Your friends befriending your ex after you break up is a common problem when you’re a lesbian because the community tends to be small and tightly knit. The pool of potential partners is of the mere paddling variety, even in bigger cities.
Not only does this mean that you are more likely to make the beast with two backs with one of your friend’s friends (okay, just one of your direct friends), but also it means that friend is perhaps less like to give up their friend. How can you cope with the trauma of your friends still being friends with your ex? You know, the one who is THE WORST HUMAN BEING ALIVE.
1. Quietly resent your friends.
You can do this for years; years and years and years, even. Nobody cares to hear your opinion about the situation, and everybody ignores the fact that what she did to you was objectively terrible because she is rich/important/cool/very loud (delete as appropriate). So instead of voicing your opinion and making everyone feel awkward because they sort of know they’re doing the wrong thing, keep that big lumpy opinion to yourself. Lock your resentment in a big dark cage where it can grow into a monster.
2. Only feel the full force of your feelings when you are alone.
Sit in your bedroom and think about how your ex got away with everything she did! Become incandescent with rage! Feel like you are physically on fire! Remember, if you do spontaneously combust, your house insurance probably won’t cover the damage.
3. Buy new house insurance that covers “Acts of God” and “Spontaneously Combusting From Rage.”
4. Tell your friends how you really feel about them still hanging out with your Terrible Ex when you’ve had 20 gins.
“What if I prefer beer?” you ask. “Shut up and drink your gin!” I reply. Gin makes you the perfect combination of sad and angry. Sangry.
5. Let the anger start slipping out.
Let little snakes of sentences slide out and bite. Refer to your real friends, in a way that makes it very clear that they are not; for the simple, specific reason that they still hang out with the psychopath that ruined your life. No, she absolutely did ruin your life, stop this therapy talk about “projection” and “moving on.” I pay my therapist upwards of £50 an hour for the privilege of pointing out that absolutely everything is actually my fault, thank you very much.
6. Take every opportunity to remind your friends that still hang out with your Terrible Ex that the only reason she hangs out with them is because she lost all her other friends due to being an utter shitshow of a human being.
Whereas, you have other friends but still generously choose to spend time with them.
7. Observe that she is buying your friends affection with bottles of champagne and tickets to fancy events.
Ponder doing the same and competing for your friends’ affections with gifts of increasing value, like they are the kids and you and your Terrible Ex are the rich but stupid recently divorced parents. Then remember you are a writer and make them a homemade cake, which turns out uneven with icing that looks like someone sneezed on it. Crush the cake with your fists while sobbing into it, trying to remember a time when you were normal. Throw the sodden cake crumbs in the bin.
8. Talk about it for the 87th time in your therapy session.
When your therapist uses the term ‘letting go’ also for the 87th time resist the urge to use physical violence and instead pay her upwards of £50.
9. Make fake profiles on Facebook of your “other friends.”
10. Go into the middle of a dense forest and scream.
All the pillows and sponges in your house are already saturated with pent up frustration and angry tears.
11. Get invited to an event where she will be.
As you are studying the event wall on Facebook notice that she has edited you out of photos/taken credit for something you did/got a new GF who looks just like you only younger.
12. Have a panic attack!
Hey, don’t try to fight it; that only makes it worse! Let the wrenching feeling in your gut rise up and consume you. Stay up to 3 am unfriending everyone on Facebook who is still friends with her. This is the sort of pro-active thing that a healthy person would do! You’re doing what a healthy person would do!
13. Scoop sodden cake crumbs out of the bin and into your mouth.
14. Skip therapy for several weeks in order to buy up all of the tickets to an event you are both invited to.
Keep all of the tickets except one and send it anonymously to your ex. Ambush her when she arrives, tying her securely to a chair. Press play on a pre-made audio-visual display of your relationship; put yourself back into all of those photos, plaster all her broken promises from love letters all over the wall, make her sign a public declaration that the thing she stole credit for was yours. YOU HAVE MADE A CIRCUS OF HORRORS OF HER RELATIONSHIP CRIMES! Film her as she weeps and begs for forgiveness. Send it to your friends to show them what she’s really like. She’s the crazy one! Finally, they’re getting it!
15. Make some new friends in prison.
