My Best Friend's Boyfriend

The other night I dreamt that my best friend moved in with her boyfriend, as far away from me physically and energetically as possible (West Hollywood.) I was helping her paint their bedroom cobalt blue and moving some of her things, when her boyfriend came home with a giant entourage and a party started and suddenly it was nighttime and mid-conversation she had to REMIND HIM OF MY NAME. I stormed out and in my waking life decided to have beef with her boyfriend for forgetting me in the dream realm.

My best friend is in love with a man who is fun, kind, successful, talented, and just as hot as she is. She has shown me that it’s possible to have love that is effervescent, that leaves you completely and totally besotted. Bearing witness to this kind of love is often breathtaking, but sometimes I am so jealous that I could rip my skin off. 

I don’t want to date her boyfriend. I think he’s great and I think he is perfect for her. What I am jealous of is their respective abilities to have attracted someone so hot and good and available and perfect for them. I feel as though I have been begging the universe for someone hot and good who I could marry for the last twenty years, while burying a fear that I am too forgettable to be truly loved.

It has been special to watch the women in my life fall in love with kind people who deserve them, yet with each friend that couples up while I stay single I feel more and more like the centerpiece of a Greta Gerwig movie about a difficult and pitied woman. I’m tired of yearning, it feels as though my heart has been running on fumes since the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

Part of me does wish she could be single with me right now, while I’m single. That’s the part of me that knows she’s my best friend, but her boyfriend is hers. No matter how much of a girl’s girl a girl is, her boyfriend gets all of her, wherein my jealousy lies. I was in her heart before him, but her boyfriend is called first when she finds bees in her walls, or when she gets the promotion she’s wanted for months, or when she gets into her dream MFA program – I get texted second or third. 

Her boyfriend gets her when she gets home from a graveyard shift at the hospital she works at, when she’s exhausted and collapses into bed. He gets to make her breakfast for dinner when she wakes up at 6pm. I get her at 7:30pm, when she’s rested and we take a stroll around our neighborhood. When he doesn’t answer her call after a long day at the job she hates, she calls me. He gets her when she’s taken off work to spend a week with him because he’s in from Paris. I get her only once he’s departed, and she’s relaying the week to me minute by minute. I get the half-life of my friend, after she’s been digested by her boyfriend.

I love that she’s dating someone who I can talk to about how cool and pretty she is, and how much we both love her. I think platonic and romantic love have a larger intersection than we care to acknowledge. And so, I can’t escape the feeling that he may love her as much as I love her, but she will never love me as much as she loves him. 

Maybe I am jealous of her boyfriend. And maybe I am lonely.