How the “other woman” became one of my best friends

The sun was just rising over the Nevada desert when my boyfriend told me that he had been sleeping with my best friend’s roommate for the past few months.

His confession shouldn’t have come as a shock. I had seen signs of their intimacy all week at Burning Man, from their legs casually touching as we shared a hookah to the excuses he kept making for stopping by their camp. And as someone who had explicitly agreed to an open relationship with him, I was technically a willing participant in this triangle.

But that didn’t stop the animal rage from overtaking me at that dawn. What had been just an abstract idea of ​​sex with other women abruptly transformed into the tangible reality of naked encounters with a person who shared toothpaste with my closest friend. A person I had known socially for years, whose generous confidence I envied, who drank her morning coffee in a kitchen where I had spent countless hours.

So I did what any sensible, resentful girlfriend would do: I screamed and cried, waking up friends in nearby tents. I knocked over his box of Burning Man costumes, sending colorful fabrics flying in the dust. I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe, and when I ran out of tears, I shuffled around our camp like a zombie until my eyes were ready to produce more. Needless to say, our relationship wasn’t strong enough to survive this information.

Earlier that summer, I had quit my job as an editor, rented a storage unit, and moved to Mexico City with nothing but a very large backpack and the previous year’s uncashed Christmas bonus check. I had spent most of my twenties on the escalator of my journalism career, and after half a decade of being chained to my laptop to service the 24-hour online news cycle, I felt burnt out and ready for a new one Adventure. I accepted a fellowship at a microfinance nonprofit and begged my friend to come to Latin America with me.

He didn’t want to leave the USA – but he didn’t want to separate either. Our connection was one of those fiery connections that hijacked my common sense, our catalog of inside jokes was annoying to anyone who didn’t live in our two-person universe, our affairs and disagreements were both equally explosive. When I wasn’t with him, I was dreaming about our next encounter or worrying about the fight we’d inevitably gotten into the last time we saw each other. Like most other addictions, logic told me that my life would be much healthier without it, and lust won the battle against logic every time.

“Maybe now would be a good time to experiment with opening up our relationship?” my friend suggested casually as I balled up the remaining clothes I hadn’t stored and put them in my backpack. At first I was hesitant, but by the time I went to the airport he had convinced me. Eventually we would live 2,216 miles apart. Didn’t I want the freedom to build a life in my new city without giving up my long-term relationship?

In my first few weeks in Mexico I read self-help books like Sex at dawn And The ethical bitch. I recited arguments in my head about why it made perfect sense for someone you love to enjoy intimacy with others, why lifelong monogamy was an unrealistic societal expectation that had nothing to do with our biological roots, and why only, because my partner had physical contact with other women. That doesn’t mean he loved me any less. I memorized the dictionary definition of “compersion” and tried desperately to integrate it into my psyche. I went on a series of hollow, meaningless dates and immediately felt guilty if I so much as kissed my admirers on the cheek at the end of the night.

But most of all, I was agonizing over my boyfriend’s love life. I was obsessed with who he was with and who he might meet. I scanned his Facebook friends list, looking for any new women he had added since I last saw him. I lost five pounds because I was constantly sick. Although I had asked that our open relationship follow a “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule, assuming that I would feel worse if I knew about the other people he was seeing, there was Lack of information only gives my imagination the space it needs to torture myself with detailed, fantastical scenarios.

Then one morning, as I was agonizingly scrolling through social media for the umpteenth time, I noticed that my best friend’s roommate – a woman named Ari, with whom I had had pleasant conversations many times – had shared a quote from my favorite friend had posted book, Jitterbug perfumeon her own Facebook account. A few days later, a handful of photos surfaced on both sites showing the two laughing together at a beach party. I had planned to meet a colleague from my community at a coffee shop that afternoon, but the thought of meeting my friend and Ari together worried me so much that I canceled and spent the day in bed.

Pretty soon Ari replaced my boyfriend as the object of my tense fantasies. I checked her Facebook and Instagram feeds daily, poring over even the most insignificant updates to find further clues about her life, interests, desires, and possible relationship with my partner. I clicked through her photo collection, disarmed by her confident smile, her free spirit, her diverse circle of friends. I was deeply jealous of her. I hated her. I wanted to be her.

I called my best friend on Skype. “Is Ari seeing my boyfriend?” I blurted out before she could say hello.

“I’m staying out of it,” my best friend replied softly, reminding me that I was the one who didn’t want to know details about his dating life. But her face almost confirmed that my suspicions were correct. And later that summer, when I flew from Mexico to Nevada to meet my boyfriend at Burning Man, the discrepancy between our relationship preferences reached a breaking point.

A year later, my Latin American escapades had come to an end. I returned to San Francisco in search of a steady job and a place to live. My best friend offered me a coveted room in her house: a shared apartment for thirteen in a historic Victorian mansion in the vibrant Mission District. Ari, of course, lived there with her. But I had spent the past year recovering from my moody relationship with my ex-boyfriend and was fascinated by the splendor of my travels. Even though I still hurt when I thought about Ari, the possibility of living with my best friend outweighed the remaining discomfort.

My connection with Ari was hesitant at first: a yoga class here, a cooking lesson there. When we first met, I felt uncomfortable and jarring, the girl who couldn’t stay within the confines of a modern, enlightened romantic atmosphere. I talked too loudly and immediately judged myself for everything that came out of my mouth, marveling at the ease with which Ari moved around our house, at parties, and down Valencia Street.

At some point, our forced interactions began to feel natural. We discovered we both loved tuna melts and spent an afternoon getting the fanciest bread and canned fish we could find, laughing as we made absurdly extravagant sandwiches. We realized we wore the same clothing size and began regularly going through each other’s closets. When she found out that I had previously struggled with depression, she asked me for advice about another friend and felt comfortable enough to cry around me. After a few months of building a real friendship, we finally brought up the topic of our mutual ex-girlfriend.

It turned out that her connection to him had been the same as mine: passionate, volatile, unpredictable. When she found out how upset I was to find out about their relationship, she was devastated (he had insisted all summer that I was “totally okay with everything”). They were no longer in touch and she had no interest in ever seeing him again. In fact, we were both equally eager to broach the subject with each other—and equally relieved to realize we had similar feelings.

Society tends to fan the flames of toxic female competitiveness by portraying “the other woman” as a sneaky snake. She bears one-sided guilt for seducing the man we love and who protests his innocence. Through my friendship with Ari, I learned how inaccurate this story can be. In the years since we lived together in San Francisco, our relationship has only grown stronger. My best friend and I welcomed her into our fold, and now as a trio we form the foundation for each other’s entire world.

All day long, our text thread is full of triumphs, frustrations, revelations, photos, and hot takes on everything from the Ezra Klein podcast to season four Consequence to our latest vintage finds. We share the mundane and the wonderful with equal enthusiasm, and I feel privileged to be a witness to their lives. It’s more than friendship – it’s an emotional life partnership. And I consider our relationship to be one of the things I’m most proud of, whether I’m writing a book, getting sober, learning Spanish, or raising my dog.

A few years ago, on a trip to Rosarito, my ex-boyfriend texted me to say happy birthday. Ari was next to me when my phone rang with his unexpected overture. In response, we made silly faces and took a selfie, which turned into a fit of giggles when I hit send. I threw my phone on the nightstand and went outside to join her in the hot tub before I could see his answer. At this point, none of us were interested in what he had to say anymore.

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