essay about a friend who betrayed you

Essay About Betrayal Of A Trusted Friend

Essay example on narrative about friend betrayal.

As a child growing up friends are everything. Your best friend is the one you share all your secrets with and trust them not to tell anyone. They are the one who knows everything about you and stands by your side through everything. For some, best friends may change frequently, but that wasn’t the case of Michelle and l. That was the type of friend Michelle was. We had been friends since the first grade and shared everything.

We never kept secrets from one another and more importantly, we never shared those secrets with anyone else. Well at least I didn’t. One fall I learned many important lessons in life.

The most important one was not to trust people. Sounds cynical I know, but I don’t know any other way to put it. I was 12 years old and trust had never been an issue for me, but that year brought on many changes.

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon my whole outlook on life changed. On a day that seemed like so many before, my brother-in-law raped me. Dealing with that was more than I knew how to handle. The betrayal of the one person I thought I could trust only added to the pain. A few weeks passed before I could even bring myself to tell Michelle. He had made me feel like it was my fault, that I had done something to deserve it.

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He has also convinced me that if my sister found out it would cause her to lose the baby she was carrying. At that time I really didn’t know any better so I believed him. Finally I realized I had to tell someone and of course Michelle was who I turned to. I explained what happened, how it made me feel, how it made me view things. Never in my life did I think she would tell anyone. Once again I was wrong, within three days it seemed the whole school knew. To make matters worse Michelle told people that it had been my fault. That it wasn’t rape at all, that I had agreed to it. Even worse she told them I was pregnant by him.

I couldn’t understand how she could do something like that to me. Here I was trying to cope with what had been done to me physically and she betrayed me in a way that I couldn’t even begin to understand. Granted, in time the talk moved on to something else as it always does in schools, and they all realized that I wasn’t pregnant. Still, the damage to me was already done. I learned the hard way the need to be careful who you trust. It is something that was remained with me to this day. After being betrayed by my best friend, it became nearly impossible to trust anyone. Betrayed by my best friend By eschewing 123

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Friendship betrayal: Why it hurts so much

Navigate the turbulent seas of emotional betrayal and discover your route to recovery and personal growth.

Friendship is a precious gift that can bring immense joy and fulfillment. It’s built on a foundation of mutual respect , trust, and affection, and often leads to a deep emotional bond that can feel like an extension of ourselves.

But what happens when that bond is broken? What happens when the friend you trusted and cared for betrays you? The pain can be intense, and the hurt can run deep.

This piece explores the complex emotions that arise when we feel betrayed by a friend. It’s a meaningful exploration of a difficult topic that many of us can relate to.

So, let’s dive deep into understanding the  profound hurt caused by betrayal in friendships and how to find the way forward .

The depth of emotional investment

When we form friendships, we create an emotional bond based on trust, affection, and mutual respect.

This bond is nurtured and strengthened over time, often making a friend feel like an extension of ourselves. Therefore, when a friend betrays us, it feels like a part of us has been damaged or lost.

The pain we experience is a reflection of the depth of our emotional investment in the relationship.

The role of trust in friendship

Trust is the cornerstone of any friendship. It is this trust that allows us to be vulnerable, share our thoughts, dreams, fears, and secrets with our friends.

We believe in their loyalty and expect them to safeguard our confidences. Therefore, when this  trust is broken , it can have a devastating impact on our emotional well-being.

The betrayal not only shatters our faith in the friend but also leads us to question our judgement and ability to trust others.

Feelings of deceit and disillusionment

Feeling deceived by a friend can lead to a strong sense of disillusionment. The friend you thought you knew, and who you believed valued and respected you, suddenly becomes a stranger.

This drastic shift in perception can be extremely painful and unsettling.

For instance, imagine finding out that your best friend has been spreading rumors about you.

The person you trusted the most in the world, the person you shared your deepest secrets with, is now the source of your pain and humiliation.

This example illustrates the profound hurt that can be caused by betrayal in friendship .

The impact on self-esteem

Being betrayed by a friend can also have a dramatic impact on our self-esteem. This is particularly true if the betrayal involves humiliation or public embarrassment .

In such cases, the betrayed person may begin to feel inadequate or unworthy, questioning their own worth and value.

The betrayal can act as a mirror, reflecting a distorted image of self-worth that can be deeply damaging to our self-esteem.

The way forward

While it’s undeniable that being betrayed by a friend really hurts, it’s crucial to remember that one person’s actions should not define your self-worth or influence your ability to trust others.

Healing from betrayal takes time and patience, but it’s ultimately an opportunity for growth and self-reflection.

Don’t let the actions of one person close your heart to the possibility of new and sincere friendships .

In conclusion, the deep hurt we feel when betrayed by a friend stems from the depth of our emotional investment, the breach of trust, feelings of deceit and disillusionment, and the impact on our self-esteem.

Remember, it’s not about you, but about the other person’s actions and choices.

So, did this article help you understand why being betrayed by a friend really hurts? If it did, please feel free to share it on your social networks.

• 1 The depth of emotional investment
• 2 The role of trust in friendship
• 3 Feelings of deceit and disillusionment
• 4 The impact on self-esteem
• 5 The way forward

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Nothing is Worse Than a Friend’s Betrayal: 13 Signs Your Bestie Betrayed You And What to do About it

One of the difficult parts of adult life is learning that friendships end — sometimes for sad reasons. 

Even close friends can sometimes betray you, leading to a myriad of emotions. 

Unfortunately, it can happen no matter how old you are or how long you have been friends.

 The good news is that there are a few signs to watch out for. 

These might be hints that your friend has betrayed you or is thinking about betraying you.

How Does It Feel When a Friend Betrays You? 

1. they seem to be avoiding you , 2. they flake out, 3. they undermine your confidence, 4. they don’t respect your boundaries, 5. they give insincere compliments, 6. they’re not happy for you, 7. they hide their phone or social media, 8. they seem jealous, 9. they make mean jokes, 10. they avoid your questions, 11. they gossip about you, 12. they ignore you, 13. they tell small lies, 1. take some time to think, 2. confide in a friend or therapist, 3. reach out to other friends, 4. open the lines of communication when you feel ready, 5. decide whether cutting ties is a good idea, 6. consider what you need to do to heal and move on, experiencing a friend’s betrayal.

When a friend betrays you, it’s natural to have a lot of conflicting feelings. Some of it comes down to the exact situation. 

Examples of friend betrayal could include stealing a romantic partner, sharing a deeply personal secret, or pursuing something they know you wanted. 

When your friend betrays you, you might feel:

• Humiliation

All of these are perfectly normal responses to having the rug pulled from beneath you by a friend.

It may take time for these feelings to resolve, especially if the friend in question doesn’t apologize or own up to their betrayal.

13 Signs of Betrayal in Friendship

So how do you know if your friend is about to betray you? These 13 signs might offer a clue about what is going on.

Although it will still hurt, it may be better to be forewarned so you aren’t caught off guard.

