I thought the love of my life was gone forever… until my best friend let slip a twisted secret the night before my wedding to another man

Sometimes when I have insomnia, I count the close friends I’ve made and lost along the way.

I see them in a sort of receiving line, waiting for me to figure out what went wrong, how our relationships played out, who was at fault and why things soured.

In speaking with other women for my book Estranged: How Strained Female Friendships are Mended or Ended, I’ve learned I’m not alone in this feeling of harboring a sort of friendship graveyard. As it turns out, so many of us are trying to navigate lost friendships every day. 

At the end of my own receiving line is my former best friend, Paulette (not her real name), who altered the course of my life.

She was the friend who lied about the man I wanted to marry; who stole my chance to be with a person I loved.

Paulette and I met when we were 11. We were kids who skied together and traded our deepest secrets through high school, college, graduate school and beyond.

For decades, she was a vital part of my life – the person I confided in, trusted and counted on.

When we lived together during college, Jake, my boyfriend of four years who promised we’d be together forever, walked away. I was heartbroken and no one understood my mourning as well as Paulette. No one listened to my sobs and soothed me more than she did.

Jake had promised to call when he was ready to make a commitment. 

Back then, Paulette and I had one black rotary phone in the kitchen. There was no answering machine. I still loved Jake, and we were both on red alert for that call. 

As far as I knew, it never came.

Nearly two years later, I was engaged to someone else. At the rehearsal dinner the night before my wedding, Paulette cornered me. She confessed that Jake had called four months ago – he asked her to relay a message, but she had decided I didn’t need to know. In her opinion, I had moved on as I was already dating the man I then married.

My first reaction was to flee, to call the wedding off. Then I thought of my soon-to-be-husband and his trust in me. It was too late.

Besides, Paulette was my best friend, wasn’t she? She must have done what she thought was right.

The next day, she was in my wedding. 

I never called Jake back.

My marriage eventually ended. But what’s baffling to me is that it took several more decades before I saw the light about my friend. At the time, I still wanted her in my life, as close as ever. I somehow excused her betrayal and still yearned for her company.

I wasn’t able to admit there was a mounting tension in our friendship, that rather than safe or satisfying, it was destructive. For years after my wedding – through the births of our children and our subsequent divorces – I wanted the friendship more than I wanted to face her actions.

In the end, she was just never really there for me. She wasn’t on my side and there was no trust.

I look back and realize that I, like many women, stayed invested and hopeful, feeling like I needed the friendship the way we sometimes feel we need a partner who isn’t actually right for us.

Partnering and disentangling from romantic relationships are recognized and accepted events. But it’s tougher to abandon a tanking platonic friendship – there’s no social guidebook for that.

For my book, I listened to a diverse group of 150 women between the ages of 20 and 80 talk about their unsettling experiences with their closest female friends. These connections were central to their lives, even when they became unhealthy and wretched.

There were friendships that began in a most promising way, some of them going back to childhood, like mine and Paulette’s.

More than 80 percent had an issue with a close friend and 61 percent reported a friend had done something terrible to them. Sixty-seven percent wanted to leave a friend behind and 72 percent had the courage to break up with a friend.

Their stories fell into different kinds of friendships, including faithless, wayward, green-eyed and thieving, among others.

Faithless friends are those who push a best friend aside for a third party. For example, Ella, a 47-year-old paralegal living in Memphis, Tennessee, was ghosted by her best friend who started anew.

‘Fifteen years ago, one of my closest friends and I co-hosted a Sunday brunch for mutual friends,’ she told me. ‘It went very smoothly and then she avoided me.

‘She was living in another state and I thought doing this meal together meant something. She stayed with me, we had a great time.

‘After that, I texted and called and she barely got back to me. I wondered what I had done. One of our shared friends said she had begun an entirely different life 200 miles away.

‘To this day, I feel I’ve lost out.’

Natasha, a 39-year-old mom from the American Southwest, described a wayward relationship and struggled to deal with her best friend’s substance abuse.

‘No one else can get near this friendship, we are that close,’ she said.

‘But we have terrible fights because she can’t stay sober. She has lost jobs and two husbands because of her drinking and drugging.

‘I used to cover for her but she makes the worst choices and the cleanup is becoming too heavy for me.’

But, she added, ‘We have been together since we were in pre-school. How can I turn my back on her now?‘

As for green-eyed friends, jealousy can cause them to root against you, no matter how close you are. 

Avery, 53, works in the fashion business and lives on Long Island in New York. She admits to being jealous of her friend’s good fortune in marrying a wealthy man.

‘I hoped to stay friends,’ she said. ‘I thought she might know someone for me.

‘Meanwhile, I wished I had met this man online. My friend knew how I felt, how I was struggling with my own kids getting student loans and I’m alone. She went from sympathetic to out of the picture.

‘The [friend] group began to fall apart after that, and she is in her husband’s world, not ours. I’d been a loyal friend and it was very hurtful when she bailed on us.

‘At the same time, I’m asking myself how she pulled this off.’

Sarrie, 29, from Iowa City, had a thieving work friend who stole her clients at the hair salon where they both work.

‘Since I am in a new place to live and to work, the one friend I made means something,’ Sarrie said.

‘We both work at the salon and when I first got there, she was welcoming. But she noticed I’m good at what I do and some of her clients are now asking for me.

‘This really upset her and she has made comments. She’s about my age and also married, so the friendship is not only about us but we’re friends as couples.’

Now, she says, not only is the friend trying to hold onto her initial clients, but she’s trying to ‘take my clients that were never hers to begin with.’

‘I don’t want to be her friend anymore, but I’m here. We’re at the same job and our husbands play pickleball together.’

At every stage of our lives, we want the truest of friends. But we know deep down it is often a precarious path. When a friendship unravels, many of us hang in, having been taught to be best friends forever.

This cultural message is thrown at us wherever we go, from fiction to weekly tabloids to social media. We are encouraged to believe in our female friends, and we expect to find solace and infinite understanding in our counterparts.

The UCLA Study on Friendship Among Women found that, as a response to stress, our brain chemicals cause us to seek out friendships with women.

Female friendship is endorsed as a panacea, but if we dig deeper, we can admit to the down side. We just aren’t schooled to face the reality that, along with raising us up, friends can cause emotional pain and disappointment.

They can be disloyal, lie, keep secrets, be jealous or competitive, have opposite values or steal an idea, another friend or even a fiancé.

An  MIT Media Lab study found that half the time friendships are not reciprocal, despite us believing otherwise.

My interviewees – who represent both estrangers and the estrangees – felt deeply ill-prepared for moving away from their highly touted relationships.

 

Many of us hope to be conflict-free when it comes to our closest friends, and we generally don’t want to be disenfranchised – if we fall out with a friend, an entire group can sometimes be affected.

For some, there is also a fear of emptiness – a hole in one’s life now that the time together is gone. The risk of being pushed away or being alone is so great, women of all ages try to avoid it.

By the time I let go of my friendship with Paulette, my awareness was heightened. I was able to process the loss by comparing our relationship my other, healthier friendships filled with mutual trust and caring – those provided a sense of security.

I have also come to realize there is a shape shifting happening around female friendships. 

Women are now more loudly confessing their unhappiness and acting on it. Viewing this acknowledgement as a positive measure, they are bravely choosing to set themselves free from subpar friends.

Happily, Paulette and I no longer cross paths. And I’m here to report what an uplifting, liberating experience it is. 

Excerpted from Estranged: How Strained Female Friendships Are Mended or Ended by Susan Shapiro Barash, published by Meridian Editions