My fiance works closely together with two colleagues: one is my best friend (let’s call her Beth) and the other is his best friend (let’s call him John). We like to hang out with Beth, John and their significant others.
Beth is getting married to this really good guy, Jerry, this year. He is nice and sweet, although his jokes never really land, and to be fair: I find him kind of boring. Jerry and I never seem to be able to keep a conversation going for longer than five minutes. But no biggie, I’m not the one getting married to him.
This is where John comes in. You see, when Beth started at this workplace years ago, she was single and instantly smitten with John. She found him nice, funny and handsome. Only John was in a long-term relationship, so nothing came of that, except friendship. (John, Beth and my fiance are something like the Three Musketeers at their workplace.) Along came Jerry into Beth’s personal life, and he and Beth started dating.
Meanwhile, Beth and John stayed very good friends and colleagues. Then, two years ago, Johns’s long-term girlfriend cheated on him. He ended the relationship. In the meantime, Beth and Jerry had started living together, but things weren’t running so smoothly: Jerry is away for work A LOT, and due to a combination of circumstances, he was away for almost eight months.
During this time, Beth and John became even closer than they already were. They went out for beers with colleagues, but they would be the only two hanging around until the end of the night. She has this special tone in her voice when she talks to John. A lot of people started making little jokes about them being a couple.
One night, there was this work party. John put his new status as a single man to good use, flirting away with a lot of female colleagues. Beth, though, kept hanging around him. At one point my fiance pulled her aside and asked her if she noticed that she was c*ckblocking John big time. ‘Either you man up and just kiss him like you want to,’ he told her, ‘or you back off and leave him to it with Shelley from accounting.’
Beth backed off for a bit, but later that night, she had to go to the bus and John offered to walk her there. And when they were there, waiting for the bus – talking, laughing, goofing – they looked at each other and there was this… spark. They ALMOST kissed, but at the last moment Beth pulled away because, of course, she was together with Jerry and didn’t want to do that to him. Plus, John is her friend and her colleague, so kissing him would probably just complicate things instead of improving them.
So they both just kind of… acted like that never happened. Beth told only me and my fiance about this weirdness between her and John.
Quite soon after this, John got into a new relationship. This girl, Natalie, is a sweetheart, only she is quite possibly the polar opposite of Beth.
Soon after John and Natalie started dating, Jerry proposed to Beth. And she said yes. We were all very surprised, not only because he asked her to marry him so soon after this rough patch they just went through, but also because they were together for only two years at this point, and Beth was only 25, which is quite young/soon in our country.
It seemed as if, as soon as John heard the news, he also wanted to do something drastic. After just four months of dating, Natalie moved in with him. She instantly started replacing all of his stuff with things that were more to her taste, up until the point where it feels like I’ve set foot on someone’s Pinterest board when I visit.
John and Natalie don’t really seem happy. Beth and Jerry have been planning their wedding for the past two years, but Beth tells me that sometimes, she is doubtful of what could have been between her and John. Of course, soon after admitting that to me, she rushes to add that it would never work between them because she is super motivated and he is still doing the same job he started in and even started working fewer hours because he makes enough money to live comfortably.
Natalie has been dropping hints about getting married, buying a house and having kids from the moment she moved in with John, and this September they’re going on a big road trip. He is going to propose. We all know, even though he didn’t outright tell us. If he chooses this path, this time next year he will have an expensive Pinterest wedding coming up, plus probably a mortgage and a baby.
Meanwhile, Beth and John keep doing fun stuff together – having drinks, and working out. Natalie has started to give Beth some snark because of it. But when I talked to Natalie about our friend group, she only said super nice things about Beth, almost desperately so.
I know Beth has her doubts. I know John has his doubts. But it seems like they go through with their respective Big Life Altering Plans as some weird game of Chicken.
My fiance and I just feel like there will be a moment in the future when the feelings they bottled up all come bursting out, and by that time there will probably be kids and other high stakes involved.
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