I was terrified of her reaction, knowing full well that it was a truly horrible thing to have done. But on the following Monday at school, she shrugged it off. “I ended things with him,” she said.
Interpreting this, at surface value, as permission, I proceeded to fall head over heels. It was the kind of intoxicating first love in which you are talking about baby names one minute and screaming at each other for an imagined indiscretion the next. He was all I could think about—and talk about. Unsurprisingly, this created tension with Sadie, who at first simply rolled her eyes and pretended not to care, her ego clearly badly bruised by this development.
But soon her behaviour started to change and she became more withdrawn at school. She would get drunk at parties and then throw herself at Tom, seeing if she could “steal” him back. Then she started to do the same thing to other friends’ boyfriends, apparently hell-bent on proving to herself that she, too, could take somebody from someone else. But all these attempts at karmic revenge only resulted in her slowly being frozen out of the friend group. She and I never spoke about what happened.
Both at the time and in the years after, I would justify my own behaviour with the belief that I was in love. (As a die-hard romantic, that made it all okay.) My relationship with Tom ticked off certain milestones: At first, it was the length of time we’d been dating; then it was the big firsts—like having sex, meeting the parents and going on holiday together. If he and I were going the distance, I thought, what difference did it make that he’d dated my friend first? None of the rest of our friends seemed to think it was a big deal, largely following the same logic as me. Tom and Sadie’s encounter had been fleeting, juvenile and inconsequential. His and mine was earth-shattering, important, and transformative.
Until it wasn’t, of course. We broke up after three and a half years, and I’ve never spoken to him or seen him since.
Ultimately, I will never know if dating my best friend’s ex was really worth losing her over. I look back on that time and feel huge sympathy for Sadie, who did nothing wrong except poorly communicate how she felt about the situation and then act out from a place of hurt. I know that I, too, was only a teenager, but is that really any excuse?
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
