Dear Cary,
A friend, and ex-fiancée, of mine recently became engaged to someone she has known for only six months. They are planning a wedding only three months from today. When they were dating she never had anything positive to say about him and seemed on the verge of dumping him before he proposed. She has distanced herself from all of her friends because, though they are supportive, none of them think it's a good idea. But the reasons that she gives for cutting her friends off are the tantrums that he throws every time she speaks to anyone who has ever said anything negative about him. I feel that her actual reason is that she wants to avoid thinking about her own fears and doubts about this man because she wants a successful relationship so badly that her partner is irrelevant.
She and I both know I have a conflict of interest in this. She knows that I still love her very much and had hoped that we could try again. The timing of our relationship was wrong for both of us and it ended badly, but our friendship survived. We are both very much attracted to each other. I didn't take the news of her engagement well; rather, it led to a pretty intense depression and a lot of messy fallout. Her fiancé used that drama as his justification for forcing her to choose between friendship with me and their relationship. I lost.
But that's not the reason I'm writing you.
I confirmed something about him that I had suspected for a long time, but it gives me no comfort because I cannot tell her what I know. Since they started dating he has given her lecture after lecture about how faithful he is, how important monogamy is to him, how he has never cheated on anyone he's ever been with. She didn't tell him that she had never been faithful to anyone, including me. He picked fights with her in public among their mutual friends over the fact that she is bisexual and that if she pursued her interest in women, she would be cheating on him. He did these kinds of things so often that I began to suspect that he was being defensive.
Tonight I found out that he was indeed cheating on her, and not only on her, but on his previous girlfriend. He left his previous girlfriend to be with the woman he was seeing on the side. There are nearly three months of overlap between the time he started "exclusively" seeing my friend and the time he finally stopped cheating on her. I found this out directly from the other woman. I even know the dates.
I can't tell her. For one, she has a tendency to shoot messengers so if I'm to have any hope that she and I will end up together it has to come from another source. Two, my motives are suspect. At the same time, if she does find out and also finds out that I knew, she will never forgive me. I try to keep my big damn mouth shut, but she sees through me and will know if I am hiding something.
Do I e-mail him a picture of the other woman with a caption saying, "I know everything"? Do I go to the bar he manages and tell him that if he doesn't come clean, I'll have the other woman do it for him? Do I tell her myself and take it on the chin?
At a Loss
Dear At a Loss,
Here's what you do: You don't e-mail him a picture. You don't confront him at his bar. You don't put someone else up to it. You don't take it on the chin. You don't do anything.
What you do is you let it go. You let her go. You let him go. You let everything go. Do some yoga: That part at the end where you let everything go out of your toes, do that. Sit in a blues club and let it go. Do the breath of fire and let it go. Do the downward dog and let it go. Put on some Coltrane and let it go; take a walk in the woods and let it go; go hunting or driving or running or cycling or whatever you do that stops you from thinking about her and her dishonesty and bad choices and willful blindness. Let it go.
There's the personal angle and there's the legal angle. The personal angle is that people make bad choices in their personal lives and it's none of our business. The legal angle is that people make bad choices in marriage and it's none of our business except where the marriage, as a public contract, affects children, property, other wives, etc. Just being a jackass isn't grounds for anything. If he's already married with kids in Idaho or a rap sheet that takes three minutes to print or three wives in Utah, OK, that's relevant information that his intended betrothed ought to know. But if he just wasn't done with all his sexual entanglements before he sexually entangled himself with your friend, that's between them.
Besides, I have a feeling it's not her moral choices that are bothering you as much as it is her sweet sex and who's getting what you used to get. Because why else would you want to get back together with a woman who was never true to you or to anyone else anyway, unless she's such a salty sweet bundle of lips and thighs that the mere thought of her makes you tingle so badly you need a neurologist or a priest? How could a guy who admits upfront that he's got only selfish interests and who admits that she never was true to him anyway be deeply interested in the moral problem of infidelity and lies?
So don't pretend to take the high road just to get to the low road. Whatever road you're on, turn around and walk the other way. You've got no rights in the matter, being, as the poem says, "neither father nor lover."
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