I have heard it said time and time again, trust takes a lifetime to build and a moment to break. This is especially true in our relationships. Yet in this fragile world things are rarely, if ever black and white. In fact, the closer you get to someone the more gray situations begin to look, especially in our relationships with other women. So when you are faced with a decision that could make or break your relationship, you have to decide if the truth is worth risking your friendship.

Let me paint the picture for you. You’re out one night, having a good time with the girls and suddenly you are face to face with your friend’s man in the arms of another woman. In that instant, your night is ruined and you are faced with the dilemma you never want to find yourself in. You just caught your friend’s man cheating and now you have to decide whether or not to tell her.

In these types of situations there are always a lot of risks involved. You risk an undeserved backlash from the friend who doesn’t know how to handle the situation with her man so she opts to take it out on you. Your friend’s man might be an excellent liar and somehow manages to convince her that the whole thing was a huge misunderstanding. This in turn leads to your credibility being shot and your friend never trusting you again. Well, at least not until she actually catches her man cheating and comes back to you, but that is a whole other topic in itself.
In all respects, this is not a question that can be answered with a simple yes or no. In my personal opinion, depending on the type of friend it is, the answer is most often going to be yes. It will probably be easier in the long run to have your friend find out that her man is cheating on her from you, rather than a doctor telling her she has some sort of sexually transmitted disease. It might also be easier for her to hear it up front instead of finding out that you knew about it all along and didn’t say anything about it early on. Initially you may have to distance yourself from the friend and that situation until she figures things out, but that is a small price to pay to save your friend from becoming a statistic.

But of course this is all coming from a rational thought process. But in the heat of the moment, when tensions are high and your friend is feeling hurt and betrayed, you can look like the bad guy who is out to ruin her life. Your friend may decide that she doesn’t believe you, or that she can live with him cheating and will decide to stay with this man and if she does, she will most likely be unable to have you in her life knowing how you feel about him. There might also be a bitterness that comes from her knowing that you had something to do with the demise of her relationship. In most of these cases there is a bit of emotional backlash that the person doing the telling has to deal with, but only you can decide if it is worth it in the long run.

Like I said, I personally believe that this type of information is worth the short term affect on the friendship. With all of the diseases and confusion that is plaguing our age bracket, telling your friend that her boyfriend is unfaithful just seems to make more sense. If she gets angry and decides to cut you off remember that eventually she will see the light and a true friend will be there for her when she does.

By: Brandelyn Castine