Maybe it’s because of a guilty conscience, or maybe they are trying to cut you out, but your friend may seem to be avoiding you. They ignore your calls and texts or offer flimsy excuses for why they’ve been out of touch. 

When you ask if you’ve done something to upset them, they might say something vague that doesn’t offer a genuine answer. Good friends make an effort to stay in contact, and deliberate avoidance isn’t normal.

If you do manage to make plans with a friend who’s drifting away, don’t be surprised if they flake out. Whenever you try to meet up, it seems like they have something come up — and it’s not something that really adds up. 

People can only have so many car emergencies or family problems before it becomes pretty obvious that they’re trying to avoid you. If your friend cancels plans again and again, there may be something else going on.

Good friends should be supportive and kind. A friend who might betray you may try to undermine your confidence by making passive-aggressive comments, backhanded compliments , or unhelpful suggestions. 

They might belittle you in front of others or contradict you in ways designed to make you look illogical or incompetent.

Other ways people might do this is by exposing your mistakes to others or belittling your achievements. 

A good friend respects your boundaries , whether or not they agree with them. A friend who has betrayed you may repeatedly disrespect the boundaries you have set in place.

These might be large or small, such as keeping your secrets or respecting your preference that they send a text before dropping by. 

Dismissing someone’s wishes shows that they don’t care about your sense of comfort, safety, and trust — or that they think their preferences are more important. 

We’ve all been on the receiving end of a backhanded compliment, and they can really hurt.

Insincere compliments can sound like, “You finally did something right!” or “I never thought that dress would look good on you,” or “Your skin looks so much better than it did last week.” 

These backhanded compliments are designed to sound nice but are clearly insults when you stop and think about them. The only reason people give them is to make you feel bad .

Maybe you just got a big promotion at work, started a new relationship, or heard great news about a close family member. Ideally, your friends will feel happy for you because you feel happy. 

But if your friend has betrayed you, they might not seem very happy about your good luck.

In fact, they might seem downright upset or even angry about it, giving curt congratulations and then leaving the conversation.

Just as with cheating partners , friends who are drifting away from you might hide their phone or social media from you. 

Not that friends usually have open access to each other’s phones, but you might notice that they quickly put their phone away when you walk into the room or act evasive when you ask who they’re talking to. 

These things alone might not mean anything, but they can certainly point to something sneaky behind your back. 

Does your friend seem oddly fixated on your achievements or blessings, but not for the best reasons? Maybe they often make jealous remarks about your financial status, relationships, or material possessions. 

Frequent comments like these often have a lot of anger behind them, and eventually, that becomes evident.

You can always ask them gently if everything is OK. Unfortunately, if they’ve betrayed you, they’re unlikely to be honest about what’s really on their mind.

There should be room in a friendship for jokes and sometimes even good-natured teasing. But “good-natured” is the key phrase. 

If your friend is continually making jokes at your expense or seems to enjoy embarrassing or belittling you, it’s safe to say something is going on.

It’s always a good idea to voice your concerns to ensure it’s not a misunderstanding. If they mean well, they’ll apologize and back off. 

You sense something is wrong, so you start asking questions. Maybe you even wonder if you did something wrong and your friend is upset with you.

Sometimes, you might end up having a heart-to-heart and laying everything out in the open. 

But if they dodge your questions and insist that everything is fine when it’s clearly not, there might be something else going on. Good friends shouldn’t act evasive when it comes to fixing problems.

Talking about a friend behind their back is never okay. If one of your friends suddenly seems to be dishing out with everyone you know, they owe you an explanation …and an apology. 

Of course, most people don’t just start gossiping out of nowhere. It could be a sign that your friendship has soured. It could also be a sign of their true nature. People can be good at hiding their bad side until it suits them.

Friendship goes both ways. Just as with a relationship, there has to be some give and take. If your friend doesn’t seem to be listening to you when you speak, that’s something to note. 

A sustainable friendship isn’t possible if they demand that you listen to their problems but never return the favor.

It might just be a sign that they’re not a good friend — but it could also be a sign that something has changed.

Most of us tell the occasional white lie, but if your friend seems to be frequently lying for no reason, there might be something strange going on. 

It could be that they are trying to cover their tracks, so you don’t know what they’re planning to do — or it could be that they are showing their dishonest side. Some people are pathological liars, meaning they lie all the time without real impetus.

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What to Do When You Are Betrayed by a Friend 

So what should you do after you feel the effects of betrayal in friendship? It can take some real effort to move past the experience and heal from the emotional wounds. 

It is easy to do things impetuously when you are feeling sad, hurt, angry or humiliated. Try to avoid making any big decisions before taking the time to reflect. 

You can do this by journaling, talking it out with someone else, or simply sitting with your thoughts. Think about your friendship, the betrayal, and how it has affected your relationship.

Getting an outside perspective can help you sort out your feelings and figure out what you want to do. 

A listening ear can be helpful for your emotional needs, and another voice can help you feel validated — or consider the situation from a new angle. Regardless, it’s always good to talk to people about emotional experiences. 

Gossiping about friend drama and trying to pit mutual friends against each other isn’t a good idea. 

But what is a good idea is finding strength and comfort in other friendships. When you’re feeling let down by a friend, having other friends offer support can make a huge difference. 

Let’s be clear: even if you do want to try to repair the relationship, it’s OK if you’re not ready right away. 

You have the right to tell your friend: “I want to talk about this eventually, but right now, I’m feeling too hurt and vulnerable to have a conversation. I’ll reach out when I’m ready.” 

Sadly, some friendships can’t be saved — and reconciliation can’t be one-sided. Sometimes, cutting ties with your friend might be the best thing for your mental and emotional health. 

You also can’t force forgiveness, so sometimes, the best way to move on and forgive them is to get some space. Losing a friend is always sad, but sometimes it’s the best way forward.

Sometimes, you may need time to grieve for the friendship that you lost. It’s OK to let yourself feel the hurt, anger, and betrayal that they inflicted on you. However, it’s not healthy to dwell on these memories forever. 

Consider what you need to do to move past the experience, whether that’s making new friends, going to therapy, or something else.

Unfortunately, most people experience a betrayal by a friend at some point. Although it is always a sad experience, it can open the door to healthier friendships with other people. 

Betrayed by Your Best Friend? 6 Ways to Heal Your Heart

Psychology can help you explain and manage the pain of a friend's betrayal..

Posted January 14, 2018 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

Daphne was almost 40 when she came home to find her best friend, Jennifer, in bed with Daphne’s husband, Mike.* “I think it was the worst thing that had happened in my life,” she said. “I guess it was the double betrayal. Mike and Jennifer: Two people I completely trusted.”

Not every deception by a friend is as life-shattering as Daphne’s double whammy, but even the smallest can sting. Daphne is one of the women I spoke with as I gathered the information for my book I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women’s Lives. Others told me of a number of different ways that friends had betrayed them — sharing something they had told them in confidence , talking about them behind their backs, and lying to them were just a few examples.

