Bros Before Hoes

Six months after we got together, my girlfriend told me she wanted to break-up. "Just for a little while," she said, almost apologetically.

I was shocked, to say the least, as I had been sure that things were going just fine up until that moment. So, naturally, I asked why.

She finally told me that on the very same day I had decided to finally tell her about the way I felt about her, another friend of mine had done the exact same thing. She had never told me this, though she had told my friend this as part of her explanation about why she was seeing me and not him. I had only noticed that my friend had been distant from me for the past six months, but had never suspected the real reason. He had probably wondered why I had put a girl before our friendship, but I had never known that he had been interested in her as well.

I decided to be fair (mostly because I was fairly confident about the outcome) and told my girlfriend to go ahead and go out with my friend. I explained that I would be waiting for her when she finally changed her mind and came to her senses. Less than two weeks later, we were back together and that was that. I never mentioned this to my friend or to anyone else. As far as I was concerned, this was between my girlfriend and me.

(As an aside to this story, my girlfriend and I eventually became engaged before she broke it off after six years. My friend ended up going out with a girl who had had a huge crush on me - though, again, I never mentioned this to anyone - and they ended up dating for at least two years and maybe more).

I suppose that had I known that my friend was interested in the girl from the very beginning, I would have never asked her out or told her my true feelings. And, as a result, I would have been miserable until I found some other girl to moon over. I'm not entirely certain we would have remained friends, but I do know that a lot of strife might have been avoided all the same.

After the Navy another friend of mine was dating a girl I had known most of my life on a friendly basis (we were friends, even if we didn't hang out together). He was madly in love with her. She was in love with him. They were totally wrong for each other and I think most everyone knew it. But, again, I didn't say anything.

After my friend proposed to this girl and she turned him down, they broke up and the break up turned nasty for the girl. Though she had done nothing wrong except turn my friend down, he started bashing her to his friends (and her friends) until she was, more or less, ostracized from their group of friends.

About three months later I ran into this girl and she asked me why I hadn't warned her about my friend. I told her bluntly, "Because you wouldn't have believed me. And then you and my friend would have hated me for butting in."

There are times when the guy ethic expressed in this post's title can be really idiotic. Had I simply interfered with my friend's relationship, both might have been spared some heartache. Had I simply known that my other friend had an interest in my girlfriend as well, we might have been able to come to some sort of amicable arrangement, and a great deal of heartache (on his behalf) might have been prevented. But because of this ethic, in addition to broken relationships and hurt feelings between the various couples, the collateral damage spread into friendships that had very little to do with the actual relationship. Suddenly people who had been the best of friends before could no longer associate with one another simply because two of the friends in the group had decided to break up, thus splitting a group into two camps. Once a relationship ended, the entire group was affected and things could never go back to the way they'd been before.

And all because of a stupid rule.

Currently, I am on the outside of one of these internal friendship/relationship debacles and I can't help but see it for what it really is - arbitrary and depressing. Friends who have been friends forever are being torn apart as a result of a mismatched and misguided love affair. Hurt feelings, betrayals, lies, jealousy, and all the thousands of other pieces of shrapnel of this exploding relationship are tearing through friendships like hot knives through butter. Its so damn unfortunate, and so damn unnecessary. So and so breaks up, so and so hook up, then they break up and so and so get back together, and then so and so's friends hear all the sordid details of the break up/hook up/break up and lines are drawn and sides are chosen and someone has to be right and someone has to be wrong. But nothing is ever really that easy, is it?

We grow older for a reason - and that is to take our own experience of stupid decisions and of things probably left unsaid and use them to help the younger generation before they make the same exact mistakes we made. Otherwise we simply perpetuate the cycle of regret for another generation.

So, if anyone is out there listening, I need to say that allowing a friendship to die because of a failed romantic liaison that doesn't directly involve you seems like a harsh punishment and a heavy price to pay for the stupidity of youth. I ask all involved to forgive and to forget and to move on.