I love my friends and I'm supportive of them no matter what they do (unless it's destructive, obviously). And really, who has friends whose decisions they agree with 100% of the time? No one, that's who. But the past week and a half I've heard through the grapevine that some not so great stuff seems to be going down involving three friends of mine. (I swear my family/friends are like Mayberry, everybody knows everybody's business 30 seconds after it happens). This is an attempt to see if I can understand these situations better by writing them down (I doubt it, but you never know).
Let's talk about one of my best friends E and his girlfriend (and my former friend) Z (yes, those really are their actually initials). E is one of those 'don't judge a book by its cover' cases; he's Brooklyn born and bred, he's got tattoos up and down his arms and he loves the Yankees (well, nobody's perfect lol). But he's one of the greatest people I know and he's had a rough 33 years. He lost his dad to violence and his fiancee in a car accident which also left him with a broken back that forced him to give up a baseball scholarship. He's come a long way from all of that and I'm very proud of him for it. Z and I were friends by association in high school, she played basketball with my best friend so we all hung out together every now and then. Two years ago she came back into my life when she got a journalism job in N.Y. and we got to know each other better and became close. I introduced E to Z and they very quickly entered into a relationship. E was completely smitten and considering proposing when his sister started having suspicions about Z. His sister felt like there was more to Z's travel schedule than she was letting on and she turned out to be right. E came home one day to find Z making out on his couch with another guy. She was unapologetic about it and claimed that he had to have known that she was seeing other people on the side. She broke his heart and it took him a long time to recover.
Flash forward to about six months ago when E decided to start dating Z again. No one thought it was a good idea but it's his life and his decision. He's considering proposing (again) in a few months and it's put a rift between him and the rest of the group. Obviously, we want him to be happy but we also know this is not a good idea. I'm a big believer in 'once a cheater, always a cheater' and considering she wasn't remorseful at all after she did it the first time, I doubt she'll have trouble doing it again. It's that whole stuck between a rock and a hard place situation and we're all in this holding pattern, hoping he'll realize he can do (and that he deserves) so much better.
Then there are friend's X and Y. They've known each other since jr. high and, once upon a time, X's sister was engaged to Y's brother. X and Y never spoke much or hung out during their high school years, which many people took to mean they didn't like each other. Those of us in the know were aware that they were actually crushing on each other but didn't wanna hook-up since their siblings were gonna get married. But the engagement ended very badly during college and everyone (including Y) rallied around X's sister. Slowly X and Y fell into a friendship and, inevitably, they started dating. They're been together about three months when X found out she was pregnant. They navigated the next nine months without really knowing if they were together because they were in love or just because they were expecting. One month after the birth of their daughter they split up and kinda lingered for a few months before ending it for good.
So imagine my shock when they started telling everyone about their plans to have another child together. Their little girl is now one and a half and she's beautiful but I'm not sure why they're in such a rush to give her a sibling. Or why they think she needs to have a sibling at all. Neither of them have any romantic prospects so I guess they figure, 'What the hell?'. But is that really any reason to bring another life into the world? How would you even explain that to the kid when they get older? They're gonna be able to do math and realize that their parents weren't together when they were born. And then they're gonna figure/know the only reason their alive is because their parents wanted their first child to have a sibling. It just seems to me that this would be making a a complicated situation over-complicated. They're in a good place now and I think that's clouding their judgement. But they say the rest of us 'just don't get it'.
Wouldn't it be nice if the people you loved realized they were wrong before they made big mistakes?
