So I thought I’d write this story out, because it came to mind recently about unfairness and betrayal by someone I thought was a friend – a thing that sadly hasn’t happened only once in my life.
Back in the late 2000s, I was friends with someone I’ll call Es. Es and I met through mutual friends a year or two earlier, and we moved in similar circles, seemed to care about the same things, and generally connected. So we also became friends and celebrated birthdays, hand-fastings, and other events together. We shared a lot on one of the many instant messenger clients at the time about our lives.
I trusted Es, and confided stuff in her. When I entered my first polyam relationship, full of anxiety and uncertainty, Es was there to listen to me and share her own stories that related to mine. I repurposed a blog around this time (no, I’m not sharing the link) and wrote about my feelings, the joys, the concerns, the anxieties and insecurities. I wrote about my new partner and how I was newly navigating having two partners, and then how I was navigating being one of many partners.
I shared this blog with a handful of trusted people. It was a private blog and was unlisted with search engines (it was a blogger blog, and that was an option I could choose at the time). So I felt safe writing about the people in my life, how I was navigating stuff, and my personal experiences.
Es was one of the people that I shared the blog with, because we were friends and already talking about this stuff. I thought it would save time overall because Es could read stuff, and then we could talk about it later, versus me having to take the time to explain everything each time. This worked fine until late 2006/early 2007.
At the time, my partner was struggling with another partner we’ll call Be. I can’t remember what the struggles were about now, it was a very long time ago and I’m not going to go back and reread the blog (I’m afraid it might all be cringe). I do remember asking my partner if he felt that the relationship with Be was worth it overall. Each time he answered that he thought it was, and so I remained a listening ear. Under no circumstances did I want to influence his relationship with Be, who I also liked, because that would be wrong and against my personal values.
I wrote about this in my blog, because I was writing about stuff, and Es clearly read it. At the time, though I didn’t know this, Es was trying to build a friendship with Be. I didn’t realise that Es was status seeking and aiming for something like appearing as an authority or something. I really don’t quite understand the motive. Anyway, Es read my blog post about my partner’s struggles and my commentary, and assumed that I was trying to break my partner’s and Be’s relationship up. Es shared my blog with Be, with the “concern” that I was interfering and attempting to break up her relationship.
Be commented to this to our shared partner, including mentioning that she’d read my blog. My partner asked me why I was writing stuff down, and I was initially confused, and then he told me what had happened. I was furious at Es.
I checked in with Be, and she was happy that I hadn’t done what Es had suggested, and we were cool, just asked that I change her name on the blog, which I did.
I confronted Es (via email) and asked why she did what she did. She refused to back down or apologise, said that anyone could have found the blog (which they couldn’t), and then showed me that if you entered a very long and convoluted search string that you could find that the blog existed, and that was justification for breaching my confidence and talking to Be without talking to me first.
I ended up having a miscarriage part-way through this whole confrontation (not related), so I just let Es have the last word and didn’t speak to her for years. It caused some minor dramas between mutual friends who didn’t know what happened, or didn’t realise how serious it was, but those were ironed out. If I see Es now at social events (thankfully very rare), I am polite, talk about general stuff and then go my own way. To this day I have never received an apology or acknowledgement of wrongdoing. It’s just something that apparently happens sometimes.
And some people wonder why I struggle with trusting others… here is one such story as evidence.