My best friend’s affair has given me the ick. How do I get past it?
With advice from Sense & Sensibility and Forster's Aspects of the Novel
This one is about friendship… So me and this other woman have been friends from almost ten years, from years 5-8 of that I'd say we were each other's real number one support, shared so much, made future plans and it felt like the most committed relationship in my life. During that time she started seeing someone who I don't totally approve of - he's a lot older and was seperating from his wife but essentially cheating and keeping their relationship a secret. I felt distrustful of him, and angry at feeling complicit in their dodgy behaviour, but also didn't want to be too judgemental and hoped it was a short fling. After two years their relationship is now an open thing and she seems really happy. In that time some of the big life plans we had together didn't work out (thanks to covid). Instead, I've moved cities, made new friends, and we've kind of drifted. I thought it was just the distance but even when I go home to visit, I can't seem to get over this "ick" I feel, and it’s stopping me wanting to spend time with her. There's such a history of sisterly love between us but is it in the past now? Do I try to repair the relationship or do I just let it go?
CS
Oh, CS. Your letter is so full of feelings: profound love for your friend; wariness surrounding her current partner; yearning and confusion as you mourn what you once had. Clearly this runs deep for you, and I’m sorry it’s been hard.
Infidelity is a topic that provokes strong feelings in a lot of people. Fortunately for me, you haven’t asked for a definitive judgement on your friend’s behaviour. What it sounds like you want is advice on how to reconnect with her, or permission to let the relationship go. I’ll try to give you both.
I want to start by saying I’m not sure it is the affair, exactly, that has caused you to drift apart. If literature has taught us anything, it’s that we can connect with all sorts of people, and we rarely do so because they are ethical or well-behaved. We connect because they let us in: because we understand them. From Anna Karenina to Fleabag (adulterers and ‘other women’ in their own right), stories are littered with morally ambiguous characters we adore. We adore them because we know why they acted in the way that they did. Intimacy + time = love, pretty often.
Of course, life is different to literature. But the thing that jumps out to me about your letter is that your friend’s affair with a married man was shortly followed by a major separation. You now live in different places, have new friends, and the bonding experiences you’d meant to share got cancelled. What I’m wondering is if your friend has become a one-dimensional figure in your head. She has become defined by a single action, and of course it was a big one. But it’s not the whole of her.
In 1927 the writer and critic E.M. Forster suggested that characters fall into two categories: ‘flat’ and ‘round’. Flat characters are ‘constructed around a single idea or quality’ with ‘none of the private lusts and aches that must complicate [even] the most consistent’. Round ones are ‘capable of surprising’; full of the ‘incalculability of life’.
I wonder if your friend flattened herself to you as a self-defence mechanism during a complicated time. If you want to reconnect, I think you need to encourage her to become round again. This might not happen overnight. But I’d begin by setting up a situation which allows for relaxed conversation: a hike, a weekend away. And then talk to her.
I’d start slow: share some stories from your own life, and ask her about the ups and downs of her current relationship. Then maybe ask some open-ended questions about how it started. ‘Has your dynamic changed much, since the two of you began dating? How did you find that time?’ Then share some of your own feelings. ‘I felt uncertain when you got together. I love you so much, and I was worried he might hurt you.’
If she is able to open up to you with self-awareness, it may restore your intimacy. There is an interesting chapter in Sense & Sensibility in which something like this happens. Toward the end of the novel, the rakish, villainous Willoughby storms back onto the scene after a long absence. At the start of the story, he seduced the book’s younger heroine, Marianne, and then discarded her for a richer woman. But when Marianne falls dangerously ill, Willoughby races across the country to inquire after her health. Then, over many pages, he confides his sorry tale to Elinor, Marianne’s older sister: ‘I mean to offer some kind of explanation, some kind of apology, for the past; to open my whole heart to you’. And he does: he shares his guilt; his remorse; the financial extravagance that led him to his decision, and the veracity of the love he had - still has - for Marianne.
I find this chapter intriguing, because it has no effect on the plot of the novel. Marianne marries a different, less rakish man; and Willoughby disappears again, back to his loveless marriage. But Austen is the master of tight plotting. So why include this baggy scene?
Well, Austen is also the writer who Forster holds up as the master of round characterisation. Here, she demonstrates that almost no-one can be reduced to a single epithet, such as rakish (look, I don’t get to use that word very often). Elinor remains aware that Willoughby’s behaviour was inexcusable. But, with access to his interiority, she allows herself to think of him as ‘poor Willoughby’ from time to time.
I mention this scene because I think it is distance, rather than a lack of empathy, that has separated you. But of course conversation is a risk. Perhaps what your friend reveals - or is incapable of revealing - makes you realise she has changed too much as a person for you to feel ‘sisterly love’ anymore. That would be alright, too. It sounds like you have built a great life for yourself with new friends in a new city. Not every relationship has to last forever.
And, I might be wrong, but I do wonder if your friend’s behaviour is something specific you can point to, to justify a more perplexingly incomprehensible drift apart. A wise friend of mine observed that ‘icks’ (the word you use in your letter) are something women grasp at when they need a semi-logical explanation for not fancying someone. But it’s ok to just not fancy someone, and it’s okay to just no longer gel with someone you met ten years ago. If this rings true, then understanding your separation as the result of a more comprehensive growth in different directions might actually help you to move on.
You asked me if you should try to repair the relationship. The real question is: do you want to? If you do, I think it’s possible. If you don’t, I promise you will get to have more great platonic loves, and that you will look back on this one with affection in the fullness of time. Whatever you choose, I hope you don’t stop committing with passion and delight to your friendships. It is sisterly love - even when it ends - that makes all the chaos and ambiguity of existence worth sticking around for.
Shout-out this week to my esteemed colleagues in the agony aunt community,
, , and . All three give wise & witty advice.Did you have an opinion on this week’s problem? Are there any books you’d have referenced in your answer? Leave a comment - I’d love to hear it!
I love this! The use of Austen and Forster especially — just wonderful.
I wonder if ”I was worried he might hurt you” might not be more ”I was worried that by lying you and he were hurting someone else, and causing me to do that too”? But if course that’s a more difficult question to raise.