The adage “ignorance is bliss” takes on a entirely different dimension when the knowledge gained is that your friend’s spouse, fiancé, or significant other is cheating. Once you’ve been made privy to such information what should you do? Do you tell or not? Do you intervene or stand back and watch the drama play out at a safe distance. There is no uniformly correct answer that applies to every situation, as each set of circumstances is as unique as the people involved. So I will speak from my personal experience.
A few years back, I found myself in the unenviable position of discovering that a good friend’s husband was indeed cheating on her. The situation was even more painful because he and I were close friends as well. I obtained the information from another friend who was very close to all three of us, and who knew the person with whom the husband had cheated. This second friend not only knew the paramour, but had gotten a first hand confession from that person. The news devastated me. I knew immediately that the situation had to be handled with loving respect for all involved. I began praying immediately for God to be clear about how I was to move forward.
The first thing I did was to contact the husband. I knew that despite the depth of my pain, I needed to confront him (Luke 17:3) gently (Galatians 6:1), in private (Matthew 18:15), and in a spirit of love for the purpose of his being reconciled (Matthew 5:23-24) to God. Since he and I had been like siblings for over a decade, it was reasonable for me to expect him to take my call, hear me out, and to offer some kind of explanation. I trusted that he knew that I both loved and respected him regardless of what he had or had not done. He was and always will be my brother.
Our first conversation went reasonably well. I calmly told him what I had heard, expressed my concern, and asked him to please help me to understand. I still had hope that somehow I had been misinformed and that he had not broken his marriage vows. He agreed to address all of my concerns, but stated he was not in a place where he could talk at that time. We set a future date and time to address the issue. He had been his usual, reasonable, lovable self. I had no reason to expect that he would never again call me back, or that he would dodge all my calls in the future. Sadly, that is exactly what he did.
After two weeks of leaving messages for him – messages in which I urged him to tell his wife about the circumstances surrounding his infidelity – I concluded that he had no intention of confessing to her or to anyone else. Since she resided just fewer than 100 miles away from me at the time, and he was out of town on business, nearly 500 miles away, a face to face meeting proved to be impossible.
To read the rest of “Reasons I Outed My BFF’s Man,” by Sheeri Mitchell, click here.
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