My boyfriend has a close friend who happens to be a woman. That sentence sounds straightforward until I add the detail I keep getting stuck on: they talk almost every day, and most of it happens on Snapchat.
We’ve been together for over a year. She’s someone we both went to high school with, so she isn’t a mysterious new name. We’re all in our 30s now, with plenty of years between those school days and the lives we have today. Their friendship has its own history.
They live in different states, although the distance is manageable enough that visiting would be possible. I can’t treat geography as a complete answer to my concern. At the same time, being able to visit someone doesn’t mean anything has happened.
Sometimes they use Discord. Mostly, though, it’s Snapchat, and that’s the part I’ve brought up with him. If they’re such close friends, why wouldn’t they just text?
Even as I ask it, I know that “why don’t you text like normal people?” carries an assumption. To him, this apparently is normal. He says it’s how they’ve always communicated. His explanation is simple, and it could be the whole explanation.
Still, I’m left trying to decide how much weight to give my discomfort. The frequent contact catches my attention; the app makes me more aware of it. Together, those details leave me with questions I don’t know how to settle.
I haven’t described a confession or something I caught. I have a boyfriend with a very close friend, a familiar name from high school, and a communication habit he doesn’t seem to find unusual.
What I want to ask other men is fairly plain: does this sound like an ordinary friendship to you? Can you talk to a woman almost daily this way and have it be entirely platonic? Or is there something here I’m right to be concerned about?
