Questionable Friendships

Funny how you can be the kind of person who goes out of your way constantly to do nice, caring, helpful things to others, yet make one mistake and all of a sudden that mistake is how certain people choose to define you.

The precursor to my anger, hurt and shame is a long story but I will do my best to cut to the chase.  I have been in a relationship and living with my boyfriend for a little over two years.  It has been rough from the start.  He moved in with me because we both were suddenly faced with being laid off and he was losing his home and I felt at the time that if I didn't have a living partner to share the financial obligations I may lose my home as well.  Fucking economy, but I will get to that later as I'm quite pissed off about that as well.  But I digress, so throw two people who don't really know each other into a pressure cooker situation, most times there will be issues.

So the arguing begins and disagreements on who does what, who should do what and the like.  We began even sleeping in separate rooms.  Now part of that was due to back issues I had from a minor accident over 10 years ago but let's just say it didn't help.  Well I try to consider myself a pretty cool and open minded person and at the beginning of the relationship I ended up befriending his ex-girlfriend.  We were all hanging out in the same watering holes and thought you know this is stupid to have this tension.  I had nothing to do with their past history and I don't always judge girlfriends before me based on what a jaded ex may say.  There are two sides to every story.  (Hang on to that "moral of the story" it will revisit us later.)

My apologies, back to the arguing and things drifting apart.  Since we all hung out in similar circles it wasn't unusual for my boyfriend to go out and me stay home after all we weren't exactly yucking it up at home.  The chances of his ex being there at any given time was very likely.  I didn't care for a couple reasons.  I try to give them both the benefit of the doubt and not question that anything were going on.  I mean she was a friend of mine now too.


A year and two months ago he comes home at almost 6am, which by the way wasn't untypical and I did have a problem with that as well but I trusted him.  Needless to say I was a bit upset and wanted to know where the hell he had been until that time of the morning.  The answer I received was that a group went out to breakfast after leaving the bar.  I don't know what possessed me to not believe him after all the other times.  Call it women's intuition, or just a keen ability to smell bull shit but I decided to probe further.  Something didn't add up.  This man tells me what color the corn was in his shit in the morning but now all of a sudden he wasn't giving hardly any info at all.

It took almost a full week to pull all the details from the steel trap but I managed.  Come to find out they had been getting friendlier over the previous few weeks.  Phone calls, emails, he would go pick her up and take her to the bar because she didn't have a ride there.  The reason he didn't come home until almost 6 in the morning was because they had been drinking too much, he gave here a ride home, they shared sob stories and "one thing led to another".  He claims there was no sex just "heavy petting".  His words, not mine.  She claims they had sex.  At this point whatever, the shit has hit the fan.

We struggled but somehow managed to get through it and after a long penance on his part I did eventually forgive them both.  But, I guess we just aren't meant to be together.  Over the course of the last year nothing has really gotten any better.  I honestly don't believe he has ever done anything like that again, however, I never thought he would in the first place.  Here's where the tricky part comes in.  We are no longer technically in a relationship but we are unfortunately forced to stay living in my house.  I'm laid off again and he works out of town all week long and that makes it almost impossible for him to find a place of his own especially with two big dogs.

When I sat down and had the talk with him about ending the relationship I told him if he wanted to leave it was ok, but I did understand how hard it would be for him to even start looking and that he could continue to live with me short term until he could find a place.

Now in between all this other stuff there are so many things that I have done simply out of the kindness of my own heart and for no other reason for him, his family and many of his friends.  I don't do these things because I expect recognition, something in return or have some ulterior motive.  I do them because I genuinely care.  As noted by the allowing my ex to continue living with me.  Oh, and the time I was up at 5am and read a FB (Facebook) post from his nephew that he was feeling really sick.  I spent $20 out of the only $30 I had left to my name, went to the store, bought all the ingredients for homemade chicken noodle soup, made 5 quarts of soup, drove almost 30 miles (on my last $10, that went in the gas tank) and took soup to not only his nephew but his sister, aunt and brother-in-law.  Seems the whole family had been suffering from some sort of bug.  Remember this when you find out later what a horrible person I really am.

It would take far to long to list everything and really I don't want to.  I'm not trying to prove I'm a perfect wonderful person, only that everyone makes mistakes and if an otherwise generally good person fucks up, it doesn't make them a demon on the whole.

So now that me and the BF are broken up and living under the same roof it's hard to know what the rules of "moving on are", I have never been in this situation before.  There are always unspoken rules I suppose, don't mess with your ex's friends, etc.  It's quite confusing on all the other stuff.  I suppose it would make sense to sit down and communicate about it but communication or lack there of has been a huge issue in the relationship anyway.

