When Your Best Friend Is A Sidepiece

sidepiece rules

Source: LeoPatrizi / Getty

What are you supposed to do when your good friend becomes somebody’s sidepiece? Truly, could somebody tell me? Because it’s happening right now and I find myself in complicated and delicate conversations and situations with her all of the time. You know all of the rules that apply to interacting with a friend’s boyfriend? Yeah, well, those don’t apply when he isn’t her boyfriend—he’s somebody else’s—and you all know it. Then there are the rules around how you talk to a friend about her relationship. Those, again, do not apply here because she isn’t in a relationship. She’s in a…situationship…if you will. And a bad one, at that. Nobody wishes for their good friend to be anybody’s sidepiece. You want your bestie to be someone’s main squeeze. It’s just a sticky situation. This is what it’s like when your best friend is a sidepiece.

When they fight, you hope it’s over

Every time they fight, you hope it’s the big one—the fight that ends it all. You are actively rooting against this relationship. Oh wait, that’s right—it’s not a relationship. But you feel a little guilty hoping that this whatever it is ends. You know your friend would be hurt, but she’s also hurting herself by being in this.

You don’t want to counsel her on fights

While you’d usually talk a friend through her relationship fights, this, again, is not a relationship. You don’t want to waste any time, energy, or your hard-earned wisdom on counseling her through a fight with a guy who is not her boyfriend.

Oh, and they fight a lot

They fight a lot. That’s how sidepiece situations go. She wavers between being patient and cool about the situation, and then exploding because she wants to know when he’ll leave his girlfriend. Then he gets mad that she’s pressuring him. She’ll spend a lot of your time together text-fighting with him, which is just one way this type of toxic relationship makes a woman a bad friend.

You don’t like him—how could you?

You automatically don’t like the guy. It doesn’t matter how funny, kind, smart, or charismatic he is. Due to the fact that he is, you know, cheating on his partner, he is not kind. He’s a bad dude. You instantly don’t like the guy for this reason.

So you get mad if you have to see him

You get annoyed when your friend wants to bring him around to hang because then you have to be fake all night. You have to make nice with this person of whom you completely disapprove, and you resent your friend for putting you in that position.

Do you ask her how it’s going?

You’re never quite sure if you’re supposed to ask her how that situation is going. You also don’t even want to talk about it, but she is your friend, so it feels rude not asking.

You can’t be happy for her

When she tells you about sweet things he does like bringing her flowers or making her dinner, you can’t be happy for her. No matter how sweet those things are, the fact still exists that he is cheating on his partner. He isn’t sweet. Not in the big picture.

You feel she’s disrespecting herself

You really feel that your friend is disrespecting herself by being a sidepiece, and that makes you lose respect for her. Yeah—you’re judging her. You tell yourself at first that you won’t but then the situation goes on for so long and gets so ugly that you can’t help but lose a little respect.

She stops pushing him, and that’s sad

She eventually stops pushing him to leave his girlfriend or even give her some sort of answer about their future. That is very sad. That means she has given up on the idea of becoming the main squeeze herself. It also makes you panic and wonder, “So, will she just be a sidepiece forever?”

You feel bad for his real girlfriend

You feel deeply bad for his girlfriend or wife sometimes. You’re so focused on your friend’s side of things but sometimes, the reality hits you that somewhere is a woman—possibly a nice, lovely woman—who believes that she has a loyal partner. And she’s dead wrong.

She wants to double date…whaaaat?

Sometimes your friend says things like, “Why don’t the four of us—me and him, and you and your dude—all have dinner sometime?” And you just think whaaaat? We aren’t going to in any way play a part in legitimizing this mess. Leave us out of this.

You even feel a bit disrespected

If you are in a relationship, sometimes you feel disrespected. You’re a girlfriend. That could have been you being cheated on. Your friend doesn’t seem to respect the sanctity of a relationship. If she didn’t know you, would she have gone after your man?

You don’t like talking about it

Generally speaking, you stop asking about it. You brush it off when she brings it up. You don’t want to talk about it. The situation drudges up a lot of negative feelings.

You want to smack some sense into her

You often want to grab her, shake her, and say, “What the hell are you doing? Stop it already!”

It creates distance in the friendship

The whole situation creates distance in your friendship. There is this pretty impactful thing happening in your good friend’s life that you just…aren’t asking her about. Because it makes you sick.

Related Tags

cheaters friendship dilemmas Side Piece

More from MadameNoire