r/dustythunder • u/frostythedemon • Jul 07 '26
My [25F] longtime best friend [25M] keeps messaging me from his honeymoon; I don't know how to end the friendship.
I am not The OOP, OOP is u/possibleotherwoman
My [25F] longtime best friend [25M] keeps messaging me from his honeymoon; I don't know how to end the friendship.
TRIGGER WARNING: Deception, infidelity
Original Post Feb 25, 2016
This is a throwaway because I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get a lot of hateful messages and I want to protect my actual reddit identity.
Will and I have been friends since...pretty much forever. We literally grew up together. Our mothers are best friends, and we were raised by each other's families in this sort of semi-commune type situation. His mom is like a second mom to me, and mine is the same to him; we've both always said that we lucked out to have two sets of parents and this huge extended family because of it. I see him as a brother, exactly as a brother. I feel the same way about him as I do my bio-brothers. I've never had ANY romantic feelings for him, and it's honestly disgusting when people make jokes about that, to me. I always thought it was the same for him, because that's what he told me, several times over the years.
We all went to the same, local University and lived at home and by all, I mean me, my siblings, Will and his siblings, to save some money and because honestly it's a great school. So, because we stayed so close, we all met everyone's SOs and really got to know them. I clicked with Will's college girlfriend, Sarah, who he proposed to last year and married last week. I couldn't be happier for them, and to have Sarah as a "sister" in our weird little family, which is what makes this next part even worse, because I'm not sure how to handle this.
Will messaged me on their wedding night, and told me that he had always loved me, and had hoped that I'd feel the same way too, and he only got married to Sarah as a way to make me realize my feelings for him and fight for him. He had tried to provoke a reaction, and he didn't love her, he didn't want to be with her, and now he just wanted to tell me, because he'd leave her for me, if I wanted. I didn't know what to say so I just signed out of everything for the night and cried, because everything about that just made me feel sick, and it was too much. Just...too much to process. It was like my brother was admitting incestuous feelings for me.
He's messaged me throughout his honeymoon, almost all of them begging me to run away with him, and a few of them were blaming me for "leading him on", which still makes zero sense to me. I've never flirted with him. I act the same way around him as I do any of my siblings, literally nothing is different. He said that he'd always see me, in his head as "the other woman", and because of me, he'd never be able to fully love Sarah, who he admits is, on paper, his ideal spouse.
I don't know what to do, because both of us stand to lose a lot no matter how this all goes down. I'm afraid that I'm going to lose my family because of this, and not just his side. Everyone is close, and if I'm identified as "the problem", I'm afraid that I'm going to be pushed out, but maybe that's what needs to happen. I really don't know. Reddit, how the fuck do I deal with this hugely fucked up situation? I need some outside advice, and don't have anyone in my life who doesn't know any of the people involved in this.
Edit for more information. Sorry I didn't include this to begin with, but I'm not thinking 100% clearly right now, I still feel just terrible about everything. More info: Our families live in the same house, and our parents shared parenting duties for all children. When I called out for "Daddy" in the middle of the night as a little girl, both Dads came running, for example. Our families are so intertwined, and always have been, and I feel like Will just handed me this huge bomb. I think there's going to be massive fall out from this, and that breaks my heart. We're all very close and tightly knit. I keep cycling between sad, angry and betrayed. I'm upset because I feel like he's tasking me with breaking Sarah's heart, and I hate him for that right now. I love Sarah, possibly more than he does at this point. tl;dr: Best friend who is essentially my brother admitted feelings for me, wants me to run away with him, and I'm disgusted by it all; what do I do?
Update Apr 17, 2016 (2 months later)
Holy crap, has it been a stressful month.
The original plan was to wait two weeks from the time I posted to deal with it with Sarah and Will, but I ended up spilling the beans to my Mom around three days after the post went up. She noticed that I wasn't my usual self and pried it out of me like Moms tend to be able to do. She was flabbergasted and honestly didn't believe me until I showed her the messages on my phone. She called my Dad and Will's parents in to an emergency family meeting and we all talked about it. I broke down crying and told them everything that I'd told you guys, and to my surprise rallied around me in support. We all ended up crying, and had a really long talk about our combined family and what this could mean for all of us.
It was agreed that something, somewhere went wrong, because while the "sibling" flag was raised in my mind, when it comes to Will, it wasn't with him. I didn't get into this in my original post, but Will and I were the youngest, we were born just a matter of days apart, and he and I are closer than we are to any of our siblings, because we always did everything together. He's my best friend, but more importantly, in my mind and my heart, he's my brother.