Due to the same economic issues the rest of us are facing I don't get to "go out" and "let my hair down" very often.  Maybe once every 5 or 6 weeks at most.  Well I decided last weekend that I was going to do just that.  I'm 38 never been married, never had kids and I would like to have a companion and life partner that I should be with and am compatible.  I know a bar is not really the place to go but it wasn't that I was on a hunt it was that I wanted to go out and if by some stroke of luck I meet someone then great. 

Saturday night was the night I decided I would go out and have some fun.  My day got started late and got very busy unexpectedly.  I had favors to do errands to run the whole 9 yards.  Needless to say even though I know better, I will say it again, I know better than do go out on an empty stomach but I did it.  Throw on top of that I rarely drink and it was my ex's friend's birthday so there were a lot of shots flying too.  It was bad, so bad.  I don't remember a HUGE chunk of the evening.  I will even tell you I pissed the bed for the 1st time in probably 35 years (remember I'm 38).

I do fortunately or unfortunately remember one really bad thing about that night though.  I remember sitting in my ex's friends car, and he started to put the moves on me.  I didn't resist right away and did end up making out with him.  What I would consider equal to a couple teenagers making out at lover's lane.  Oh yeah I will use the term my ex used before he was my ex, "heavy petting".  Well it didn't take long thankfully for me to come out of my drunken zombie walk to put the brakes on things, throw up outside of his car, say I gotta get out of here and we can't do this and proceed to figure out how to get home.

I feel so absolutely horrible I can't even stand it.  I was so upset when I found out he had been carrying on a relationship with my friend/his ex and the last thing I wanted to do was cause that kind of hurt to anyone regardless of the circumstances.

As if I don't already feel bad enough his sister writes a post on FB to the effect of she was hurt and disappointed and can't believe the two of us would do that, our friendship must have meant nothing and about jumping on the loser train.  Now she didn't mention either of our names but wow.  Oh, and she wasn't even there that night, her son, my ex's nephew (that I took chicken noodle soup to when he was sick) must have said that he had seen something go on.  My problem with this is, what is he saying he saw, why didn't she call me and ask me what the hell happened, why didn't the nephew ask me before he started spreading the word, do they actually think I had sex in a car with this guy, really?  I don't know.  I refuse to even attempt to discuss it with them strictly because of the little FB post.  You want to know something come ask me.  Don't assume you know based on something someone else "thought" they saw.  Had she called/come to me 1st I would have told her everything, up to and including how much of an ass I felt like for letting things almost get way out of control.

I know I am so wrong and being drunk is no excuse, and the fact that my ex did that and then some with his ex while we were officially together, I still fucked up.  I admit that, I would say that to anyone who asks me.  I take full responsibility for so much as putting myself in a position where that could even possibly happen.  But I also want to scream from the mountain tops that I didn't do anything with him beyond kissing.  Yeah that's bad and wrong but I stopped it from going further and how dare you speculate and not just come ask me.  That's fucked up.  And then you question MY friendship.  A true friend would have asked questions first and reminded me that although what happened was wrong that doesn't just completely erase the good things I have done, and the nice things I have tried to do for other people.

So I get to go from saint to evil bitch in one moment of severely poor judgement and way too much alcohol.  My shoulders are big I can take it.  I can tell the truth and admit when I'm wrong and give people the benefit of the doubt.  And quite frankly I probably should have never dated this guy anyway.  My 1st warning should have been when I found out his sister was actually his cousin and his nephew is actually his 2nd cousin.  Why can't you just tell people that hey this is my cousin but we were so close we were like brother and sister.  It's one thing to let people know you call your cousin "sis" because of your closeness and maybe it's just easier but to intentionally lead people to believe your one thing when your not.  Too weird for me.

Just an added thought because I went from trying to be diplomatic and not a complete bitch to full on bitch.  May I remind his sis/cousin or whatever the hell she is that she told me she used to be a dominatrix and I never passed judgement on her.  But guess what I am now.  You want to chop me down to nothing because you think I had sex with my ex's friend without finding out the truth and brand me with a scarlet letter, let's take a closer examination of yourself.  I had a drunken few minutes that I stopped before it got really out of hand, you got paid to do sexual things to people.  What's the saying, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Fuck that.  Not sure why she thinks I can't live without a "friend" that would believe and or make up lies and/or speculate at something that did or did not happen somewhere where there were only two people and her and her son weren't one of them.

Wow I think I actually feel better.  I'm sure there will be more to come about this little saga.  I'm not going to take this shit.  And I will go back into that bar (don't have much choice the manager has asked me to host a show) and I will hold my head high knowing that one mistake does not make me a bad person as a whole and depending on how far these little rumors have spread, I will gladly tell anyone who wants to know the TRUTH exactly what happened even though I am completely ashamed anything happened at all.  But I would rather people know the truth and not speculate or believe false rumors no matter how ashamed I am.