I Slept With My Best Friend Once
Here’s why I won’t be doing it again
I met Ethan when I was 21 and living abroad for the first time. Ethan reminded me of a young, darker-haired version of Leonardo DiCaprio — he had a boyish charm to him and a shy, generous smile. He was a very introverted person, and it took a lot for him to socialize with a big group of new people with a lot of loud characters dominating the room.
I met Ethan on the same night that I met Ryan at a social event organized by the two international schools where we all worked.
Ryan was the complete opposite of Ethan. He was confident to the point of arrogance and he tried to act older than he really was. He was one of those loud characters dominating the room.
Ryan made it no secret that he thought I was cute, and by the end of the evening, we were snogging in the corner of a nightclub dance floor. Ryan and I ended up in a relationship that lasted for eighteen months.
During that time, Ethan and I became good friends. We both liked reading and were into fantasy literature. We read and watched and talked about Game of Thrones nonstop when it first came out. We liked going for ice cream together and having movie nights and going out dancing with our mutual friends. Perhaps there was always a slight attraction to one another, but nothing happened since I was with Ryan.
Being with Ryan was like being on a rollercoaster — there were these incredible highs where we went out and had a great time and showed off to the world what a great couple we were. And then there were the lows — usually behind closed doors — where we fought bitterly over commitment and attitude and fidelity — all lacking on Ryan’s part.
I was young, though, and this was my first “proper” relationship, so I had no idea what things were supposed to be like. Part of me enjoyed the drama, and part of me was afraid of being alone.
Especially during the second year together, breaking up with Ryan felt quite dangerous. Many of the friends I had made during my first year of living abroad had returned home, and only Ryan, Ethan, and I were left. When things finally became too much, and I broke it off with Ryan, Ethan was the one that I called in floods of tears.
Ethan and I went out drinking to drown my sorrows, and I spent the evening describing what an absolute idiot Ryan was. Ethan agreed. One thing led to another, and we found ourselves in bed together.
We were both very, very drunk, but we were answering a question that had been there since the beginning. Should I have been with Ethan all this time? Had I been too blinded by Ryan’s confidence and let Ethan slip through the net?
Either way, we’d moved too fast. I’d broken up with Ryan in the morning, and by the evening, I was in bed with Ethan. I was scared of being on my own, and Ethan had appeared — gorgeous, kind, funny Ethan — to smooth away my fear.
We had a couple more dates, but without heavy amounts of alcohol, things were uneasy. Suddenly all of the banter, easy jokes, and uncomplicated conversation that we’d had before disappeared under the pressure that we were now “dating” for real, at the cost of our friendship. I couldn’t be natural around him and instead put on this fake, engineered performance that everything was ok. He could sense that I was uneasy underneath it all, which made him even more introverted than before, as he felt I was judging him.
After a few more failed dates where we both felt awkward and uncomfortable, we went our separate ways.
Sleeping together so quickly (and so drunkenly) had ruined it. We would have been better off staying as friends. In the following months, I missed him terribly as a friend, but we couldn’t get back to where we’d been. A while later, I moved back home and never saw Ethan again.
I wish we were still friends, even to this day.
In later years, I had one or two other male friendships where, at one moment or another, there was a question mark over whether something might happen between us, but I’m glad that I never went down that road again. Years later, I can see how things wouldn’t have worked out with those men in relationships, but as friends, we are great together, and I continue to enjoy their company.
