I’ll try to keep this relatively short. Last night, all three of us got together at my place for movie night. We spent an hour in the kitchen preparing snacks and conversing.
Before we switched to the living room, my best friend’s fiancé went to the bathroom, leaving her phone on the kitchen island. My friend had moved to the couch waiting for the two of us to join.
As I was grabbing the snacks, I saw her phone light up, showing a single text from an unknown number that said: “I can’t stop thinking about what we did at Kara’s (not her real name) wedding. I’m not sure I want this to end.” Kara is a friend of ours who got married 3 months ago. My friend’s fiancé is about 3 months pregnant. Now, I don’t want to get paranoid, but it’s not like this hasn’t happened to other men before.
I feel like ***I’ve*** somehow gotten betrayed. She seemed like an absolute sweetheart who adores my friend. They’ve always, at least ostensibly, had an enviable relationship. To my knowledge, he’s never mistreated her in any way. On the contrary, he worships the ground she walks on.
I’m not sure how to play this out. If I told him about what I saw and he questions my allegations, I might be risking this friendship. If I push for him to at least take a DNA test after the child is born and the child turns out to be his, I’m not seeing him again. However, that doesn’t change what I saw, strongly alleging there was at least an affair.
I’m afraid at this point it’s my word against the word of his pregnant fiancé whom he loves and trusts more than anyone else. I don’t like my odds; I have no proof. I don’t want to mess this up by reacting emotionally. How do I confront this without risking any potential fallout between us?
UPDATE: I told him. At first he reacted as I’d expected: he was oscillating between defensive and dismissive, and paranoid and dejected. I sat him down and explained what I saw on her phone, stressing that I could be mistaken and misinterpreting an otherwise innocuous message, but I got him to listen, which was always expected to be the difficult part.
We decided to make some calls to people who were present on that day in hopes that one of them could either confirm our suspicions or assuage them. It didn’t take long before one of the guests told us she saw my friend’s fiancé exit the indoor pool area (the wedding venue was huge: a rented castle with about 100 hectares of surrounding forest) and saw them heading towards one of the gardens we hadn’t utilized for the wedding, acting rather suspiciously, giving two people who had done something they shouldn’t have trying to play it off as they hadn’t done anything type of energy.
We didn’t get much else from her, but at least I got him on my side. I convinced him to play along and we called his fiancé to my place. I told her about the message last night and then I proceeded to *slightly* embelish the story the woman gave us, making her believe we had concrete proof of infidelity. As I continued talking, she got increasingly quieter. With her, my friend was getting increasingly more despondent, as it began dawning on him what was coming. And she confessed. She did, in fact, cheat.
However, even though we got her to divulge something happened, she was as vague as one can be and is denying access to her phone. She admitted only to the one time at the wedding but refused to say who the guy is. He could be a random person, albeit I have my doubts, as the message I read didn’t seem to be sent from a person who just “stumbled and fell” inside her by accident. It seemed deliberate, premeditated and potentially ongoing. She also swears the child is my friend’s and not the other man’s, but obviously her word doesn’t mean much anymore, so that remains to be seen. It’s going to be 6 torturous months.
Two hours of arguing, rivers of tears, screams, attempts at physical assault and whatnot later, I sent her back to their house. He’ll be staying with me indefinitely. He’s adamant about divorce. Ultimately, none of the details of their back-and-forth that ensued are relevant, so there’s no point in oversharing.
I guess that’s it. A ruined marriage, a fractured family in which an unborn child is yet to be welcomed, years of trauma ahead to be overcome… all for a quick dopamine fix. Awesome! We humans can truly be pieces of filth.
Thank you for the quick responses and many suggestions on how I should adequately approach this delicate subject. I responded to as many of you as I could. I hope things get better for him quickly, but all we can do is take it one day at a time.