My theoretical letter to Scout

Congratulation! You’ve succeeded! By incessantly and inappropriately inserting your opinions into Manny’s life and our relationship, you’ve officially broken us up and hurt the both of us. I know what I did to Manny, and I will not defend myself. I lied to him for months about cheating on him and was cowardly to tell him honestly. I got back together with him under false pretenses, and then went to Europe and still saw the person I cheated on him with after getting back together. And when he found out the truth himself, he was mature and kind hearted throughout the entire process. I know exactly what I did. But this isn’t about that. Even after everything I did to him, he chose to be with me because he truly loves me. I am so grateful for that opportunity, and it made me appreciate how incredible he was, and that I regretted hurting him so much. 

I don’t know what Manny has told you, but I have continuously been making amends. When I blocked the person I cheated on Manny with, that was that. I have limited myself and my social life to the point of loneliness. I never stay out past midnight. I am completely dedicated to him. He himself has told me that I’ve done nothing to worry him since. I know he was beyond hurt. I don’t deny it. And Manny needed solace from friends. But somehow, you ended up being that friend. Now I’ve only met you once so I can not be a true judge of your character, so I will make no statements here about who you are as a person. I will tell you though that Manny chose to continue being my boyfriend and you villainized me, constantly telling him how awful I was for him and how I was such a bitch. You decided that YOU knew what was right and healthy for him and you were so forceful in your opinion. And yet you told him “all I was trying to do was be supportive and be there for you”.

That “support” led him to lie to both of us because he didn’t want you to keep judging him for continuing to date me. When I was coming to visit Manny, he made Sam lie to you about the fact that I’d be around, because he knew you’d make a horrid fuss about how much you hate me and how I am horrible for him. You intimidated him with how much you inserted your feelings about me on him that he would rather hide my presence in his life from you to avoid hearing you constantly talk shit about the person he loved. And so he started putting you before me, his girlfriend. How do you hate me, a person you don’t even know? I am a person your good friend has chosen to love and date, and you’ve never made any effort to get to know me. Instead, you blindly hate me and even have blocked me on Instagram and Facebook.

Scout, I don’t know how it is between you and your long distance boyfriend. But you cannot deny that you would be furious if Coord lied to you about where he was for months while he was actually spending evenings at a female friends apartment, occasionally even sleeping over. Imagine he lied and said he was home after a night of drinking, but actually he was alone with that same drunk female friend from the hours of 3-5AM. Imagine this girl and Coord wore the SAME matching costumes for Halloween that you and YOUR boyfriend were planning to do the next week! And best of all, he hid all that from you and you had to uncover it all yourself piece by piece, only to discover that he deleted all his texts with that female friend, all call logs, instagram threads, everything. All you had was his “word”, but those words kept becoming lies. 

Because you couldn’t accept that Manny was a grown adult who could make his own decisions, because you decided YOU knew what was best for him and his future, it led to this. You villainized me so much and kept emphasizing him how “horrible” I was for him, to the point where he began relying on you instead of his girlfriend. I don’t know if anything ever happened between the two of you, or if you harbor any feelings towards each other. I will never know. Manny told me that he was only relying on you for emotional support, but he recognized how inappropriate it was, and he admitted how much he lied to me about it. I said I wanted to breakup, but he begged and BEGGED to give him another chance. HE was the one who wanted to continue dating. I told him there was no foundation left for a trusting relationship. But he promised that he’d cut you out of his life, with me understanding you were in his friend group and would remain in the peripherals of his life until you finally left Evanston. I made him send me screenshots of that conversation – in the same breath as telling him you didn’t want to lose him to suicide, you told him “it is exhausting being your friend”. You said “you have hurt me, drained me mentally, brought on more stress than peace. I have done more than enough talking and trying to actually have this friendship succeed. I am done”. You promised “I will remove myself completely from your life”. A real good friend you were.

And he never really cut you off did he? What happened Scout? I thought you were going to remove yourself from him life completely? He promised me he’d always tell me when you were around, and that he’d never hangout with you without telling me first. Lo and behold I see your instagram post at the Christmas Market. How chummy. He never told me about it, and when I confronted him he was not apologetic, but dismissive. I later discovered that he had lied to me about taking a 4 hour nap while he went with you that day. He preemptively planned the lie out from beginning to end, going as far as to make up a story of Juan Ga teasing him for sleeping in so much, and sending me a shirtless picture from bed like “I just woke up!” I never felt so betrayed, and broke up with him. You may not think this is a big deal, but please think of it from my perspective. I found out all these lies and mistruths about his extremely emotionally intimate relationship with you just the month before and then I find out that he still goes through some extreme lengths to hide the fact that he’s hanging out with you. If you were uncomfortable with a friend of Coord’s and then found out he lied that he was sleeping to go hang out with her, how would you feel?

We reconciled. It was incredibly emotional, and Manny made some more promises. He told me had blocked your number, unprompted. I asked him to block you on instagram and facebook. I thought all was finally fine. Until New Year’s Eve. Sam sent a selfie from my apartment that I had conveniently not been in frame for to your Northwestern groupchat where I discovered that he never actually blocked you on Facebook. That led to me discovering that he unblocked your number whenever he wasn’t in my presence and then reblocked you whenever he was around me. He kept denying things, but when I took his phone to discover more lies, he shoved me against my fridge, bruising my arms while he wrestled his phone out of my hands. He has not talked to him since. 

I don’t know what you’ll think of this. Maybe because you’re his savior, you’ll take his side and dismiss what he did as a result of me cheating on him. Maybe you think I’m crazy for expecting him to stop being friends with you because from your perspective, nothing inappropriate ever happened. But if there was truly nothing inappropriate about it, he should’ve never lied about it and hid it from me. I view this as on emotional affair that has developed an incredibly inappropriate intimacy over the course of so many months. Cheating doesn’t have to be physical. I believe you do love your boyfriend and only viewed Manny as a close friend. But I don’t think Manny viewed it the same way. He developed a reliance on your emotional support that you openly encouraged, and he now cares about you more than just as a friend. That’s the only way I can logically explain him continuing to keep you in his life while lying to me about it, even after you said those horrible things to him. I don’t know what he told you this whole time, whether you knew the extent to which he lied to me, but it has been so incredibly painful. He wrote me letters, promising that lying about your involvement in his life was a mistake, “one last bad judgment call”, but then he continues lying. Is this what a good person does to the person they say they’re in love with?  I gave him so many opportunities break up but instead he cries and begs for chances. So now he hurts me instead of following through on literally every. single. promise he has made me.

Life is not a game of tit and tat. Just because I’ve hurt him does not mean he’s excused for hurting me. I’ve done nothing but make amends after what I did to Manny. And I never deleted a single message. Manny knows the complete truth, beginning to end. I know NOTHING. I have deleted text threads and continued broken promises to go on. He has decided to completely avoid me and be the cowardly one instead of acknowledging his mistakes and what he has done to hurt me. And I am so hurt. I thought I blamed you, but by the end of this letter I don’t think you realized your impact on what was happening. I can’t blame you, only Manny, but I want you to know you are the reason my relationship has ended. Shockingly, it’s not about cheating or lying, it’s about the fact that you’ve become more important to him than I am. Congratulations. May Coord be ever okay with the fact that Manny loves you more than me.

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