Polyamory is all the hype right now. Three people, open communication, equal partnership, everyone is in the loop, and nobody gets hurt. It sounds progressive and modern, and honestly, good for anyone who makes it work. There is a whole community built around the idea that love does not have to be a finite resource and that more people can mean more joy. Lovely in theory.
What it does not mean is that your boyfriend and your best friend of sixteen years decide to make their own little arrangement while you are at work, on your couch, with your wine, and then look you in the face every single day for months like nothing happened. That is not polyamory. That has a different name entirely, and this woman found out what it was the moment she picked up her boyfriend's phone.
More info: Reddit
The question as old as time is whether or not there is space for more than two people in a relationship
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A woman saw text messages on her boyfriend's phone between him and her best friend, confirming that they had been involved in an ongoing affair
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She was appalled to learn that the pair of them first hooked up one Valentine's Day when she was working a late shift
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Since then, the boyfriend and the best friend where not as close as they used to be, but the narrator just assumed they were having a friendship-bicker
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Ultimately, she could not get over this betrayal, and after the friend confessed, she physically dragged her out of her house and she showed the boyfriend the door shortly after
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She even went so far as to ship the friend the couch where the initial betrayal took place
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The narrator was firm that an open relationship or polyamory was not something she was willing to consider
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She eventually sent all the proof of the affair to her friends and family too, making sure that all bridges were successfully burned down
A woman had been with her boyfriend, Adam, for 2 years and had been best friends with Delaney since high school. The three of them hung out regularly, and she watched Adam and Delaney bicker like siblings, which she found endearing. She had no reason to think anything else was happening. Then Delaney started pulling away, not wanting Adam around when they hung out, getting visibly upset whenever his name came up.
She thought they were having a friend disagreement until one day, when Adam left his phone unattended. She picked it up to check if Delaney had replied to her own message and read the first thing on the screen. It was Delaney telling Adam that she loved him and that he needed to choose between the narrator and her. She was disgusted to realise that they had first hooked up on Valentine's Day, on her couch.
She remembered coming home to find them passed out on opposite ends of the couch and feeling guilty for leaving them alone all evening. She photographed everything and told Adam her mom had an emergency, and left. She spent the night crying and reading the screenshots she had taken. By morning, she had made her decision. She confronted them both, Delaney, first, who came over and admitted everything.
She physically dragged Delaney out of the apartment. Adam showed up after work with explanations and promises to never see Delaney again, but she simply pointed to the door. She watched the maintenance man change her locks while she enacted her revenge.
She sent screenshots to every friend, every parent, both families. She had the couch delivered to Delaney's house and sent Adam the same wine they had been drinking that night, then blocked them both. The OP noted that no one would support them, no one would trust them, and if they ended up together, they would have built it on the rubble of everyone who loved them. She called that revenge enough.
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A surprising number of people told her to consider an open relationship as a solution. Relationship expert Jera Brown is clear that polyamory is not for everyone, and specifically warns against it as a rescue strategy for a relationship that is already in trouble. More people means more complexity, they say, and if the foundation is already unstable, adding complexity only accelerates the collapse.
Psychologist Randi Gunther Ph.D. explains that loving more than one person at once is not as rare as people think, but it comes with a brutal cost. Every relationship requires a redistribution of resources, time, energy, emotional availability, and finances, and there is only so much of any of those things to go around. The partner trying to maintain two relationships simultaneously is constantly robbing one to feed the other.
Experts at Verywell Mind are clear that romantic betrayal is a form of interpersonal trauma that can even bring on PTSD symptoms and depression. The standard recovery path involves leaning on close friends and family for support. The particular cruelty of this situation is that her closest friend was also her betrayer, which eliminated the most obvious support structure at the exact moment she needed it most.
She handled it the way she handled it, locks changed, couch delivered, screenshots distributed, and both of them blocked. It was not the high road, and she did not pretend it was. But for someone processing a double betrayal with no best friend left to call, it was probably the most honest response available.
How would you have closed a devastating chapter like this? Share your schemes in the comments!
Folks in the comments were increasingly concerned about the narrator's well-being, regularly checking in on her and her story
