One of my friends was dating a guy who had a female housemate. My friend thought it was OK, because the housemate was about 15 years older than her “boyfriend.” I thought something was fishy from the get go. I met the guy a couple of times and the whole living arrangement with the housemate didn’t seem right, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. After my friend and this guy had been dating for several months, he wrote her a letter telling her it would be better if they were just friends and that his housemate meant a lot more to him than he thought and he didn’t want to hurt her, blah, blah, blah.
Basically, the guy was two-timing my friend. The housemate was his live in girlfriend, even despite their age difference (he was about 23 and she was about 40). My friend lived in another city, about 100 miles away, so she hardly ever saw him, although they talked on the phone quite often, and she did see him often enough to believe that she was actually his girlfriend.
When she got the letter, she told me that she was confused and wanted me to hear it and see if I could figure out what he was talking about. I told her that this supposed housemate was actually his live-in girlfriend. He spelled it out pretty plainly, but was fairly pleasant in his delivery and didn’t bad mouth my friend. But my friend just couldn’t believe that he was breaking up with her, or that the other woman was the actual girlfriend.
She started treating me rudely after that. She would contradict everything I said, and eventually we had to go our separate ways, because she was no longer nice to me. This was a classic example of killing the messenger. It was such a shame, because we were really good friends before this happened. I haven’t seen her in 20 years.