Female Friendship & Fidelity: Can Your Best Friend Cheat on You?

In 2016, I turned to my best friend and asked: which is a greater offense, physical infidelity or emotional infidelity? 

Without a lick of hesitation, she said emotional infidelity - that physical cheating was just a passing onset of primal urges, and didn't actually undermine the love you had for your partner. She said it was like scratching an itch, or relieving a bladder - sometimes these things just need to be done, and shouldn’t rattle an otherwise resolute commitment (pretty hot take, I guess).

Emotional infidelity, however, was a huge transgression, because it put your heart, not your clit, at the center of the betrayal. Just two 20-year-olds musing on fidelity in the backseat of her ‘84 Wagoneer, we determined that your genitals don't need to be the sole terrain of your partner - especially with the biological forces at work against monogamy. But to feel something for someone else spelled trouble. That foreshadowed abandonment.

Years later, this evolved into a new question: does emotional infidelity extend to non-romantic relationships? 

Can a best friend emotionally “cheat on you,” or is that relegated to sexual partners? I landed on this question organically - when that same best friend started getting close with a girl she knew I hated. I was gutted by it. I couldn’t believe she would risk our deeply rooted friendship for this barely budding one. She knew how much it wrecked my peace, and carried on with it regardless. It made me question our friendship from top to bottom, and her character with it. 

It felt like she was “emotionally cheating” on me, on the friendship. Not to say she couldn’t have other friends. But by refusing to show solidarity with me, I felt wickedly unimportant to her. Are you not supposed to hate who your friends hate? To lend further context, the girl in question was dating my first love, and she and I had a red hot sizzling rivalry. I'd decided that she had single-handedly robbed me of love and happiness. (She hadn’t, but there was no reasoning with my 20-year-old wartorn heart.)  

Ever since, the concept of emotional infidelity in female friendships, has fascinated me. To what extent does fidelity even have a place in friendship? Is it an unreasonable demand in the absence of romance? Or is it a reasonable request, given a close enough relationship?

Just put yourself in my shoes. Imagine someone you love cheating on you or breaking up with you for someone else. Now imagine your best friend becomes good friends with the person they cheated on you with, despite knowing how wounded you are. Is that insensitive? Would you be overstepping by requesting they squash the friendship? Now let’s say your best friend befriends someone who just generally wronged, insulted or hurt you - leaving romance out of it entirely. Is that wrong? How great does the offense have to be, and how close do the friends have to be, for someone to make such a request?

When Is It Okay to Break Up With a Female Friend?

As I inched toward 22, I concluded that it was not okay for my best friend to befriend someone I hated, to make memories with her, and invite her into our world. I found it abhorrent. So after operatic fights and novel-length texts, I “broke up” with the girl I considered my best friend, because she was not being faithful to me, in a capacity that I considered essential to friendship. What’s more, I found myself crying and pining for her, the way I would for any boy who’d broken my heart, been unfaithful, or left me wanting more.

I’m not writing to say that I was justified in my martyrdom, but to explore the question of emotional infidelity as a whole: is it perfectly valid, or a fallacy of oversensitive souls? To what extent can we make demands of our close friends in service of our own emotional wellbeing, or perhaps, our ego? To the friend dismissing your concerns, you could level accusations of callousness. To a friend expressing such concerns, you could call them overbearing, possessive, or too narrow in their view of the situation (are they conveniently ignoring the full context, trying to control you?). I look back with no clear answer to this question. Perhaps a line can be drawn between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” versions of this request, but I don’t know that I’ve found it. Time has dulled my emotions, but I still lack true objectivity. 

When Love Becomes Possession & Parasitism

The stronger the female friendship, the heavier this question becomes. Diablo Cody’s second film, Jennifer’s Body, explores (among other things) how female friendships can verge on parasitism. I adored my best friends, but I now know that my adoration bordered on frantic, and our connection bordered on codependency. Our love was larger than life. Our fights were biblical. These were the most intense relationships I ever had, far exceeding the sexual entanglements I had with boys. I wanted boys, but I needed my friends. There was the need to love them. The need to protect them. The need to possess them. I found that boys were transient, but friends were forever. That permanence meant that every interaction, every show of affection, every slight, carried more weight.

And female friendships are, in their own right, romantic. Theirs are the hands you clutch on long rides home from music festivals. Theirs are the limbs you curl up with, in houses you enter without knocking. Theirs is the hair you hold as they bend over the toilet in a seedy nightclub. They exist in a shared space of companion and protector, from whom you hold no secrets. A closeness which, if ruptured, lends itself to war. But by virtue of shared gender, a deep trust binds both parties, and you become irreversibly entwined. From that is born an expectation of faithfulness - or at least, the absence of betrayal, if those are not the same thing?