The Sunday Mail
We usually think competition is limited to business, so sometimes we forget that there are other people out there that are interested in our lovers.
Sometimes our competitors are our close friends, our workmates or even our family members.
Some years back, when I was doing my third year at a local university, I met a girl I really loved and I wanted to marry her. I never knew my best friend loved my girlfriend too.
From nowhere we started having problems, she started changing and acting funny. I didn’t know my best friend was engineering all this. He was telling her lies about me, creating false stories so that she would see me as a bad person who had a terrible past and who was dating other girls.
She believed in what he was telling her so we started having endless problems. I used to get into to town with my friend after studies, but all of a sudden he started giving me excuses. So the other day he said he was sick and wanted to sleep in the hostels. I went alone to town.
As fate would have it, I saw him walking with my girlfriend in town when he had told me that he was sick. I was shocked but I decided to stay calm. I started following them secretly, trying to establish what was happening. I didn’t see anything to suggest that they were dating. But they looked to be in perfect harmony.
This gave me a hint, something wrong was happening. Why would he say to me he was sick, and there I was seeing him with my girlfriend? He also knew I had some issues with my girlfriend. Two days later, my girlfriend said that she had thought over our relationship and had come to the decision that we should end it.
But a week later, my girlfriend called and requested a meeting. I went to see her. She apologised for her actions, then came clean on why she requested to end our relationship . . . because my best friend was telling her lies about me.
If my best friend had not made advances on her, our relationship would have died there and then. My girlfriend got to doubt him the moment he asked her out . . . that is when she connected the dots.
But in the meantime, she had believed the other lies that made her lose love for me. Which explains why he was always with my girlfriend.
Many times we leave our lovers with our friends because we trust them and it never rings a bell in our minds that something can happen.
Later on, joining the dots as well, I realised that is why he was always asking me about how I spent the day with my girlfriend and if everything was well. He wanted every detail about our relationship.
If I had known that he was using this information to advance his proposal, to my girl, I would have been secretive about the affair. But I thought, here was a friend who was concerned.
The competitor in your love life can be someone very close to you. You should not trust everyone, let alone assume “this is my best friend I should tell him/her my secrets”. That very person you call your best friend might use those secrets as weapons to destroy your relationship.
Be always on the look-out. Create boundaries so that even your friends cannot have an “anytime-access” to your lover. Don’t always share your love problems with your friends for some might use that against you.
For example, my neighbour got his wife’s young sister pregnant. Before this became trending news in our hood, we used to see the neighbour with his wife’s sister driving around so many times, whilst his wife would remain home with kids. They were just too close. Whenever he was going out, he would go with his wife’s sister. His wife trusted her sister so much.
Maybe, as someone already married, the wife thought she was spoiling her sister or maybe she thought that sister might get a boyfriend of her own when she went out with her husband.
When the affair came out, though we were somehow shocked, we all blamed the wife for allowing the closeness. There is a certain closeness, call it social distance if you would like, that should be allowed, for such scandals to be avoided.
There must be boundaries, even to people that we think are very close to us, for prevention is always better than cure.
Brian Matsaira is a love and relationships coach and can be contacted on [email protected]
