My friends are ending their marriage and I am stuck in the middle
LIKEACATDOES - Mar 20 2022 at 17:16
I have two very good friends who have decided to end their marriage. I care about them both and they both know this. I enjoy their company but am finding it tricky living in the middle of their break up.
I don't want to lose either of them from my life but recently found out the male is seeing another woman so soon after the break up and made the difficult decision to tell the female who naturally found it hard to hear but was very appreciative that I told her.I just couldn't sit opposite her,looking into her eyes and keep such big information from her when it wasn't my mouth it probably should have come from in the first place.
I understand full well it probably wasn't my place to tell and usually I am not so forward with this stuff but she is my friend and has been a bit hard done by through the breakup. She reassured me if it was me and my husband she would've done the same and would've wanted me to know so I am thinking as her friend perhaps it was the right decision.
Now I am upset for upsetting the female and upset the male will be angry with me. I just can't win. I've been doing my best to keep my involvement minimal and it has actually been keeping me up at night, I feel like whatever I do I will upset one of them :(
I am not a gossip person and I hate drama I just feel like I am betraying my friends by either saying or not saying stuff and it is really starting to play on my own mental health.
I just feel so sad.
It sounds to me, like the male had a girl on the side before this. People don't usually move on that quickly.
You made a moral decision to tell your female friend, because it was the right thing to do. She deserved to know.
If your male friend blames you for this, then he is not a friend to begin with. He shouldn't have been doing something, if he didn't want people to find out about it.
It seems like the right thing to do, but I'm not so sure it really is.
Your friend did deserve to know, but perhaps a better tactic would be to tell soon-to-be-ex (or whatever) that HE should tell her or you'll be forced to. Then, when soon-to-be-ex-wife says, "He's seeing someone, already" you could play it like you never heard. Then she's not embarrassed by being the last to know.
It IS hard, and people often say "I'd want to know" but really, it's just embarrassing. It shouldn't be, really. It isn't like people are going to say anything about seeing someone new. And once they've moved into separate households, it ceases to be the partner's business. My personal opinion is that it's wise to spend some time examining what went wrong with the marriage to avoid making exactly the same mistake over again. However, no one has ever asked my what I thought about his or her breakup.
At the end of the day, getting involved just leads to issues & you feeling miserable about it all. You need to realise that it's basically none of your business to get involved with other's relationships no matter how good a friends they are. It's their life & they live it however it turns out. If they need support outside of the relationship, they will reach for people who they can trust.
You won't be the first person who may lose friends over a marriage or relationship breakup simply because you were good friends with the people in them. Sometimes it backfires that badly that you well & truly find out just how good a friend, or not, the others were without you even saying a word.