September 26, 2002
The Double Whammy
When your boyfriend cheats on you . . . with your best friend!
Dear Em & Lo,
Today my boyfriend of ten months returned to Chicago from New York City, where he was looking for an apartment. I picked him up from the airport. As soon as he got in my car, he started crying uncontrollably. When we got back to his apartment, he clutched my arm and told me, "I've done something stupid." Turns out, while he was there, he slept with one of my best friends. His excuse? "I was extremely drunk and it just happened. I love you and I don't deserve to live." Her excuse? "I hate myself. I love you and things just happened."
My boyfriend and I were involved in as serious a relationship as we could be for the amount of time we were together. We exchanged many sincere "I love you's," met each other's families, etc. To complicate matters, I was planning to relocate to New York City and live with the woman who betrayed me. She did not want me to know this happened, and I think he intended to keep it from me as well because their hook-up happened nearly a week ago and we talked to each other on the phone after that (before he came home) without incident. This "friend" has a history of putting herself in unsavory situations with men. I have no personal prejudice against single women (or men for that matter) having casual sex, but this last transgression treads on Springer turf.
Needless to say, my heart is broken. I have been completely betrayed by two very important people in my life. I can no longer move to New York. I would like to believe they did this to spite me, but I know this is not the case. There was nothing in my boyfriend's behavior that indicated he was unhappy in the relationship, and he seems extremely remorseful. Also, everyone else in my life thought he loved me lots and that he was a great guy. My friend reassured me that she wasn't thinking of me when she had sex with my boyfriend and apologized over and over again. It is very hard for me to believe the drunk excuse, as I have been drunk plenty o'times and never slept with anyone off-limits. I don't ever want to see either of them again. What should I do? Which one should I hate more? How do I get over this? How can two (two!) people do this to a decent person who has never harmed them? How can I be certain I'll never find myself in this situation again? How could my boyfriend let me pick him up from the airport?
Lots of questions, but one answer would kindly suffice.
Thank you,
Four-Timed in Chicago
Dear Four-Timed,
Here's one quick answer: Tell them both to go fuck themselves in the black tar pits of Hell! But we've got a lot more to say on the subject.
First, let's talk about your so-called "friend." We'll call her Swimfan. There are three implicit rules of friendship: 1) You don't fuck your friends' boyfriends/girlfriends, 2) no, seriously, you don't ever fuck your friends' boyfriends/girlfriends, and 3) you have to help them move. Swimfan seems to be missing the gene that has these rules encoded. But even if she doesn't feel these things instinctively and has only learned them second-hand from the Sweet Valley High book series in grade school, they're not that hard to live by: When you're in a monogamous relationship, you agree to sleep with only one person; but in a friendship, you can sleep with anyone in the world except one person the person your friend loves. It's a sacrifice akin to flushing the toilet when you just don't feel like it.
But let's resist the temptation to blame the friend and forgive the boyfriend, shall we? That's a tired old tradition that lets catty competition trump female solidarity; it's based on the conventional wisdom that it's in a guy's nature to cheat, and it's in a chick's nature not to unless she's the spawn of Satan. But women have urges (and are stupid) too. Also, there's a built-in expectation that romantic relationships have a shelf life (i.e. mistakes will be made), while friendships are meant to stay fresh longer than yellow Peeps (i.e. mistakes will never be made). With friendship, there's no standard process for forgiveness and reconciliation (i.e. "the talk" followed by make-up sex).
So let's dump on the boyfriend now. We'll call him Fuckface. He's the one that made the explicit promise of fidelity to you. It's like in Sex, Lies, and Videotape when Ann's sister says to her brother-in-law, who she's shagging at the time, "I didn't stand up in church in front of God and everybody and promise to be faithful to Ann." Yeah! Plus, he killed you softly . . . two time, two time. Once just by cheating on you; twice by taking away the friend who would otherwise be there to trash-talk Fuckface and eat ice cream with you in your time of need. Not like fucking some nameless, faceless, scabies-ridden stranger in the bathroom of a dive bar wouldn't be bad enough.
Wait, are we making things worse? Let's try to figure out why this might have happened. Why, god, why? Well, maybe affairs are like trees falling down in a forest when nobody's around to hear them: If nobody's heart gets broken, it's like it never really happened, and then what's the point of doing it? Maybe there was something bothering him about the relationship, but he was too chicken to bring it up in healthy conversation like a decent, well-adjusted human being, so he did a very bad thing and wanted you to find out, like a cheap cry for help. And then there's that ultimate taboo thing: The wronger it is, the hotter it is. (Yeah, we're definitely making things worse.)
Most likely, Swimfan and Fuckface just fell into a bad situation one night: They're friends, they've become closer through you, they feel safe and comfortable and platonic, hooking up is not even a remote option at least at the beginning of the night, before they start drinking. Leave it to the sauce to create the illusion of "runaway" sexual urges. The thing is, most guys in monogamous relationships don't often find themselves drunk and alone with an attractive woman; and most chicks don't often find themselves drunk and alone with their good friend's hot boyfriend. The false security of friendship led them there. When the moment of truth came, they weren't prepared: They lacked the integrity, willpower, sobriety, and/or heart to do the right thing. It's kind of like hanging out with a distant cousin, and then all of a sudden, one day at a picnic at Aunt Betty's, ding! you're making out with Cuz behind Grandpa's old Cadillac. Which leads us right back to that taboo thing . . .
So what do you do? Here's where the Em & Lo road forks.* Lo thinks you should consider the possibility of forgiveness: If they truly are important people in your life, if you can get to the bottom of why this happened, if they work really, really hard to regain your trust, and if you believe they'll never ever do it again, then maybe you can live with their stupid human trick and end up living with them. Em thinks you should just tell them both to go fuck themselves in the black tar pits of Hell.
Either way, sister, if you do come to New York, call us up we'll take you out, drown your sorrows in booze, introduce you to some cute single boys, find you a roommate, and help you make new friends.
See ya, wouldn't want to be ya,
Em & Lo
* Click here for the only other time we disagreed.
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