Madeleine*, a recent college grad, said that she felt betrayed by a friend who had started dating and suddenly wasn’t available to chat or spend time with her. “I know that’s not fair,” Madeleine said. “She’s involved in a new relationship, and it’s normal not to have as much time as she used to. But it’s happened a few times, and the problem is, when the relationship is over, she sort of thinks I should be available to spend the same amount of time we used to spend. It doesn’t matter if I’m dating, or if I’ve got plans with other friends. I’m supposed to be at her beck and call.”

The psychologist Jeanne Safer describes a friend who betrayed her by becoming more and more self-centered, unable or unwilling to even ask questions about Safer’s life or experience. She writes, “Lost friends are as haunting as lost lovers, and just as hard to replace.” Some of the women I spoke with would have changed her comment to “even harder to replace.” Numerous women described experiences similar to Safer’s, with friends who could not tolerate or support them through an illness, or a divorce , or the loss of a spouse or child.

But in some cases, what feels like a betrayal is really more a change in life situation. Like Madeleine, you may have experienced a sense of betrayal when a friend married, began to have children, and/or became intensely involved in her work. Interestingly, many of the women also told me they felt bad that they had become less available for their friends, but said that their closest friends understood. “We’re all in the same boat, more or less,” said one woman in her early 30s. “We get together when we can, we talk on the phone, but it’s a lot less than it used to be.”

Another woman told me that she felt she had been a bad friend because she was so involved with her family and her career : “I felt like I left my friends behind. And I hurt some of them.”

Change and loss can feel like a betrayal, but it is not always meant that way. As we move through different life stages, it is not unusual that some of our friendships receive less attention . Further, being disillusioned by a friend is a normal and even expected part of a healthy developmental process.

Yet studies have found that we feel these changes are personal — that is, that they are specifically directed at us, which is what makes them sting so much. [ii] [iii] [iv] Julie Fitness, a psychologist who has studied and written about the impact of betrayal, puts it this way: “When those on whom we depend for love and support betray our trust, the feeling is like a stab at the heart that leaves us feeling unsafe, diminished, and alone.”

And this loss makes us more vulnerable physically as well as emotionally.

There are books galore about handling infidelity in a marriage . But what about when a friend is disloyal or unfaithful? What do you do when your best friend — or any friend — betrays you?

Here are some suggestions gleaned from the women I interviewed and from psychotherapists who write about these experiences:

1. Clarify the situation. Whether you are the betrayer or the betrayed, the damage can sometimes be temporary, with the disruptions folded into the fabric of a relationship without doing too much destruction. Sometimes, however, the fallout can be permanent and life-changing. In either case, how we interpret the rupture can add to or alleviate our pain.

What does that mean? Sometimes it means making sure that your interpretation is the same as your friend’s. For instance, Alice* felt abandoned by Deirdre*, her closest friend from childhood , who had stopped returning her phone calls. “I texted, emailed, and did everything I could short of going to her house and pounding on her door,” Alice said. “Eventually, I just decided that our friendship must be over. I was so hurt and angry and really kind of horrified.” But she felt worse when she discovered that Deirdre was in the throes of severe depression . “I finally did go over to her house and knocked until she let me in. She looked terrible. She wasn’t eating and hadn’t been out of the house for days,” Alice said. “I bundled her up and took her to the hospital. It wasn’t a betrayal. It was an illness.”

2. Accept and process your feelings. Once you have faced the painful truth of a betrayal and your own feelings about it, you can start to process the emotions — the good, the bad, and the ugly. After a betrayal, you will very likely have to manage a number of different emotions. Your feelings about what happened are not going to be static. Hurt may turn into anger or vice versa. Each phase will require different emotional and maybe even physical responses on your part. The key is to stay as honest with yourself as you can. And, when possible, to explain your thinking to the people who are important to you, although not necessarily to the person who hurt you.

3. Consider whether or not to process the feelings with the person who hurt you (or the person you hurt). Sometimes the person who betrayed you is around to help you process those feelings. In that case, it can be healing to talk about what happened. But sometimes she cannot join you in that work, or you may not want to open yourself up to the possibility of further injury, and that is okay too. The same is true when you have done the betraying. If your genuine apologies are not accepted, you may feel hurt and frustrated. In either case, you can still express your feelings, but maybe not to the friend. It is also perfectly okay if you want to act like things are fine, and you want your friend to do the same, although of course, this solution works best when it works best for both of you. Like Lillian on the show Bridesmaids , you might just want to say, “Why can't you be happy for me, and then go home and talk about me behind my back like a normal person?”

4. Decide whether or not you can forgive your friend. Daphne felt that she could not forgive her friend Jennifer: “It wasn’t just her, of course. Mike was part of it. And so was I. I mean, I had known for a while that something wasn’t right with our marriage, but I was afraid to address it. But that doesn’t mean that it was my fault. And I’m just not ready to put it all behind me and be kissy-face with either of them.” Safer says that sometimes not forgiving can be both freeing and allow you to move on. It can also help you remember the things that you did love about your friend.

But sometimes forgiving is also freeing. Madeleine found that she missed her friend and decided to accept her for who she was: “We have a great time together. And I’m really fond of her. So, I just have to know that she’s going to put whatever boyfriend she’s with first; that’s just who she is.”

5. Recognize that there is no single right way to handle a betrayal. What is crucial, however, is to recognize and acknowledge, at least to yourself, what you are feeling. Once you have done that, it is easier to find ways to cope with the experience that works best for you. If you do not have a clear sense of what you want to do, you might try talking or even acting out a possible conversation with someone you trust. Take the conversation as far as you can, and then let yourself sit with your feelings about that scenario. Then imagine the opposite. What would happen if you said nothing? How would that look and feel to you? After you have imagined several different scenarios, you will probably have an idea of what you feel most comfortable doing — or not doing — about the situation.

6. Remember that it may not be what it seems. This can mean trying not to take the hurtful actions personally, even when it seems that you are the intended victim. Daphne finally came to realize that the double betrayal by her husband and her best friend was not her fault. Sure, there were things she could have done differently, and ways that she could have been both a better wife and a better friend. But as another friend pointed out to her, their behavior had much more to do with their inner demons than with her. It might seem to you that a friend intentionally hurt you when she was thinking about her own problems, not you. Of course, her lack of consideration of your needs could be hurtful in and of itself, and you do have to deal with that. But stepping back and looking at the bigger picture can help. And turning to other friends can also be an invaluable way to help the injury heal and help you move on.

“It was an awful time,” Daphne said. “I wanted to withdraw from the world.” Because she felt that her children needed extra attention from her during the separation and divorce, she focused all of her attention on them. As a working mother, that meant she had little time to spare for herself, and even less for her friends. “But my friends wouldn’t let me bury myself in my work or my kids,” she said. "They arranged activities!” They would organize a movie day for all of the kids and the moms and insist I come. And then afterward, a couple of them would take the kids for pizza, and the others would take me back to someone’s home for a glass of wine. They knew I wouldn’t come if they just asked me that, but it’s really exactly what I need. I’m so lucky to have friends like this!”

