The things you find when you're trawling through Google for something completely unrelated are interesting. I was trying to Google up the link I knew I'd saved to someone else's blog entry about a delightfully raunchy advertisement for a photo printer (the advertisement featured a woman in bridal gear with an elaborate white necklace and frosting on her face, but on a second look, the necklace and frosting looked to be something adamantly not work-safe) and came across my high school best friend's ex or soon-to-be-ex wife's blog. I knew I'd probably posted a link to the raunchy ad in my journal, so I was Googling "azurelunatic" and "print" or something of the like, and ... well.
My high school best friend and his wife separated at the beginning of August, just before they would have been married for five years. I went to their wedding, and the clearest emotional memory I have of the wedding, besides the black depression and bitterness that I'd been passed over once again, was the sense of profound relief: He's not my problem anymore. I owed it to him to give him a great bachelor party and make sure the wedding went off smoothly, as much as it was in my power to do so, and then I was done with him.
In early September, Shawn offhandedly mentioned that his wife was reading my journal, and after a brief moment of typical Alaskan double-take, I continued with business as usual. I had no idea that she had a blog, because even while she'd linked to my journal, LJ doesn't give you your referrer logs. (*nudges Six Apart staff* ...hey, while you're taking feature requests...) So I hadn't gone back to her blog, and thus there were crucial bits of the picture I had yet to process.
Picture this: you're young, and haven't had the breadth of experience you'd like to have. You're introduced to a guy, and you wind up falling for him, and he falls for you. He's got a friend who's madly in love with him, but you're the one who winds up taking up all his spare time, and he winds up marrying you. You and his friend manage to alienate each other, and you find out, a few years later, that not only did she come to your wedding dressed as if for a funeral, but she was flipping you off behind the pew as you walked up the aisle.
Been reading my husband's best friend-from-high-school's livejournal since he told me that he talked to her about the impending divorce. ( http://azurelunatic.livejournal.com ) She's always hated me, and I can't say I blame her. I fully realize that if a single person clicks on this link she'll find her way here. That's fine. I don't care anymore. Hi Joan.
I didn't start out hating her, you see. We'd been introduced by mutual friends, and I was well on the way to thinking that she was one of the most promising friendship prospects I'd met there so far, before disaster in the form of Romance vs. Shawn struck. By the time they got married not quite a year later, there was enough hostility on both sides to start a war (or at least an ill-advised police action). But I got engaged and then moved. Things have changed, in my head, since then. When Shawn told me she was reading my journal, I was surprised, but all right with her reading about my life and all. I realized, when I read her journal entry, that I couldn't just leave her believing that the outdated status is still current.
I think I gave up hating you sometime about two years after your wedding. It was a slow and bitter lesson, that I wasn't going to even have the chance to have a romantic relationship with Shawn (vs. my desperate love for him and his willingness to exploit same), and I was dreadfully resentful that he'd desert the history he and I had for someone he'd barely met and didn't have half as much in common with. Since I'd met you first, and introduced the two of you, it was like a romantic comedy gone very, very bad.
In retrospect, I think everyone involved, myself not excepted, could have handled the situation better. The whole mess triggered off a nasty little depressive-type episode, which led to quite a bit of my erratic behavior, and that only made things worse. Usually, when I'd had an existential crisis of that magnitude, I could get some insight or at least some sympathy from my best friend, but not only was he in the middle of the problem, but he and I had virtually stopped talking. I'm sure I could have used some professional help at that point, but I didn't know how to look for it or even that I should, so I didn't get any.
By the time I was sane enough to start thinking straight again, life had reached up and smacked me around enough so that I was really too busy with work, moving, and plans for my own wedding to think very much about you guys, and by the time things had calmed down enough for me to wallow in the trauma again, something inside me had identified you as the reasonably-innocent bystander, and saved most of the blame for Shawn. He broke things off with me in a singularly graceless manner. I don't know if I've ever written the story where you had the chance to come across it, and I'm not entirely certain if you'd want to hear about it, but suffice to say I felt far more sympathy for Monica Lewinsky afterwards.
I thank God(s) on a daily basis that my current best friend and I happened upon each other when we did. I broke up with my fiancé shortly after moving to Arizona, and the stress of that brought all the Shawn-related issues rushing back. My best friend was able to talk me through the worst parts, and when he did wind up dating another one of my friends, he was able to demonstrate that even though he was seeing someone else, he still had time for me, that our friendship still meant something. He was the help I needed, even if some years belated.
He helped me come to the realization that the thing that I had been the angriest over was not so much that someone else had finally claimed the heart of the guy I'd been after, but that I'd lost my best friend into the bargain. I'm sorry everything happened so badly, but I'm glad that we both have a chance at happiness in ourselves, and perhaps even a chance at love with someone better-suited.