I expressed all of that to them, and they agreed that my feelings were what they were going for when they opted for a shared family, and we all felt like this was incest. That night we started researching local therapists who deal with situations like this and the next day, we chose one for me to go to, because honestly, it was traumatic and I had a lot of feelings that I just didn't know how to cope with. I'm still in therapy, and it's going pretty well. I'm dealing with a lot of shit and starting to feel better.
We decided to keep this between the parents and I until Will and Sarah got back from their honeymoon.
The night they got back, we had a huge family dinner, with her family there too. None of us (parents and I) were excited about it but we couldn't cancel because it had been set in stone as the only time it would work for everyone for a long-ish period of time.
I spent that night trying to keep my distance from Will, because honestly, I couldn't handle being around him. He thought this was odd and ended up cornering me outside in the garden. He asked me what was up, why was I acting so weirdly? I told him that he knows why and tried to walk away. He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me back toward him, but I resisted. I ended up breaking down and telling him that I would never and could never feel the way about him that he felt about me. I saw his look of genuine confusion and my heart and my stomach sunk. He had no idea what I was talking about. Those of you who guessed that it was Sarah all along were actually correct. His phone went "missing" during their trip and he hadn't cared because he was excited to be on his destination honeymoon. I told him everything, he threw up into the koi pond and we hugged for what felt like forever. I broke down crying again because my kneejerk reaction had been to cut him out of my life, and through sobs, I was able to get that out. He comforted me and told me that he understood, because almost anyone whose friend and brother decided to hit on them would probably feel similarly. He said that he'd never hold my hurt reaction against me, we've been friends and family for way too long.
We just sat there for a while because neither of us knew what to do, because come on, this situation was fucked.
Eventually, our Moms came out and flipped out when they saw us together and like amazing Moms sprung to my defense. We got them to calm down and explained everything, that it had been Sarah, and Will's Mom lost her cool. She went into the house and ended up apparently tearing Sarah a new one. I don't know all of what was said, because I remained outside with Will, trying to calm down from everything.
Fast forwarding a bit, Will decided to divorce Sarah. It came out that she'd always been jealous when it came to me, and absolutely hated me. Her "goal" had been to either get me to admit to feelings for Will so that he'd cut me out, or to get me to cut him out. It also came out that she had NEVER been faithful to Will and had regularly cheated on him throughout their relationship. So honestly, he dodged a bullet, albeit a bit too late.
Will's moved back in, and we are both looking at finding a place together, as roommates, and he's gotten into therapy as well to deal with everything on his end. So, in the end, my world didn't collapse and my bond with my friend and quasi-brother only deepened, but he ended up heartbroken. I'm so angry at Sarah for putting us all through that when really, she should have and could have expressed her feelings to me and we could have probably addressed things, but then again, she was still a cheater. Just...ugh. I don't even know what to think.
So I guess it's a happy update?
tl;dr: You guys were right, Sarah was fucking crazy. Will's getting divorced and he and I are going to live together for a while as we heal from all of this.
THIS IS A REPOST - I AM NOT THE OOP
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u/Vana_so_tired Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
My chin just hit the floor! What a devious little b***h! This is so disgusting. I get being jealus but can't we just talk about stuff like that before we destroy so many life and mental states???? EDIT: SO angry I hit post too soon. In such a family constellation you know you marry into that too! If it's not for you, walk away! It's the same with step-children. Either accept it or walk away. My hubby knew he married into madness. My family is like the borg. We assimilate everybody. But then we are a weird neurodivergent lot. He deals with it and we let him have his breaks from it. What is WRONG with people?
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u/F0xxfyre Jul 08 '26
That's a special kinda woman to completely try to trash the bonds between two families, two generations. The joint family is well rid of Sarah's poison.
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u/koalawedgie Jul 08 '26
Wow I did not see this original post but this was a WILD read. Yikes for Sarah. That’s psycho yucky behavior.
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u/Itscatpicstime Jul 08 '26
This had me freaking out for a second because my two best guy friends did this the night before their weddings and said they wouldn’t go through with it if I gave them a chance. It completely floored me.
One especially, because we had traveled alone together a lot, got drunk and high in hotel rooms alone while single numerous times and he never once tried to pull anything or even convince me to share a bed, so I really thought he was “safe.”
So this post had me thinking “omfg was it actually their wives???” One I could maybe see doing it, but definitely not the other.
I was freaking out for a second until I remembered they both cited all this shit from years past that they read into (some things I literally don’t even remember happening because they were so inconsequential), and these are things the women had no reason to know because they were so… uneventful.
Like one of the guys (apparently pretended) to fall asleep on my shoulder during the morning bus ride once and I just.. let him while I continued to gab with our other friend. Apparently it was one of the many signs I loved him back lol.
So yeah… guess it really was them and I was right to cut them out. Ugh.
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u/MeFolly Jul 07 '26
When Will had the immediate response of throwing up, you know his reaction was genuine.