Did the email address match up? Could it have been someone else sending the boyfriend’s picture as a way to make themselves seem more attractive?
My process for stuff like this…
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Is it true? As in, do I have practical, first hand, factual information?
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Does it NEED to be said?
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Does it need to be said by ME?
If yes to all 3, then I say something.
Exactly. How could everyone not see it this way?
In my case, ‘cheater’ and ‘boyfriend’ were both best friends of mine in non-overlapping friend circles. ‘Girlfriend’ was a roommate, thus it was relatively easy to know the cheating was going on. So I told ‘boyfriend’ in a heart-to-heart friendship talk because it really bothered me that everyone was going to end up being hurt in the end.
The whole house of cards came crashing down, like it always will. My involvement meant that I lost the friendship of everyone. Had I minded my own business, the house of cards would have crashed anyway, and I may have came out of it retaining a best friend or two.
Because there have been plenty of times where the victim ends up siding with the cheater and all friendships are ruined. That’s the warped reality behind these kind of unhealthy relationships, sadly.
There’s a moderate chance that the other friend knows about this and is fine with it- perhaps he and his boyfriend have an open relationship.
What I would definitely do is write the guy back and be like, “Hey, this is kind of awkward, but this is X. I had no idea you and and Y were in an open relationship. :)”
So long as you’re 1000% sure it’s really him, I would tell. Because I would want to know.
And when the truth comes out (and it always does) he will be hurt and upset you never told him from the get-go.
Heartless bastard here, I wouldn’t get involved unless there were something in it for me.
Since the two involved are gay, and I’m not, I’d just ignore it.
Now if it were a hot woman being cheated on, I’d absolutely mention it, and provide a very sympathetic, er, shoulder.
This, this, this, a thousand times this. Any sort of Naughty Boyfriend! What are we going to do about this? is just going to cause more drama. Since you aren’t in the relationship, assume the best and don’t talk to your best friend about it. Once boyfriend has addressed the picture issue then you can move forward. Do you know that he’s actually cheated, or just that he has a profile on a hookup website? Perhaps this was his initial move into cheating waters and he can still be rescued. Being argumentative or aggressive is just going to make him dig in his heels.
If people are losing ‘best friends’ because they let them know they were beating cheated on…makes me wonder how people are defining ‘best friend’ and what (if any) sort of value judgement is going into deciding who your best friends are.
In a previous incarnation of this topic, there was a poster who kept threatening to beat people up, just for suggesting a hypothetical in which his wife might be cheating and his friend might consider telling him. So, maybe it’s people like that.
I have never told , even when I knew. I do not know what understandings people have , nor do i want the reaction ,which may well be pointed at me. Like cops who stop a man from beating up a woman, and she turns on them. Stay out of it.
Cops should stay out of it?
A long time ago, I had a good friend at work whose manager was the husband of my manager (the husband and wife were in different departments). My friend had worked with my boss in the past and knew and liked her.
Anyway, she found out that her boss (the husband) was cheating on my boss (the wife) with another co-worker. She confided in me because she didn’t know what to do – the work relationships made it even more complicated than usual. And we weren’t sure if the wife knew about it or not.
So finally she sent an anonymous note to the wife. Who apparently had not known about it, and promptly dumped his ass. Then he got fired for sleeping with his subordinate.
So I guess what I’m saying is that instead of saying nothing, think about an anonymous tip.
IME, people don’t want to believe they’ve been made fools of. And then they attack the messenger, because of course they weren’t so stupid as to fall in love with a cheater! Even though the warning signs are sometimes hard to see.
It happens over and over again. Hell, my first best friend and I have never been the same again after I told her that the married man she was sleeping with was *never[/] going to leave his wife for her. It’s been years and I have been proven correct but we never really healed from the rift.
It’s a nasty situation alright, I’ve only had to deal with it once. I didn’t know for sure (just heard a rumour from someone else), so I didn’t tell.
He found out a few months later, and although he never outright blamed me for not telling him we drifted apart after. Haven’t really spoken for about five years now. I sometimes wonder whether I did the right thing or not.
This subject comes up pretty often on the board, and that was always my question. Then, another poster mentioned that a ‘concerned friend’ had totally made up an allegation about the poster’s boyfriend, nearly causing them to break up. So, there is a spectrum from ‘loyal friend’ to ‘shit stirring narcissist’, and just like it’s difficult to see when your lover is cheating on you, it’s hard to tell when your friend is trying to screw up your relationship.
I’ve always been of the opinion that you should tell, and that’s because of personal experience. I had a boyfriend who cheated on me. He got an STD, and he infected me. The STD developed into a bout of pelvic inflammatory disease which sent me to the ER with severe pelvic pain and may have damaged my ability to have children (PID creates scar tissue in the fallopian tubes. Scar tissue in the fallopian tubes halves the chance of getting pregnant and doubles the chance of an ectopic pregnancy.) Then, he pouted when I was angry with him and accused me of cheating on him.
Breaking up with him was really not that hard to do. What was much more difficult to cope with were the friends who knew exactly what was going on, had seen him flaunting his partner at social events I couldn’t go to (because I was working and he wasn’t), and never told me. One of those friends even had the chutzpah to ask me out a week after I kicked my boyfriend out.
Later, I lost a friend when I tried to tell her that I’d seen signs her boyfriend was cheating on her.
Now?
I haven’t been in those circumstances again, but my plan is to ask the person, in a conversational manner, if they would want to be warned if someone thought their lover was cheating on them. It’s an easy topic to bring up. Mention this thread or a letter to Dear Abby, or another friend’s experience.
If your friend says ‘no way’, you drop the matter. If they equivocate, you give them examples. If they say yes, you tell them what’s going on.
[quote=“rachelellogram, post:13, topic:602100”]
make sure they’re involved in a monogamous relationship–don’t take this as a given. They may be involved in an open relationship, which they may not advertise, and it may not even be cheating. /QUOTE]
I think this is the crux. If the first friend believes he’s in a monogamous relationship he may not be practicing safe sex with the second friend. And even if the second friend says he’s ‘safe’ with others I still think the first guy deserves to decide for himself what protection he wants.
For me the spectre of disease trumps your friendship concerns.
I would tell. The way I figure, I would want my friends to tell me if they were in my position. Will the person shoot the messenger? Maybe. Maybe you’ll lose both friends. It’s a risk I’d be willing to take, rather to have that burden of knowledge with me.
Who knows what risks he may be putting your friend in. At the least, he’s doing something incredibly risky that could be crushing if your friend was to ever find out about it (assuming the two are monogamous, OP didn’t say.) At worse, he could be exposing your friend to STDs contracted from other partners.
I had a friend who went through a similar situation. We were both cashiers and she was with a night crew guy, A (my boyfriend is also on the night crew.) A did some shady things but assured my friend that he was all about her and no, he was not continuing to see his ex behind her back. Nobody really thought he was lying.
One day a group of us were sitting around (without A) and my friend decided to flat out ask my boyfriend if A was hooking up with his ex still. My boyfriend, much to my surprise, said that yes, A was hooking up with her still behind my friend’s back. This was well known among the three other guys on the night crew but not to anyone else.
To make a long story short, my friend was grateful to get the confirmation that she needed. She held no resentment to my boyfriend. If anything, I was more mad at him for not telling than she was! So not everyone is going to shoot the messenger. Some people really want that information so, like her, they can get out before it’s too late.