Dear Joely: My Best Friend Shagged Someone Beside Me
Her best friend brought a man back to their shared holiday bedroom. She’s furious. Joely wonders whether the real offence happened in the bed, or somewhere rather less obvious.
When your best friend crosses a boundary you didn't know needed explaining
Dear Joely,
You seem good at holiday problems so I thought I'd write in. I happened to find you while scrolling by the pool. My best friend (let's call her Christine) and I are both 24 and have known one another since secondary school. We are very close. There's no one either of us knows better in the world. We are called "the fixture" by my family. She's on the next sun lounge as I type this, but things are a bit strained at the moment.
We recently came to Tenerife on a holiday break, for a week. We looked forward to the trip as we have all our holidays in the past. Our days are made up of sunning ourselves, reading, chatting and swimming. In the afternoons we go back to the apartment and take our time getting ready for the evenings, a few drinks, getting showered and dressed and then out for dinner, more drinks, dancing and fun.
Last night was just like that. We both drank probably too much. Well, it was too much. At some point, I knew I needed to go back to the apartment. Christine wanted to stay out. I didn't think that was a problem. She was having fun with a guy. We weren't far away from the apartment. So I told her goodnight and told her to have a good night.
The sun shines in the curtains in the mornings and this morning was no exception. I felt as rough as a badger's arse. I looked over at Christine's bed. It was then that I realised she wasn't alone. I think it was the guy she was last dancing with when I left. To be honest, who cares? They weren't just sleeping, they were actually shagging. You know, in that kind of "let's do it quietly so we don't wake her up" sort of way.
I felt the bile rising in my throat, and I ran to the toilet and was sick. My head was banging and I was suddenly so angry I could barely see. I went back to my bed and just yelled at him to get the f*&% out. Christine started to protest. I just kept yelling, "Get out."
Things have been strained between us, to say the least, since this morning. I've got my dark glasses on and I'm under an umbrella on my sun bed, as I said. But I'm furious with her. She's tried to talk to me, but I won't have it. I just can't believe she'd treat me like this. I hope you can answer me urgently.
Yours,
Barf & Bitter
Dear Barf & Bitter,
First things first: your friend should not have brought a man back to your shared bedroom and shagged him while you were asleep three feet away.
I don't care how quietly they did it. Sex is not made private by reducing the volume.
You were entitled to wake up furious. You were entitled to tell him to leave. And Christine owes you an apology for deciding, without consulting you, that your shared bedroom could become hers for the night while you remained inconveniently unconscious in the other bed.
So far, I'm entirely under your umbrella.
But now I'm going to pull my sun lounge slightly away from yours.
You say, "I just can't believe she'd treat me like this."
Like what, exactly?
Because there are two possible offences here, and I'm not convinced you know which one has made you so angry.
Imagine the same morning again. Same murderous hangover. Same Tenerife sun drilling through the curtains. You roll over and Christine's bed is empty.
An hour later, she wanders in wearing last night's dress and somebody else's grin. She tells you she went home with the man from the bar and had spectacular sex.
Are you furious?
If the answer is no, excellent. We know what happened. Christine violated a perfectly reasonable boundary about your shared room, behaved selfishly while drunk, and now needs to apologise. You need to stop refusing to speak to her long enough to let her do it. You've been friends since secondary school. Don't turn one inconsiderate shag into the Treaty of Tenerife.
But if you're reading this and thinking, Actually, Joely, I'd still have hated it...
Then I'd be interested in that.
You call yourselves "the fixture". Your family calls you "the fixture". You holiday together. You have your rituals: sun lounges, books, swimming, the leisurely transformation from daytime selves into evening selves. And you tell me there's no one in the world who knows either of you better.
That's a beautiful friendship.
It may also have become an arrangement whose terms you've stopped examining.
Sometimes the most intimate friendships acquire invisible rules. We don't announce them because we don't realise they're rules. You'll choose me. I'll choose you. Other people may come and go, but this is the relationship that remains. This particular territory belongs to us.
Then somebody wanders into the territory wearing nightclub trousers and suddenly we discover there was a border.
I'm not telling you you're jealous of Christine. I'm certainly not telling you you're secretly in love with her. Perhaps neither is remotely true.
I'm asking whether you felt displaced.
Because your reaction interests me. You weren't merely irritated. You were incandescent. And somewhere between the badger's arse, the vomiting and the strange man moving rhythmically in the next bed, several different kinds of nausea may have become acquainted.
Incidentally, I wouldn't place too much evidentiary weight on the vomiting. You had drunk far too much and woke with your head banging. Christine's sex life may be many things, but I'm not yet prepared to hold it legally responsible for your stomach.
What I would do is take off the dark glasses, turn towards the woman on the next sun lounge and let her speak.
She may say, "I'm so sorry. I was drunk, I wasn't thinking and I behaved appallingly."
She may say, "I genuinely didn't think you'd care."
She may even say something that makes you angrier.
But at the moment you don't know, because you've sentenced your oldest friend before hearing her defence.
