About seven years ago, I had to make a choice. The choice was between two of my friends from high school. The first had been my friend since sophomore year and the second had been my friend since senior year. Melinda and Heather.
I'm not quite sure why my brain went to thinking about these two friends, maybe I was feeling nestalgic...but anyway. Basically the choice I had to make was over the guy in the picture below, Nick.
The major choice was between whether I should confide a situation involving what Nick thought was just time to hang out with Heather...or what Heather felt would be a chance to steal Nick away from Melinda. The reason it was such a difficult decision to make was because I was being pitted against both my friends.
Heather had given me a call to tell me how excited she was that Nick would be coming over to her house and that she thought that it might be the chance to steal him away from Melinda, because it was "so obvious" that Nick must have feelings for her to be coming over to hang out with her. My response was very minimal, seeing as I was going "Oh crap, what am I going to do?" and I was asked very nicely, and with some cunning, not to tell Melinda about it.
Why did I feel so guilty? Because Heather had joined our small gang of friends because of me. We had started hanging out in a couple of our classes and became friends pretty quickly. I then got her in to working at the Men's volleyball games with me because I was one of the trainers/score keepers/managers for the team. And bam - semi-stalker to Nick.
Now, you might be asking yourself what happened after this day...and I'll get to that, but let me show you a few pictures that have occured after this situation and maybe you can make a few inferences.
If you haven't already guessed, I made the decision to stick with my friend, Minda. After waiting, perhaps a minute, I made the phone call to my best friend and told her that I had received a phone call from Heather telling me about the hang out session and that she had asked me not to say anything. I didn't feel right keeping that from Minda, even if it meant losing Heather as a friend. I think that it may have led Minda and Nick to the largest fight they'd ever had, but in the end I also think it made them stronger.
Heather held it against me, of course. Calling me as soon as Nick had called her to let her know he wasn't going to be over...or perhaps he had already gotten there and left, that part is a little foggy. I was told I had betrayed her friendship and her trust. I told her that it wasn't right of her to try and break up a relationship and it wasn't right of her to ask me to keep that secret from my best friend.
Ultimately, it led to this:
Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Mitchell
Do I feel bad for the choice I made senior year? Not at all. Heather stayed my friend through the end of the school year, but I only think it was because she got to mingle with my other friends; but by the time summer rolled around and then fall, we no longer spoke. But I still have my two best friends and Melinda is now a member of my wedding party, and I'm excited that even though we have been through some rocky moments in our friendship, we come back to the realization that our friendship is more important than a lot of other things in life.
I think I'm feeling very sentimental now that the wedding is coming up. Family and friendship have always been the most important things to me in life. So here is my question for you. Given the same situation, would you have kept the secret, or would you have done what I did and break the trust of one friend to protect the trust of the other?
No comments:
Post a Comment