As the saying goes, two’s a party but three’s a crowd.
Relationships can be tricky at the best of times.
As much as you may row and disagree with your other half, it’s your love for them that keeps you together but sometimes even the power of love is not enough as other human emotions like jealousy or paranoia begin to creep in.
One girl on Reddit has opened up about a tricky situation regarding her boyfriend and his female friend.
22-year-old Reddit user Icognitoburrito has spoken of her worry at how close her 21-year-old boyfriend and his classmate, a mutual friend to the couple that introduced them, are.
“…Our relationship is stupidly fantastic, we get along great, he’s always there when I want/need him and he very obviously loves me. So why am I posting here?
“He is VERY close with our mutual friend. I am close with her as well but she is his absolute best friend here at uni. Not in a way that competes with me or anything; the only comparison that feels remotely right is that they’re like siblings. I’ve never had a problem with this but a lately a few things about it have me concerned.”
The concerned girlfriend has given the Internet some background to how her boyfriend and this girl became friends in the first place.
“They knew each other for about 2 years before I met him. He has described their friendship then as comparable to ours in terms of intimacy and personal chemistry, but completely without anything sexual. He told me once that by the end of the first year of knowing her, he had started to become confused by his feelings towards her. As in, “what’s the difference between being best friends with someone you have so much chemistry with and who you find attractive, and being romantically in love with them?”
“He has also admitted that back then he kinda assumed that eventually they would end up together because of how obviously happy they made each other, but that he didn’t care about sex or anything and didn’t want to mess anything up so he was content to leave things as they were. She was also to study abroad the next year (which is when I met her), so he decided to wait and see how he felt when she got back.”
While this friend was away, she says her boyfriend really missed her.
“Our friend is not particularly good at communicating and from what I’ve heard, that year was really hard on him and he really missed her. Meanwhile she was with me and fell super in love with someone in my friend group but never mentioned him. Then when she got back, she apparently was slow to rekindle her friendship with him this made him really resentful of her then-boyfriend (I’m not sure if I totally believe this was the full reason but that’s part of why I’m posting here).
“In fact, they didn’t really start hanging out again until she broke up with her boyfriend (which I again find kind of odd). Then a few weeks before he met me, she started dating her current boyfriend.”
After given us a backstory, the worried girlfriend has become more and more convinced that her boyfriend is in love with his ‘platonic’ friend.
“I sorta feel like he is not being honest with himself about how he feels about our friend. He sleeps at her house several times a week, he spends hours helping her with homework and basically tutoring her for free, he casually does chores at her house because her housmates slack off and he knows she gets stressed about it, etc.
“I’m not jealous of these things because he always prioritizes me over her, but I feel like this goes beyond normal friendship stuff. He told me the reason he thought he used to love her was because his favorite feeling was making and seeing her happy, but it seems to me he still feels this way.
“Also, he does a great job of hiding it but he HATES her current boyfriend, and I think it’s because he’s jealous of the affection she shows him. I know she’s not trying to take advantage of him but sometimes I feel like she loves him like a brother and he loves her like something more.”
This girl has shared feelings of doubt because of her boyfriend’s history with this girl and asked for help with how to sort the situation.
“It just feels like he has a deeper connection with her than with me, that he’s trying to suppress because he knows she’s not into him. We have great personal and sexual chemistry, which is something they never had, but when they’re together sometimes he looks at her and the look on his face is just so happy. I don’t know.
“I’ve kinda brought this up with him, which is how I know so much about the backstory. He assures me that his feelings towards me are fundamentally different than anything he ever felt towards our friend, and I think he believes that, but I’m not so sure anymore.
“And we never have any actual problems, he never does anything that makes me actually jealous, it just feels like this thing that’s hanging over our relationship. I just can’t help but wonder what he would do if she was attracted to him, and I kinda worry that one day she’ll wake up and realize what she passed up. And I worry that his possibly unrequited devotion to her is unhealthy for him.
Do you guys have any thoughts on this? Like am I being insecure over nothing? Should I say/do something even though he hasn’t actually done anything?”
What would you do in her situation?
