When my best friend started telling us how wildly in love she was with her husband, I wanted to be happy for her. Instead, I spent the evening struggling to believe her. My partner and I had gone out with them, and she kept fawning over him, talking about how they couldn't keep their hands off each other. All I could think about was what she'd told me before.
She had cheated on him after two years of marriage. When she confided in me, she said she didn't love him anymore and wanted a divorce. That was the version of her marriage I had been trusted with: she had been unfaithful, her feelings had gone, and she wanted out. She never went through with the divorce. Now they're trying to make the marriage work.
I don't object to that decision. It's their relationship, and they get to decide whether to stay in it. I can accept that someone might want to leave and later choose to try again. What I hadn't expected was to go from hearing about the end of her marriage to spending an evening listening to how wonderful it was.
It was the insistence that got to me. She wasn't simply affectionate with him. From where I sat, the evening seemed full of declarations about their love and how much they wanted each other. I found it irritating, and I'm not especially proud of that. A friend tells you she's happy, and your reaction is to doubt her. It doesn't feel like a generous place to be.
But I wasn't hearing those things without any history. I knew what she'd said when she wasn't presenting them as a happy couple. I couldn't put that knowledge aside just because the conversation had changed. It felt as though she was trying to prove something, although I don't know whether she was trying to convince us, herself, or no one at all. She may actually feel close to him again. I can't see inside their marriage.
That's what makes my mistrust so uncomfortable. Her earlier confession was something I believed because she was my best friend. Now I find myself weighing her words instead of taking them as they come. I used to listen as her friend. Now I catch myself checking one conversation against another, and I dislike what that does to the way I see her.
I hadn't expected her affair to change how I felt about our friendship. The betrayal happened in her marriage, but I'm the one sitting here wondering how much of what she tells me I can trust. I don't want to require her to keep feeling exactly as she did when she confided in me. I also can't make myself accept the picture of a perfect marriage just because that's the one she's showing me now.
I'm starting to wonder whether I can stay close to her while I feel this way. She's trying to continue her marriage. I'm still unsure what continuing our friendship would feel like.