And when she has finished, tell her why you were angry.
Not just "You shouldn't have done that."
Tell her what hurt.
If all that hurt was waking beside an unsolicited live sex show, that's quite enough.
But if something else hurt too, don't be frightened of looking at it. You don't have to give it a name immediately. You just have to be honest enough to notice it.
You asked me urgently, so here is your emergency holiday prescription:
Drink some water. Eat something salty. Stop looking at Christine over the top of your sunglasses as though you're Joan Collins discovering a second will. And talk to your friend.
You have several days of Tenerife left.
Don't give the best sun lounge to a grudge.
Yours, in better boundaries and separate bedrooms,
Joely
Dear Joely: My Friend Ditched Me for a Pub Fixture
A rare night out ends badly when one friend vanishes into the beer garden with a stranger, leaving the other waiting, worrying and quietly furious.
Dear Joely,
I'm a 55-year-old woman living in Melbourne. I have a good female friend, a bit older than me, whom I have known for many years. We don't catch up often enough, but when we do, we always vow not to leave it so long before getting together again.
When we do get together, we normally start with dinner and a catch-up. The wine begins to flow, and then we go to a few bars for drinks afterwards. Because it's such a rare thing, it's not unusual to get a bit tipsy and find ourselves doing something silly like karaoke or dancing with very young men. The next day, we text to compare hangovers. It might seem a bit childish, but for us, it seems to be a good way to dust off the cobwebs.
On the last occasion, we ended up in this rather awful bar. Many of the men there looked as though the place was their second home. They seemed to come up to us one after the other and try their luck. I found it rather dull and would have preferred to carry on talking together, but my friend started getting all giggly and girly with one of these men. I was trying my best not to be bitchy towards the man involved. Smile politely, etc.
My friend at one point excused herself to go to the ladies. After she left, the man tried harder to get a laugh out of me, but I was not impressed. At one point, he asked me if I'd rather he left me alone, and I actually nodded. So he left, and I waited for my friend.
And I waited. And I waited some more.
I began to worry that she might have been more tipsy than I suspected, so I decided to go and check the ladies' toilet. I didn't make it all the way back when I spied her in the beer garden. She and the boring guy who had been chatting with us previously were deeply engaged in a game of tonsil tennis. I was utterly floored and, to be honest, disgusted.
I went out, tapped her on the shoulder and said that I was going home. She made some protests, but I left before I could hear what she had to say.
I didn't hear from her again that night, but the next morning she texted a light-hearted message, hoping I got home safely, telling me she had a shocking headache and probably wouldn't be moving for the rest of the day. I just sent the normal smile emoji back in response.
I can't bring myself to reply. I still feel too angry. How dare she trade me in for some boozer? It's thinking of myself sitting there waiting for her, feeling concerned, while she wasn't giving me a care in the world that really sticks in my craw.
I haven't responded to her yet apart from that. I do love this friend, but I can't see myself going out with her again if that's the way she's going to carry on. Neither can I see us having a conversation about this that won't end badly.
I'm too old for this.
Yours
Pissed off, to be honest
Dear Pissed Off,
You are not too old for karaoke, questionable bars or dancing with men whose birthdays occurred alarmingly recently. You are, however, too old to be left sitting alone in a pub wondering whether your friend has fallen into a toilet cubicle while she is outside conducting an enthusiastic oral examination of a man who appears to have come with the furniture.
The problem is not that she kissed him. She is entitled to flirt, giggle and make decisions that look significantly less enchanting under the hard light of morning. The problem is that she vanished without telling you, left you waiting and worrying, and then sent a breezy hangover bulletin the next day as though the evening had concluded exactly as planned.
That was inconsiderate. You had gone out together. At the very least, she owed you a quick: “I'm heading outside with him. Are you all right getting home?” Friendship does not require a permission slip before tonsil tennis, but it does require basic courtesy.
I would not end a longstanding friendship over one drunken lapse, especially when you clearly love her. But I would not swallow your anger and pretend nothing happened either. Resentment kept under the tongue has a nasty aftertaste.
Say something simple:
“I was really upset that you disappeared without telling me. I was sitting there waiting and worrying about you, and then found you outside with him. I don't care that you kissed someone, but I do care that you left me without a word.”
That keeps the issue where it belongs. Not on the boring man. Not on her sexuality. Not on whether women in their fifties should know better than to behave badly in bars. On consideration.
Her response will tell you far more than the incident itself. If she is mortified and apologises, the friendship probably survives with one useful amendment to the constitution: no disappearing into beer gardens without notifying the other member of the delegation.
If she laughs it off or tells you that you are overreacting, then the problem is larger than one ill-advised snog with a pub fixture.
You are not too old for silly nights. You are simply old enough to expect better manners during them.
With sympathy for the hangover you didn't deserve,
Joely
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Dear Joely is the resident advice column at Slightly Penetrating: candid letters about friendship, sex, relationships and modern social disasters, answered with warmth, dry humour and considerably less judgement than some situations deserve.
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