*Names and personal information changed to protect privacy

Copyright @ fdbarth, 2018.

F. Diane Barth, I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women's Lives. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Feb. 6, 2018

Jeanne Safer, “Broken Bridge,” Psychology Today , March/April 2016, p.43.

Warren H. Jones, Danny S. Moore, Arianne Schratter, & Laura A. Negel, “Interpersonal Transgressions and Betrayals,” Behaving badly: Aversive behaviors in interpersonal relationships , Robin M. Kowalski, (Ed.). (Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association, 2001): 233-256.

Julie Fitness, “Betrayal, Rejection, Revenge, and Forgiveness: An Interpersonal Script Approach. Interpersonal Rejection , M. Leary (Ed.). (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001):73-103 .

Mark R. Leary, Carrie Springer, Laura Negel, Emily Ansell, Kelly Evans, “The Causes, Phenomenology, and Consequences of Hurt Feelings,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 74 (1998): 1225-1237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1225

F. Diane Barth, L.C.S.W. , is a psychotherapist, teacher, and author in private practice in New York City.

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What To Do When You Have Been Betrayed by a Friend

• by Celes     |    
• Relationships

(Image: Jilbert Ebrahimi )

“How should we react when we find out that a friend betrayed us? How do I turn my anger into something positive instead but without being on the losing end? I was promised a great opportunity by a friend but found out that she secretly offered it to someone else later. Thank you Celes.” — Zenwell

Hey Zenwell, thanks for your question. :)

Questioning the Assumption

My first question is: Can you be absolutely sure that your friend deliberately “betrayed” you? Sometimes what we perceive may not be the truth. It may merely be our perception which would be based on a subjective belief system.

For example, a while back, a friend of mine thought that I betrayed him by backing out on something I had promised. However, in my mind, I never made the promise. It was a difference in perception that led to the misunderstanding. After several talks and effort to rebuild the friendship, we finally buried the hatchet and mended the rift between us.

For your friend, it is possible that she offered the opportunity to someone with valid reasons and has not had the chance to inform you yet (rather than “secretly” offering it to someone else). It is possible that the opportunity was offered to someone else due to circumstances outside of her control and she has not informed you yet because she feels guilty about it. It is also well possible that she never “promised” you that opportunity and was simply talking about it as a hypothetical discussion.

These are possibilities you can consider in giving her the benefit of the doubt. Without knowing your friend and what was exchanged between both of you, I can’t pass a verdict on whether she did betray you or not.

Assuming She Did Betray You

However, let’s say that she has indeed done you wrong by deliberately, secretly, offering this opportunity to someone when she has already promised it to you.

My questions to you are: How important is this friend to you? Is this a friendship you treasure? Can you do without this person in your life, or is she someone who means a lot to you and whom you want to keep by your side? Does she mean enough for you to look beyond this betrayal?

Or is this a hi-bye acquaintance-like friendship, where her presence or non-presence in your life wouldn’t mean anything at all?

Option A: Working Out the Issue with Her

If this is an important friendship to you, then you should work this out with her. Find a good time and place to air your unhappiness. Do this objectively—don’t make it an issue about her , but rather, your grievances about  her actions  and their impact on your feelings. This will focus the discussion on the problem at hand rather than turn it into a personal attack. The article on  How to Give Constructive Criticism in 6 Steps  would help.

Don’t fume in silence, because that’s never a good way to resolve issues. Issues can’t get resolved if they aren’t aired. And if you want to build a meaningful friendship with someone, anyone at all, you need to be transparent in your feelings, be it good or bad. That’s how strong, authentic connections are made.

Besides, by not talking about the problem, you are not being fair to her at all. It’s well possible that she’s not aware of her “betrayal”, just like in my situation with my friend. (I only knew his unhappiness after getting him to open up, because I could feel that something was amiss.) And if your friend isn’t aware that she has made you unhappy, there’s no way she can even redress the problem. There’s no way she can make things right at all. She would be forever tainted in your eyes and there’s nothing she can do to fix that. What kind of a friendship would this be, if not a superficial one?

Option B: Letting Her Go

On the other hand, if this isn’t an important friend at all to you (plus you are absolutely sure that she deliberately betrayed you), then let her go. There are way too many people in this world to bog yourself down over an incompatible connection.

I’ve written before about how I let go of an incompatible friend after being best friends for 10 years:  Why I Parted Ways With My Best Friend of 10 Years . While it was not an ideal scenario (the ideal scenario would be us continuing to be best friends and supporting each other in a way that is aligned with our values), the episode helped me to learn a lot about friendships, why it’s important to have friends who are compatible with your being, and how sometimes letting go is the best way to move forward.

Let Go of Your Anger

Whatever the option you take, don’t hold on to the anger, because when you hold on to anger, the person you hurt the most isn’t the other person, but yourself. That’s the worse way anyone can live life, and I don’t want that to happen to you.

Read my series on how to deal with anger, starting with:  My History With Anger and How I Let Go of It, Part 1: Growing Up in a Household of Anger

What I want for you is to live a life filled with happiness and no regrets. At the end of the day, betrayal is only a mental notion. While it’s never a good feeling to be betrayed, we can only let betrayals affect us if we let them affect us.

Create Your Opportunities

Whatever opportunity it is that you have lost, find ways to get that same opportunity then, if not better. While that door may be closed, there are other doors open and waiting for you to find them. The longer you stay hung up over that closed door, the more you are going to miss out on those bigger and better opportunities out there. Wouldn’t that be the truest waste of all?

Good luck Zenwell, and I wish you all the best in your talk with your friend (assuming you pick that path) and in your life. :D

Here’s a related article:  Backstabber Guide: 8 Tips To Deal With Backstabbers

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12 Strategies for Moving On After a Friend’s Betrayal

Last Updated: June 25, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Nancy Lin, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Dev Murphy, MA . Dr. Nancy Lin is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and the Owner of Go to Sleep San Diego, a private practice providing therapy for people suffering from insomnia, trauma, depression, and related problems. She is also trained in issues related to cultural diversity in mental health. Dr. Lin holds a Bachelors degree in Psychology from The University of California, Berkeley and a Masters degree in Medical Anthropology from the University of London, SOAS. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from The University of Massachusetts Boston and completed an APA-accredited internship and postdoctoral training at the VA San Diego Healthcare System (VASDHS). There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 389,576 times.

For many of us, friendship is one of the things that makes life meaningful, which is why it hurts so badly to be betrayed by a friend. It can be hard to make sense of a falling out with someone you trusted: why did they do it? Should you give them a second chance? How can you heal and move beyond what happened? You may be mulling over these questions and more right now, but believe us when we say that finding peace and moving forward is possible. We’ll walk you through how to get over a friend’s betrayal, below.

