Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [28]
BEING BLINDSIDED
When Tracy, 21, and Alexis were first introduced, they just seemed to click. The conversation flowed fast and easy. They initially met at a party where Tracy also met a guy named Brad, who was friendly and flirty. “He was flirting with both of us but a bit more towards her,” Tracy recalls. Since Alexis was already involved with someone, Tracy didn’t think anything of his play for her friend.
About eight months later, Tracy ran into the same guy at a club, and this time they really hit it off. They started seeing each other regularly and the relationship got serious. “Alexis was supportive during all of this and I never suspected that she wanted him too, especially since she was on her third boyfriend since that party,” says Tracy. Tracy and Brad dated for several months and he became her first lover, which made the bond feel that much stronger and significant.
“I never saw it coming,” says Tracy. “One day I stopped by Alexis’s house for a surprise visit on my way home from campus. She was rushing out of the shower and looked really flushed, but I presumed it was just from the shower.” When Alexis asked her to come back later without inviting her in, it struck Tracy as odd. As she started to leave, she saw Brad’s shoes on the doormat. “I felt so betrayed,” says Tracy. “I mean, I could expect it from a guy—but she and I were so close!”
Even though Alexis subsequently apologized, Tracy still feels hurt. “I ended up losing two best friends that day,” she says. Tracy was betrayed by two people whom she cared for deeply—but she says that having a female friend act in such an uncaring and duplicitous way hurt her even more deeply than her first lover’s infidelity. And because she had lost the friend with whom she used to commiserate, there was no one she could go to for comfort.
UNFAITHFUL
The dissolution of the friendship between Rebecca, now 31, and her friend Hayley was long overdue—and the infraction so egregious that it’s hard to understand how it lasted as long as it did. Yet some friendships are so strong that they tolerate the unimaginable: “What led to our friendship ending was that she had an affair with my husband while I was pregnant with our fourth child,” says Rebecca. “At first, I readily forgave her because I saw her as vulnerable and weak, a victim of a very abusive marriage. She and my husband had been seeing each other for a little over a month when I first found out—and it was supposed to be over. However, the two of them continued to sneak around behind my back.”
As odd as it sounds, Rebecca continued to have sympathy for her friend who was sleeping with her husband. “I was still trying to help her get out of her marriage,” she says. One day Hayley called Rebecca from the cell phone in her car, crying hysterically. Hayley was so upset that she wanted to drive off the road. Rebecca talked her out of it.
The last straw came during Rebecca’s eighth month of pregnancy, when she found a strange cell phone bill in her mailbox. It was for a private line that her husband had set up for himself and Hayley. For the first time, she realized that her friend wasn’t really a friend. “I called her cell phone (the secret one) and left a scathing message, and that was the last time I talked to her, although my husband talked to her off and on for another two years. It was awful,” Rebecca recalls.
“It affects me to this day,” she says. “I’m still so angry with her. I will never understand why I wasn’t important enough to her to stop trying to wreck my family and steal my husband, especially when she knew from firsthand experience how awful it is to be cheated on.”
Instead of being furious