When A Friend Advises Caution

I had a long chat over coffee with a friend, and she talked to me about the recent small contact I have had with someone from my past, on Facebook.

Even though I was the one who initiated the contact, as she looked over the entirety of the posts and other people he's responded to, she said very gently to me that I needed to stop communicating with this individual if I sensed that he was just using me as a pawn to get someone else jealous.  There were things that indicated to me the contact was genuine, but some worrisome things also. She enumerated the things this person did to me in the past, and said something very true: it's often not possible for someone to just change their stripes entirely in a year and several months, nor change their attitude towards someone, particularly in my case, unless he is really sorry and truly misses me, and has been working on himself.  A friendship cannot take place if those things have not happened on both sides.

My friend pointed out that it is very possible he is just trying to rile someone up and make them jealous to manipulate her feelings somehow, with no regard for either of us, which is what he did in the past. This again would show such disrespect for women, making them like pawns on a chess board so as to play one person against the other and hurting both so greatly in the process. I hope this is not the case. She said he had better be in touch with me because he feels that what he did towards me was wrong, enjoys hearing from me, and is not trying to manipulate another person via me.  And honestly, when these things are said and when I consider them, I just don't know.  I know my own motivations are honest and clear: I hate bearing grudges, I hate the "silent treatment" towards any person, and I hated having so much unresolved between us, and I have missed this person and feel sorry for the things I did which ruined our friendship at the time.  At any rate, caution is the order of the day, and I will be doing that.  Trust, after all, is earned.