Things You Should Know

• Take some space away from your friend to heal and collect your thoughts. Engage in hobbies and try talking to trusted loved ones about the situation.
• If you decide to try to repair the relationship, let them know they did something that hurt you, and set strong boundaries for the future.
• Whether you decide to stay friends or cut them off, try to forgive them—not for their sake, but for your own. It may make it easier to move forward and heal.

Take some time to yourself.

• Doing fun things without this friend may also help put the incident in perspective and remind you that you can still have fun without them. No matter what happens between you, you'll be OK. [1] X Research source
• Reader Poll: We asked 303 wikiHow readers how to set boundaries with someone who betrayed them, and 56% said they would limit the amount of time they spend with them. [Take Poll]

Go easy on yourself.

• Everyone makes mistakes, and bad things happen to everyone. Blaming yourself for everything that has occurred or believing that bad things always happen to you may make it harder for you to move forward. [2] X Research source

Vent to someone you trust.

• Consider talking to another friend or a trusted family member, journaling about the situation, or maybe even speaking to a counselor about what you’re going through.

Reframe the situation.

• For instance, instead of thinking that it's all your fault that your friend betrayed you, try to practice self-compassion : maybe you made a mistake, or maybe you trusted the wrong person. You made the best decision that you could at the time, and if you could choose again, you would do it differently.

Get some physical activity.

• If you play a sport, play with friends or kick a ball around. Boxing, kickboxing, and even yoga all can be helpful ways to get your stress out of your body.

Ask yourself if it was a misunderstanding.

• It’s not easy to do, but ask yourself if you could have made an assumption that led to a misunderstanding.
• If you don’t have all the details, try to get a full picture by asking third parties who may know more about what happened for information.
• Consider all the information, including your own. If your friend really has done something wrong, have they admitted wrongdoing? Not all guilty people confess, so consider all the evidence, and make a decision about what to do next if a betrayal has occurred. [6] X Research source
• Consider how your friend feels : if they are just as upset as you are, it’s possible the betrayal was a misunderstanding or an accident on their part.

Avoid retaliating.

• Seeking revenge may also make it harder for you and your friend to repair your relationship, if you think you may want to try to stay friends.

Reconsider your standards for friendship.

• You may value specific traits, like trustworthiness, honesty, or kindness, as well as specific characteristics, like a sense of humor or a shared taste in music.
• As you heal from and reflect on what happened with this particular friend, dedicate time to your other relationships. They may help you move forward and remind you you deserve friends you can rely on. [9] X Research source

Consider forgiving your friend.

• If you forgive, you can let the incident go and move on, even if you and your friend don’t patch things up. Without forgiving, it’s easier to hold a grudge, and months or years later you might still be mad as if the incident just occurred.
• Ideally, the friend who betrayed you should offer an apology. However, many times there is no apology, or there’s an insincere apology. So, you may have to work through the forgiveness stage on your own. [11] X Research source
• Once you forgive, try not to think about it over and over and over again. One way to catch yourself and stop yourself from thinking about it is to wear a rubber band on your wrist. Snap the band every time that you think about it. [12] X Research source

Reassess your boundaries if you want to stay friends.

• “Julia, I really value our friendship, but I was really hurt by what you said about me to everyone. If you have a problem with me, I wish you’d come to me instead of talking about me behind my back. I still want to be friends, but I just don’t want this to happen again.”
• Repairing your friendship doesn't have to mean things go back to the way they were: if you feel like you can't trust them as much as you used to, you may decide to consider them an acquaintance instead of a friend.

End the friendship if you can't get past what happened.

• “Josh, it really hurt when you shared my secret with everyone, and I just don’t think we can move past it. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
• “Paul, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I can’t get over the fact that you lied to me. I don’t want to be friends anymore.”

Try to learn from what happened.

Expert Q&A

• Being betrayed by a friend can be a very traumatic experience, so try to be patient with yourself as you go through this process. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

Tips from our Readers

• My best friend betrayed me and the way I dealt with it was by spending time alone and eventually confronting her privately. Then, we worked on trying to build back the trust.
• Try to make sure the person in question is trustworthy. If they aren't, make sure they were at least sincere when they apologized.

You Might Also Like

Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about relationships, check out our in-depth interview with Nancy Lin, PhD .

• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/buoyant-life/202209/6-ways-regain-trust-after-betrayal
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/enlightened-living/201304/self-blame-the-ultimate-emotional-abuse
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/201404/6-virtues-and-6-vices-venting
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201208/overcoming-betrayal-it-s-2-way-street
• ↑ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6718717/
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/201401/trust-and-betrayal
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pieces-mind/201309/revenge-will-you-feel-better
• ↑ Nancy Lin, PhD. Licensed Clinical Psychologist. Expert Interview. 27 May 2021.
• ↑ https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/01/ce-corner
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-pragmatic-aspie/201110/betrayal-can-we-get-over-it
• ↑ https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/surviving_betrayal

About This Article

Getting over a friend's betrayal can be really hard, but if you focus on yourself and give yourself time to heal, you can start to feel better. Take time to relax and do things you enjoy to distract yourself from the situation. You can also talk to a friend or family member you trust about it to get it off your chest. If you still want to be friends with the person, tell them how you feel once you’ve calmed down and give them a chance to apologize. Or, if you think you’re better without them, focus on your other friendships and let the wound heal over time. For more tips, including how to see your friend’s betrayal from their perspective, read on. Did this summary help you? Yes No

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When your friendships turn unfriendly

We've all had friendships that have gone bad. Whether it takes the form of a simple yet inexplicable estrangement or a devastating betrayal, a failed friendship can make your life miserable, threaten your success at work or school, and even undermine your romantic relationships. In “When Friendship Hurts,” Jan Yager explores what causes friendships to falter and explains how to mend them — or end them. Here's an excerpt:

Introduction: When Friendship Turns Unfriendly For some, "friends for life" seems to have replaced the ideal of a lifelong marital relationship. Of course, there are positive, wonderful friendships that are mutually beneficial to both friends that should last a lifetime. But there are other friendships that are negative, destructive, or unhealthy that should end. There may also be friendships that you thought were going well but, alas, all of a sudden, your friend stops returning your phone calls and won't answer your letters, and the friendship ends. Years later you still don't know what happened, and it haunts you.

In the two decades during which I have been researching and writing about friendship, I have seen the interest in learning about friendship soar. From a topic that was addressed infrequently by psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists (who tended to focus on parent-child or husband-wife relationships), articles about friendship are now a staple in popular magazines and daily newspapers, and also on web sites; and there are many books about this glorious relationship between peers that we call friendship.

Friendship has certainly been "discovered." Its benefits have been extolled by numerous researchers through anecdotes and examples, as well as through quantitative (or qualitative) studies by epidemiologists, sociologists, and psychologists, who have found a correlation between having even one close friend and an increased life expectancy, as well as better mental health and a greater chance of surviving breast cancer or a heart attack.

