Dear Joely: My Best Friend Shagged Someone Beside Me

When your best friend crosses a boundary you didn't know needed explaining

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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: Was I Just His Wank Bank?

The memories are warm. The messages are filthy. Then she suggests meeting in real life and discovers just how little of the relationship exists outside his trousers.

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Dear Joely,

An unanswered message has hurt me a bit, and I thought you might be able to give me some perspective.

Yes, it’s a man involved.

This man is not a current lover, far from it. I am not trying to win him back, and I wasn’t expecting some grand romantic reunion at the airport.

Here it is in a nutshell.

I met him when I was about 24, living and working in Scotland. I’m in Australia now. We worked together. He was married with two young children. We fell very hard for each other, and I became the other woman.

It went on for a few years and was exactly as intoxicating and dreadful as those situations tend to be. Ecstatic highs, terrible pain, an astonishing amount of sex and not nearly enough sense. I remember being convinced that I could no sooner hold back the tide than stop loving him.

Eventually he left his marriage, but he did not leave it for me. He left me as well and began a relationship with another woman from the office. They lived together for five years. I was heartbroken for much longer than I care to admit.

But somehow we never disappeared completely from one another’s lives.

Over the next thirty-five years there were occasional calls and messages. He would bring up old moments between us, sometimes very sentimental ones, as though they still meant something to him. I listened. I gave my best advice when he went through difficult times.

We have slept together a few times since, on my rare trips back. Our connection had always been intensely sexual.

About ten years ago, I suggested meeting while on one such trip and he sent me a very harsh reply. It was so dismissive that something in me finally woke up. I stopped speaking to him for years.

Then, around five years ago, he contacted me and asked whether I was really never going to speak to him again. We began corresponding once more. Some of it was ordinary conversation, some of it reminiscing, and quite a lot of it sexual.

To be blunt, I began to wonder whether I had become little more than a sort of wank bank.

He has old and newer photographs of me. He sends sexual scenarios and dick pics. I have joined in and sent him nude photographs too, although the truth is that I wasn’t really getting much from it anymore.

I wasn’t pining for him. I wasn’t imagining a future.

I simply thought there was affection there. History. Some basic friendship after all this time.

I told him I am going to Scotland for a holiday in a few months and will be flying home from his area. I asked whether he might like to spend a couple of days together at the end of the trip. I made it easy for him. I said that if he was happily involved with someone, or it simply wasn’t appropriate, that was completely fine.

He answered the next day with a breathless little message about how lovely the trip sounded, complete with enough exclamation marks to frighten a flock of birds, but he did not acknowledge my suggestion that we meet.

Not yes. Not no. Not even, “I’ll think about it.”

He simply stepped around it and carried on.

I wasn’t expecting sex. I wasn’t expecting declarations. I wasn’t even necessarily expecting him to say yes.

I was expecting a reply. I thought he'd be pleased to see me after all this time.

I think what has upset me is that for years he has spoken about our shared past as though it mattered to him. He has recalled rooms, moments, sex, things we said and things we did. He has accepted my listening, my advice, my photographs and my availability. He has behaved as though there is some tenderness attached to that history.

Yet when I appeared in the present as an actual person, asking for nothing more than a courteous answer, he vanished.

It feels awful. Worse, it feels familiar.

Not because I am still in love with him. I’m not.

It feels awful because I thought that after thirty-five years we had become old friends. Or, at the very least, two people who had once meant enough to each other to warrant basic respect.

Am I making too much of an unanswered message?

Or have I finally understood that he is sentimental about the memories, but not especially concerned with the woman who lived them?

Yours,
Closing an Account

Dear Closing an Account,

You are not upset because he did not agree to see you. You are upset because he could not bring himself to answer you plainly.

That distinction matters.

For years, he has revisited the history between you. He has remembered the sex, the rooms, the private moments and the woman who once loved him beyond reason. He has accepted your photographs, your attention, your advice and your willingness to enter his fantasies. This has apparently required no shortage of enthusiasm on his part.

Yet the moment you asked him to meet you in real life, he became strangely short of words.

There is something shabby about a man who can summon the energy to maintain a wank bank but not the manners to acknowledge the account holder.

He may insist, if challenged, that the memories meant something to him. Perhaps they did. But sentiment is very easy when it asks nothing of us. It can survive for decades on reminiscence, fantasy and selective tenderness. Ask it to do something as ordinary as answer an invitation and suddenly the whole structure begins to wobble.

That is because nostalgia can imitate intimacy for a very long time.

You thought the two of you had become old friends. He appears to have thought he had retained access to an old lover.

Those are not the same arrangement.

The unanswered message was not the wound. It was the diagnosis.

Never mistake someone’s ability to remember you for their willingness to show up for you. They are entirely different talents.

He has shown a considerable gift for the first and very little appetite for the second.

Do not ask again. Do not send a wounded follow-up. Do not explain why his response hurt you. Do not provide him with another opportunity to turn your perfectly reasonable expectation into an emotional discussion he can avoid, minimise or eroticise.

And when he next returns with a sentimental memory in one hand and his trousers unfastened with the other, do not confuse the performance with affection.

The house of cards has already fallen. You are simply no longer obliged to crawl underneath it looking for friendship.

Yours, in closed accounts and considerably better investments,
Joely

Dear Joely: Two Women Turn Every Friday Lunch into an Accounting Tribunal

The meal is pleasant. The company is good. Then the bill arrives and eight grown women begin reconstructing lunch from witness statements.

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Dear Joely,

I’m sure this is a problem as old as time, but I am living it and it sh*%s me every time it happens. Perhaps you can help.

A group of six to eight women from my office goes out to a fairly basic restaurant for lunch on Fridays. It’s a good way for us to catch up without the interruptions of work. The boss knows and allows us a little more than the allocated hour, which is nice.

At the end, we get the bill. Most of us are perfectly happy to split it, except for two members of the group who insist on paying separately.

It always turns into a palaver while all the adding and subtracting goes on. Then, without fail, there is another mini-deliberation about the tip.

Usually, I’ve had a nice meal and enjoyed the conversation, but when this happens I can’t help throwing the stink-eye at the culprits. Last time, I think I even sighed out loud.

I should add that none of us drinks alcohol at these lunches, so it’s not as though these two Karens are being asked to subsidise somebody else’s bottle of wine.

Am I being unreasonable, or are they?

Yours billigerently,
Cathy

Dear Billigerent Cathy,

The problem is not that two women want to pay only for what they ordered. That is perfectly reasonable.

The problem is that eight hungry adults are attempting to perform forensic accounting beside a cooling plate of chips.

Splitting the bill works beautifully when everyone has spent roughly the same amount and nobody minds subsidising somebody else’s extra side of halloumi. Paying separately also works beautifully when the restaurant is told at the beginning, rather than when the bill arrives and Sandra suddenly begins reconstructing lunch from witness statements.

So next Friday, say this before anybody orders:

“Can we decide now whether we’re splitting the bill or paying individually? If anyone wants to pay separately, perhaps we can let the waiter know before we start.”

That is not rude. It is administration, and administration is best conducted before dessert.

As for the tip, agree on a percentage and divide it in the same manner as the meal. There should be no second summit meeting unless the waiter has performed CPR.

And retire the word “Karens”. They may be parsimonious, exacting or simply watching their money. You are allowed to dislike the palaver without turning two colleagues into a meme.

The stink-eye may remain, but deploy it sparingly. Like truffle oil, too much ruins lunch.

Yours, with the calculator already open,
Joely