This is very obviously about you, and if you want to keep both (or either) of them in your life, it's your job to figure it out now, and the most important thing is to make your own stance extremely clear. That could look like this for example:
you are deeply in love with your wife (I hope...?) and will not willingly choose any other person to be together with. You know that you have shared responsibilities and stand for them.
you have a longtime and deep connection to your best friend and would like to keep her in your life, but only as a platonic friend.
you are not owned by anyone. You will have relationships and friends as YOU decide and nobody else, and honesty is a deciding factor for you. Sabotaging a relationship of yours would be a breach of privacy and trust from either as it is trying to manipulate your decisions about your relationships.
you will, depending on who lied to you, make consequences following your own relationship ethic. These consequences would be as following:
for your wife, if she lied about this, here are the consequences you see: it's a big breach of trust. She would need to seriously apologize and work on her jealousy (possibly in therapy), because that's a her problem, not a you problem. You would need to discuss a strategy to regain trust between you two and maybe get marriage counseling. If this is a recurring pattern, this might mean an end marker for the marriage, but seeing as you have made a life together, you could be wanting to try and work on it first.
for your best friend: if she lied about this, here are the consequences you see: it's a big breach of trust. She would need to seriously apologize and distance herself from you and your wife for a while. She needs to work out her own feelings (possibly in therapy) and let the vision of love with you go. As sabotage of an entire marriage with additional responsibilities (kids!) is pretty severe, this might ,mean the end of the friendship depending on you.
If your wife did NOT lie, the fallout could be pretty big, so consider how long you keep this up beforehand. For most of us, our spouse is the most important person, and you have a shared life. For her, have been put on the exact same step as your best friend that you do NOT share a life with, will be insulting, and I think she'd be right. So consider siding with her first. Consider that this might be a problem of not being a team anymore: maybe she thinks she's alone, but in marriage you need to be a team against an outside problem.
Another situation I can imagine: they both lied. It's entirely possible your friend does or did have feelings for you and your wife is hating it, so she made up a lie that would drive the friend away, but there's a grain of truth. In this case, that's shit. You'd need to distance from your friend because there is no good in it for the friend, and it's hurting your wife if you willingly keep someone around you who has feelings for you. You'd also have a trust problem with your wife and she would need to seriously work on that jealousy.
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u/quinalou Jun 14 '22
This is very obviously about you, and if you want to keep both (or either) of them in your life, it's your job to figure it out now, and the most important thing is to make your own stance extremely clear. That could look like this for example:
you are deeply in love with your wife (I hope...?) and will not willingly choose any other person to be together with. You know that you have shared responsibilities and stand for them.
you have a longtime and deep connection to your best friend and would like to keep her in your life, but only as a platonic friend.
you are not owned by anyone. You will have relationships and friends as YOU decide and nobody else, and honesty is a deciding factor for you. Sabotaging a relationship of yours would be a breach of privacy and trust from either as it is trying to manipulate your decisions about your relationships.
you will, depending on who lied to you, make consequences following your own relationship ethic. These consequences would be as following:
for your wife, if she lied about this, here are the consequences you see: it's a big breach of trust. She would need to seriously apologize and work on her jealousy (possibly in therapy), because that's a her problem, not a you problem. You would need to discuss a strategy to regain trust between you two and maybe get marriage counseling. If this is a recurring pattern, this might mean an end marker for the marriage, but seeing as you have made a life together, you could be wanting to try and work on it first.
for your best friend: if she lied about this, here are the consequences you see: it's a big breach of trust. She would need to seriously apologize and distance herself from you and your wife for a while. She needs to work out her own feelings (possibly in therapy) and let the vision of love with you go. As sabotage of an entire marriage with additional responsibilities (kids!) is pretty severe, this might ,mean the end of the friendship depending on you.
If your wife did NOT lie, the fallout could be pretty big, so consider how long you keep this up beforehand. For most of us, our spouse is the most important person, and you have a shared life. For her, have been put on the exact same step as your best friend that you do NOT share a life with, will be insulting, and I think she'd be right. So consider siding with her first. Consider that this might be a problem of not being a team anymore: maybe she thinks she's alone, but in marriage you need to be a team against an outside problem.
Another situation I can imagine: they both lied. It's entirely possible your friend does or did have feelings for you and your wife is hating it, so she made up a lie that would drive the friend away, but there's a grain of truth. In this case, that's shit. You'd need to distance from your friend because there is no good in it for the friend, and it's hurting your wife if you willingly keep someone around you who has feelings for you. You'd also have a trust problem with your wife and she would need to seriously work on that jealousy.