So why is there a need for a book like When Friendship Hurts? Because in all the excitement about getting the word out about the importance of friendship in our lives, too little attention has been paid to the notion that negative friendships can wreak havoc. Another reason is to have a forum to explore the possible causes of finding yourself in such a relationship, and how to best rid yourself of a noxious friend. Furthermore, if your friendships are consistently less than what you had hoped they would be, a Band-Aid approach to changing that situation is doomed to long-term failure. You need to look at the underlying causes of the negative friendships in your life; you need to go back to their roots in your parent-child and sibling relationships.

This book offers help and hope in understanding the complexities of friendships, as well as advice on how you can turn around your life — not just your friendships — by understanding why you have negative friendships and by finding and cultivating positive friendships. Having positive friendships — and that may not mean finding new friends, just interacting differently with the ones that you already have — can help turn around your career. For example, not only do friends help friends get jobs, but once you land a job, how quickly you rise at a company or in a career could depend as much on who your friends are at work and in your professional field as on your talents. By the same token, a friend can derail your career or get you fired. That's what happened with Marjorie (not her real name), a 23-year-old single female working as a teacher's assistant. Marjorie explains:

My best friend told my boss that she feared for her life after we got into an argument and I wrote her a nasty note, even though we had been friends for six years and she knew I would never hurt her. Because she went to my boss, I was fired after working there for a year and a half. She [my best friend] even went to the police but was told that nothing in the note was threatening. The reason for all of this had to do with the fact that she was highly competitive and felt this was a way of winning.

Unfortunately Marjorie's experience is more typical than you'd think. A 45-year-old married speechwriter at an Illinois corporation was fired because a single female friend at work, fearing that she herself might be fired after a poor performance review, blamed her unsatisfactory behavior on her boss, the head speechwriter, who was also her friend, alleging that his sexual attraction to her, which she called sexual harassment, made it difficult for her to concentrate. (Her claims were unsubstantiated but her boss/friend was fired anyway for failing to properly supervise his friend/employee.) Carol, a 39-year-old married woman, after finally landing her dream job as a florist, was betrayed so badly at work by three casual friends that she "had to take a three-week medical leave."

Losing a job or having a reputation damaged beyond repair is bad enough, but friendship has been partly to blame for even darker situations. An infamous example is the friendship of the two teenagers who perpetrated the horrific murders of 12 of their classmates and one teacher, and injured 20 more, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, in April 1999, before committing suicide. Those boys, allegedly bullied and not part of the "in" crowd, seemed to act together, getting the strength to commit mass murder and suicide from their friendship.

Then in March 2001 it happened again. A 15-year-old boy in Santee, California, again the alleged victim of bullies, supposedly shared with four friends and one adult that he planned to shoot his classmates, but then reassured them that he was only kidding. The next day he did carry out his threats when he allegedly shot and killed two classmates. Three families were destroyed, a school was branded, and a community was shocked and grief-stricken. The boy's friends, believing him when he guaranteed that he was just kidding, were transferred to other schools. The authorities feared retaliation by their classmates for failing to report their friend's macabre bragging to the proper authorities.

But we don't need tales of murder and mayhem to find value in examining negative friendships and the consequences of betrayal. Over the two decades I have been researching friendship and friendship patterns, I have interviewed people who were betrayed when a "friend" seduced their romantic partner. Others ended a friendship because of a betrayal that, at the very least, stopped a pivotal work project in its tracks. I've interviewed men and women who told me that a friend had derailed their career by sharing privileged information that was supposed to be just "between friends." Others reported that a friend had stolen money from them. Here are other examples of betrayal that I have observed or heard about through interviews in the course of my friendship research:

• "One of my best friends romantically pursued every woman in which I expressed interest." (24-year-old single male)
• "She told me she was sleeping with my boyfriend and tried to convince me we should 'share.'" (37-year-old divorced mother)
• "[My close friend at work] went to our mutual boss and described something we were either both working on or that I had taken the initiative to set up and talked about how he had handled it." (55-year-old, twice-divorced woman)
• "A close female friend is jealous of me being married." (44-year-old married man)
• "A best friend I grew up with attacked me [physically] for no reason." (23-year-old married female)
• "A casual friend started a rumor about me at work." (50-year-old divorced mother)
• "My maid of honor stole money from me on the night of my bachelorette party." (30-year-old married teacher)
• "I'm not as open as I had been, [I'm] more reserved, because of what happened." [She was devastated when her best friend referred to her by a derogatory name when they were both 11.] (32-year-old married mother)

Jealousy can hurt someone's self-esteem and may also end a friendship, as Brenda, a 40-year-old homemaker and musician from Michigan, found out. "I used to weigh two hundred pounds," she notes. "I now weigh one hundred twenty-five pounds. My friend was two hundred and fifty pounds. When I lost the first few pounds, she backed as far away as possible."

Cheating with a romantic partner or spouse may end a friendship. A 31-year-old art instructor let her "really close friend" and co-worker live with her and her husband when her friend couldn't find an apartment. During that time, the friend "flirted or even had a relationship" with her husband. The friend also undermined her at work, spreading untrue rumors that she was being physically abusive to her art students. The marriage is on the rocks, and the friendship is over.

But some potentially destructive or harmful friendships may be difficult to spot. That's because when a friendship is forming, during the "courtship" phase, your friend may be charming, polite, and completely appropriate. Once your friendship is well underway, a friend may change. The very act of becoming friends may send someone with intimacy problems into an emotional tailspin, changing those involved as well as their behavior toward each other. As friends become closer and more intimate, expectations also may rise so that disappointments become more likely, and painful, than during the early stage of the evolving friendship.

Furthermore, as a friendship that formed within a certain context, such as at school or at work, expands to include a multiplicity of situations and even other relationships, conflicts may arise that may derail the friendship. In addition, the longer you remain friends, the greater your investment in maintaining the friendship; you are more likely to ignore or try to explain away negative behaviors. But you (or your friend) will be able to put up with only so much, and the friendship may last only until such an act of betrayal occurs that the situation has to be addressed and resolved or the friendship will end.

Friendships can certainly change in the level of intimacy, and expectations can be lowered about a friend, even if the friendship does not end completely, over betrayals, disappointments, or unmet expectations. That's what a 43-year-old market researcher found out when he gave a friend $150 to conduct interviews for a project on the researcher's behalf. Instead his best friend pocketed the money and never made good on his promise to do the work. Although the friendship hasn't ended, one wonders how close it is if they haven't seen each other "in many years."

Betrayal by a friend can even lead to the ultimate betrayal: murder. Twenty-six-year-old Don is married and a father. He is also serving 15 years to life for killing his best friend in an argument over Don's wife. "He had been dating my wife while I was out of town, and finally she ran away with him," Don notes.

Although not as drastic as murder, feeling miffed by a friend, even if it is a misunderstanding, can lead to extreme and even criminal acts. That's what seems to have happened to a 38-year-old married nurse whose friend at work "stabbed me in the back by spreading a false rumor about me which ingratiated her to the head nurse and which caused the head nurse to dislike me." Or the 49-year-old single woman whose jealous and angry friend "stole my jewelry."

