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.