I’ve been through several variations of this kind of thing and the answer is surprisingly simple. If you want to maintain contact with your friends simply do so, if you are happy to let them drift away because you don’t like something they did do so. You were never really their friend at all.
Is she really incredibly loyal to you, or has it just been more convenient to treat you decently than to screw you over?
'Cause in my experience, it’s generally the latter. It sometimes takes years and years for it come about, but when the situation arises that you or your feelings are between them and something they want, even if it’s something fleeting…well, fuck you and your feelings. I’m not saying that’s always the case, but I’ve seen it be that way more often than not.
Personally, my general take on it is that any shitty thing you see someone do to someone else who is supposed to be equally important in their life, you have to assume they’re willing to do to you. By and large, you are not a special little snowflake who will magically be treated better than other people. You’re just not.
My friends have flaws out the yin-yang, frankly, as anyone who spends more than 20 minutes with most of them already knows. But for all that, they’re all kind people who wouldn’t knowingly and deliberately hurt someone they claim to care about. Accidentally hurting someone, yeah. I think we all sometimes blindly tromp on our loved one’s toes and say or do things we don’t realize will be hurtful. Infidelity is NOT an accident. It’s a knowing and deliberate hurt, and that doesn’t fit with being a good friend.
I’ve gotta agree with tim on this one. I didn’t just know a woman like this, I almost married her (Boy, wouldn’t that have worked out well! :smack:) She didn’t just help the people who could get her ahead, a lot of people with nothing to offer were better off from having known her. She was a generous person, with a good heart, and she was the best friend you could ask for.
But she was a lousy partner. She was generous and loving too, but man . . . she just had a cheating, manipulative streak that only manifested itself with someone she was sleeping with. Not only me, but with everyone who came before me. And the manipulation wasn’t for anything. I didn’t wind up giving her money or jewelry or anything else like that. I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done without the manipulation except go back after I’d broken up with her for cheating. She was not materialistic at all. She manipulated just for the sake of manipulation, and damned if she wasn’t good at it. If she were as good as lying as she was at manipulating, we might have been married today, although I kind of doubt it. It wasn’t as if she wanted to drive me away. After we broke up, she tried everything to get me back, and I mean everything! And for a while she succeeded. To this day, 17-odd years later, I’ve never been able to figure out what drove her. Never.
Yes, I’m quite sure most people who cheat on their spouses or SO’s will eventually cheat their friends and business. I don’t doubt it. But I’m here to tell you that people that tim described exist.
Linty Fresh: She treated you like shit and you’re still lauding her? :dubious: Perhaps that manipulation of which you speak went deeper than you suspected.
Honestly, how can you know that she didn’t treat her other friends just as badly? Maybe as CCL said it took years to happen, but I’m not seeing how you could know for certain (or even reasonably so) that she was invariably golden to everyone-except-those-she-slept-with.
People like that very often keep a wide circle of “friends” around just in case… just in case one of them becomes useful, just in case she can trade something you have for something she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not using them, it just means she hasn’t found the opportunity yet.
I don’t blame you for the :dubious:. Not one bit. But I know a lot of the people you’ve described, and this woman was nothing like that. We were friends before we were partners, and we hung out with a lot of the same people, and if she was like that with people she wasn’t sleeping with, I never picked up on it. To be honest, I don’t know one hundred percent that she wasn’t like that, having only known her for the four years I was an undergrad, but I seriously doubt she was. I never saw her hurt a friend, and she certainly never did anything to me before we started dating.
I’m not one to talk up people who do me wrong. I have no problem saying that she was a rotten girlfriend, and I hope I never see her again, and if I do run into her, I wouldn’t try to be her buddy. But credit where credit is due. Many times–if not most times–she gave more than she took, and she really did help a lot of people, and if she did it for any other reason besides genuinely wanting to, none of us ever picked up on it, and as I said, she wasn’t a good enough liar to have been able to hide that for long. Put it this way: If she was really out for herself with her friends, then she buried it so deeply that it didn’t really matter.
The only thing I can come up with is that friendships and relationships involve very different social dynamics. There are different emotions at work. Different motivations and expectations, and just because you know your boundaries in a friendship, it doesn’t mean that you won’t mess it up in a romance. Also, romances are a lot more intense. Things have a way of getting out of hand. That’s all I’ve got.
My best friend, who I’ve known since fourth grade, was in a relationship with a woman for three years and the two of them were engaged to be married. We had become incredibly close to her fiancée during these years and were actually planning our weddings together with great enthusiasm.