Because of my extensive friendship research, writings, and expertise, as well as the workshops I facilitate and the lectures I deliver on friendship, I am often asked to appear on talk shows to discuss friendship. Journalists who are writing about the topic frequently interview me, and their many questions about recognizing, and coping with, negative friendships helped me to realize there was a need for this book. But I wanted to go even further: I wanted to help people to understand why they might select friends who eventually betray them, to reverse that pattern, and to address social trends that could be behind the fact that friendship betrayal seems to be more widespread than ever before.

I also wrote this book to help dispel the embarrassment and shame that too often accompany failed friendships. For some, admitting to a broken friendship has become like admitting to a failed marriage. It seems that, inspired by the very "pro-friendship" tone in writings and discussions about the topic over the last two decades, a myth of lifelong friendship has emerged, even as the ideal of a lifelong marriage has, sadly, become an unrealistic reality for many people.

The romanticized ideal that friendships should not end or fail may create unnecessary distress in those who should end a friendship but hold on, no matter what. They are clinging to the myth rather than understanding the relationship. But if neither all friendships nor all marriages last a lifetime, what's left to believe in that does?

The goal of When Friendship Hurts is to give you the tools to detect, and cope with, friendships that are destructive or harmful. I hope that reading it will give you greater insight into why friendships, especially your own or those of people close to you, may have ended or should have ended, and how to cope with these endings. Furthermore, if you have a habit of forming negative friendships, this book will help you to start choosing positive and healthy friends who will enrich your personal life and help you succeed faster and go further in your career.

There may even be current or past friendships in which, unwittingly or on purpose, you betrayed a friend. Understanding the impact of betrayal on the one who betrays, as well as on the one who is betrayed, can free up important emotional energy that otherwise may be drained by feelings of guilt, remorse, sadness, or associated emotions related to the betrayal. You can learn to forgive yourself, if you betrayed a friend; or if you were the betrayed one, you might consider how forgiving your betrayer might help you.

Most of us are blessed with supportive, caring, trustworthy friends. There are plenty of books available today that describe the process of forming and maintaining positive friendships, as well as extolling the benefits of friendship, including my own popular book, which takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws from sociology and psychology, Friendshifts™: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives.

But where can you turn for help if you feel a friend has betrayed you? Betrayal is when a friend, whom you counted on for support, love, affection, trust, loyalty, camaraderie, or respect, has somehow destroyed your trust. She may have violated a confidence or told a lie about you, harmed your other personal relationships, or even cost you your job. He may have failed to come through for you in your hour of emotional need, taken your money, stolen the affections of your romantic partner or your spouse, or, in the worst-case scenario, physically harmed you or even caused someone's death. Were these "friends" ever really friends? How could a "friend" commit such treacherous acts? Did this friendship start out as a destructive or harmful one, or become that way over time? Where did it take a wrong turn, and what do you do to end it, if ending is the best way of coping? If it started out that way, how can you learn to be a better judge of character early on so that you avoid befriending those who end up harming or betraying you?

In addition to answering those questions, another goal of this book is to help you to start asking your own questions about these issues, and finding your own answers. Some of you may be able to make this journey completely on your own; others may wish to get help along the way. If you do wish to seek outside help, in addition to asking others for referrals to professionals for one-on-one counseling or to self-help or professionally led groups, you can consult the Resources section in the back of this book, which provides a list of associations that offer referrals to local organizations or affiliated professionals.

Betrayal in friendship is a subject few people want to talk about openly, but one to which all of us can relate. But by offering anonymity and confidentiality, if necessary, I found men and women, boys and girls, who not only wanted to talk about betrayal but actually needed to talk about it as a necessary catharsis. In my most recent friendship survey, of the 171 people (out of 180) who responded to the question "Has a casual, close, or best friend ever betrayed you?" 116 (68 percent) answered "yes" and only 55 (32 percent) replied "no."

Betrayal can be defined as when a friend lets you down and is not there for you emotionally, or even literally: when a friend ends your friendship but you still want it to continue (and you sometimes may never find out why it ended). That is what happened to a young married woman from Colorado who wrote to me soon after watching an interview with me about friendship on a network morning talk show. I was discussing how friendships sometimes end, and that it's okay and normal for some friendships to end, especially if it's through no fault of your own. She was so moved that she sent me a "thank you" card, saying how much the point of view I had shared on the show had meant to her. She had been haunted by a friendship that ended although she never knew why. It actually kept her up at night.

If a friend ends a friendship and you are obsessed with not knowing why, you will probably have to deal with the reason for your obsession. In other words, you may never know the answer. (There is a discussion later in the book about how to get over obsessing about a failed friendship.)

But if it is you who decides to end a friendship, even a negative one, you should be careful to avoid possible vendettas. Remember that how you end a friendship may be as important as your decision to end it. That person who used to be your friend may at some point be in the position of deciding whether you get a raise, a major contract for your company, or a promotion at work.

Certainly, over the years, I have experienced the ending of several friendships that were extremely close. If I was the one to end it, I wondered if there was another way of handling the situation. If I was not, I felt confused, angry, and betrayed. So I have wanted to find answers to my own questions about betrayal in friendship, as well as evaluating the preferred way to deal with negative friendships that should end, if there is one.

I researched and wrote this book to answer my own questions as well as the ones that I am so frequently asked, through letters, e-mail, and even in the question-and-answer sessions following the talks I give on friendship: Why do friends do hurtful things to their friends? Why do friends betray each other? Why would someone get into a negative friendship? How do you get out of a destructive friendship? How do you find and cultivate positive friendships in your personal life and career?

How I attained my own metamorphosis to becoming a better friend, as well as all the original research and observations I have done over the last two decades, form the basis of this book. Just as my life — including my career, and all the relationships in my life, including friendship — has been enriched by what I have learned along the way about friendship, I hope to help you to reap the joys that healthy friendships will bring you. As you will see in reading When Friendship Hurts, sometimes the changes must start within us before we can expect anyone else, or our friendships, to change.

Excerpted from “When Friendship Hurts: How to Deal With Friends Who Betray, Abandon, or Wound You,” by Dr. Jan Yager. Copyright © 2006, By Dr. Jan Yager. All rights reserved. Published by No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

To read an excerpt of “Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives,” check out .

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Why betrayal of friends hurts so much

When we think of betrayal, we often think of betrayal in romantic relationships and marriages. While such betrayals are obviously very damaging to the victim, the betrayal of friends can be damaging as well. Yet, people don’t talk about it that often.

In this article, we’ll discuss the phenomenon of friendship betrayal. Focusing on the betrayal of friends is important because almost all relationships start out as friendships. If you can understand and deal with betrayal at the friendship level, you might handle it at the relationship level as well.

Betrayal and close relationships

We humans have certain needs that can only be met by forming close relationships and friendships with others. These are give-and-take relationships where we get benefits from others while simultaneously providing benefits to them.