Then one night my best friend slept with another woman at a party, someone she’d just met that evening. She immediately came home to her fiancée and told her what she had done. She expressed that she felt it was indicative of her dissatisfaction with the relationship and broke off the engagement.
The fiancée’s immediate response was, ‘‘Okay, but you’re telling olives.’’
And yeah, my husband and I were both shocked at the news. Both of them were incredibly gracious about not putting us in the middle, and in fact they both attended our wedding just one month later–as bridesmaid and maid of honor–without even the slightest bit of drama. This was very impressive on the fiancée’s part in particular because she was very affected by the breakup and had been looking forward to getting married herself. Now she was standing at the altar with the woman she was supposed to marry, but certainly not in the scenario she’d hoped.
Up until this point, I was pretty judgmental about people who cheated, but this was my best friend, and cheating is extremely out of character for her. We discussed the situation at length and it became clear that while she did have a meaningful connection with the woman she slept with, she also cheated because a part of her knew it was time to break off the engagement. I told her flat out that I didn’t agree with what she did, that I think cheating is wrong, but also that I love her and want her to be happy. She acknowledged that she was wrong to cheat but emphasized her need to move on from the relationship.
As soon as she left her fiancée she became visibly happier and more energetic and there was no question that, at least in terms of breaking things off, she’d made the right choice.
One of my best friend’s greatest character flaws is her complete obliviousness to how her actions affect other people. It’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s that she doesn’t think. She has had this problem for as long as I remember. Asking me to disown her or her fiancée is like asking me to disown a sister. These are both incredibly important people in my life. It didn’t even occur to me once to stop being friends with my best friend because she cheated. She’s a part of me, and she’s human and being human includes having flaws and making big mistakes.
Last summer she married the woman she had cheated with that night. They’ve been together nearly three years. It was an absolutely beautiful and genuinely loving ceremony. I can tell when her whole heart is into something, and her whole heart is into her new wife. She is incredibly happy and is back to being the vibrant person I knew before. There is no question in my mind that her previous relationship was just too unhealthy to sustain.
I think forgiveness in these situations must necessarily be based on context, but I just wanted to offer an example of my own for your consideration.
I don’t agree with this at all. I’m not a friend till the end, no matter what they do - I have standards for my own conduct, and for the people I associate with, but that doesn’t make people who fail the standards test at some point never friends - it just means that we aren’t friends from that point on. I have a friend of many years who had children and drifted away from me because of two different sets of priorities in our lives - does that mean she was never a friend of mine? Your logic is flawed.
Is someone still your friend, and are you still there’s if there’s been a betrayal?
I used to count my loyalty to my friends as one of my best traits. I would not give up on a friend if you set me on fire. With 95% of my friends, that loyalty was returned. But there’s that 5% that remain.
I gave up on my best friend in college when she and our roommate went out of their way to isolate me, play head games with me, and emotionally abuse me. Once I realized that my trust in her was what allowed her to hurt me, I never looked back. Took me a while to make new friends, though.
I gave up on an online friend when it became clear that she had severe emotional problems, and that our friendship enabled her to continue damaging herself. I loved her dearly, and I doubt she’ll ever understand, but it was that or watch her get herself killed from 1200 miles away.
I gave up on the friends who watched my boyfriend cheat on me and didn’t tell me. I gave up on the boyfriend as well, partly because he refused to admit that he’d done anything wrong.
I gave up on a close friend because, among other things, she embezzled at least $100K from her nephews’ trust fund. The hardest part about it is putting the truly caring, empathic person she is together with the sickness that prodded her to betray her family. I’m having second thoughts. We talk, but I doubt we’ll ever be really close again.
I think it’s disingenuous to say that if a person betrays you, they were never your friend, or that if you end the friendship, you were never really their friend. Friendships are born. Friendships die. Sometimes, they’re deliberately killed. People change, sometimes for better and other times for worse. One act can profoundly change how we understand someone else. Love becomes disgust. Trust becomes hatred. Respect becomes grief.
A friend commits an act you consider wrong. She cheats on her husband. You haven’t been harmed, so you continue the friendship. But where is the line drawn? Is she still your friend if she abuses her husband? Steals from her employer? Sends threatening letters to political opponents?
I have some answers for myself, but I can’t draw a clear, articulate line of where each act falls on the scale.
Yes, and yes.
Thank you, Bites. It heals a bit more every day.
This makes exactly as much sense as saying that once a light bulb burns out, it was never a light bulb at all.
So, to summarize…wha?