For betrayal to happen, you have to first invest in the person. If you’re not invested at all in them, there’s no risk of betrayal.

A stranger is least likely to betray you. Even if they do, it doesn’t hurt as much as a betrayal coming from a close friend. Your enemies can’t betray you. You’re not invested in these people. You don’t trust them to begin with.

In friendships, however, you invest your time, energy and resources. You only do that because you expect things from them in return. If you get very little or nothing back, you feel betrayed.

The psychological experience of betrayal

The degree of hurt you feel when you’re betrayed is proportional to how much you were invested in the friendship. The feelings of hurt are there to motivate you to re-evaluate your relationship with the betrayer.

You can’t keep on investing in a person, getting no returns. When you feel bad after someone betrays you, your mind is basically giving you a chance to redirect your investments elsewhere.

Our ancestors who didn’t evolve such a mechanism would have kept investing in non-fruitful friendships and alliances at their own expense.

Therefore, we have this cheater-detector mechanism in our minds that is sensitive to cues of betrayal. 1

In other words, even if we get a whiff of betrayal in a close relationship, we’re likely to jump on it. Letting such instances pass would have been too costly for our ancestors.

In short, we enter friendships with certain expectations. We invest in the other person and try to cultivate trust. When that trust is violated, we feel betrayed. The feelings of betrayal motivate us to avoid future betrayals from the same person and redirect our investments elsewhere.

Intentional vs unintentional betrayal

Just because you feel betrayed doesn’t necessarily mean your friend intentionally betrayed you. As mentioned in the previous section, our cheater-detector mechanism is highly active and ready to jump on and call out instances of betrayal. It just wants to protect us.

However, it’s crucial to differentiate between intentional and unintentional betrayal. Only when you can be sure that your friend has intentionally betrayed you should you consider a course of action like terminating your friendship with them.

Before that, you have to give them a chance to explain their side of the story. Of course, this might give them a chance to lie or make up excuses. But if their story holds up, it’s more likely that you were too quick to doubt them.

That is likely to be the case if they’ve had an excellent track record with you. You’ve had no reason to doubt them in the past. If you often find yourself doubting that person, it’s likely that they’re dishonest. The frequency matters here.

A study asked people to describe instances where they betrayed others and instances where they were betrayed. When the subjects talked about instances where they betrayed the other person, they mostly blamed themselves but not their stable personality traits. 2

They attributed their betrayal to their temporary mental and emotional states. For example, “I was going through a rough period” or “I couldn’t resist the temptation” or “I was intoxicated”.

In contrast, when describing episodes where they were betrayed, they mostly blamed the other person’s stable personality traits . For example, “They have an inherent weakness” or “They have no self-control” or “They lack principles”.

This is why, before accusing someone of betrayal, one should always seek to collect as much information about the situation as possible.

The challenge of friendship and betrayal

One could live in a cave somewhere and totally eliminate the risk of being betrayed, ever. Some people do just that. For most of us, that isn’t an option because we’re willing to risk betrayal to have our important needs met by others.

The challenge of friendship and betrayal is this:

On one hand, we want to get close to a person to have our companionship and intimacy needs met. On the other hand, the closer we get to someone, the more power give them to betray us.

You can’t really get close to someone if you don’t share your life, secrets, and vulnerabilities with them. 3

Yet, when they betray you, they’re likely to use those very things against you.

Hence, knowing how to protect yourself from the betrayal of friends is one of the most important life skills you can learn.

How to protect yourself from betrayal

Your friend is likely to betray you when they believe they have more to gain from the betrayal than from your friendship. If you can tweak this simple math in your favor, you can significantly reduce your chances of getting betrayed.

Here are some things you can do to reduce the chances of getting betrayed:

1. Have a solid ground for friendship

What’s your friendship based on? I hope you’ve already disabused yourself of the notion of unconditional friendship. There’s simply no such thing.

You probably made this person your friend because you hoped to get something from them. You probably saw them as someone who could help you meet your important needs.

They did the same. They thought they could gain something valuable from you. It’s often hard to pinpoint what mutual benefits a friendship might be based on.

Maybe your friend thought you were smart and could help him with assignments. Maybe your friend thought you’re funny and would make them feel good.

There are many benefits people can gain by being in friendships. These benefits are often comparable in magnitude. In other words, one can’t give their friend much more than they get. This is why you don’t see the rich being friends with the poor. Sure, they might help the poor with charity and stuff, but from a distance.

If a rich person did become friends with a poor person, the latter will gain much more from the friendship than they can give. This imbalance is what makes such friendships extremely rare.

Anyway, the key to avoiding betrayal is to give your friend something they can’t gain elsewhere. If they mainly became your friend because you could help them with studying, then as soon as they graduate, they have no reason to continue being your friend.

In contrast, a friendship that is built on more lasting foundations such as personality traits, shared values, beliefs, and interests is likely to last long. There is minimal risk of betrayal here because you can continue giving them what they want as long as you continue being who you are.

It’s unlikely that your personality will undergo a drastic change. Or that they’ll come across another person who’s just like you- has your unique combination of personality, values, and interests.

By looking for such a solid ground for friendship, you can get better at choosing friends from the outset. Prevention is always better than cure.

2. Be mindful of the shadow of the future

If your newly-made friend knows they won’t interact very much with you in the future, the odds of them betraying you shoot up. Although betrayal does happen in old friendships, new friendships are a breeding ground for betrayal.

If your friendship has a short shadow of the future, your friend can easily get away with betraying you. When they believe they can minimize the costs of betraying you by not interacting with you in the future, they’d be more willing to betray you.

This is one reason people who’ve been betrayed and do nothing to punish those betrayers are likely to get betrayed again and again. They’re basically putting a message out there that they’re okay with being betrayed. This encourages potential betrayers even more because they know that the costs of betraying will be low.

When making new friends, it’s a good idea to give some thought to whether it has the potential to last. If it doesn’t, you might only expose yourself to betrayal.

3. Calibrate your opening up to people

You can’t go around opening yourself up to people. You can’t blindly trust everyone. I know this is the age of sharing, social media and public personal lives, but oversharing exposes you to betrayal.

If you’re like most people, you come across a person you’d like to be friends with, and you open yourself up to them. You hope that the other person will also open themselves up to you.  

This is a risky strategy. You may find that you’ve opened yourself up to this person, but they haven’t, not nearly to the same extent. Now, if the friendship turns sour, you’ve given them all the weapons to destroy you.

“It’s hard to tell who has your back from who has it long enough just to stab you in it.” – Nicole Richie

Ideally, you want them to open up first and then calibrate your opening up to their opening up. If they reveal little to you, you do the same. If they reveal a lot, you do too. Your revelations should follow theirs. This way, you’ll always be one step ahead of them.

If the friendship turns sour and they threaten to release your secrets out into the world, you’ll have a whole lot of their secrets to reveal as well. This strategy immunizes you to betrayal.

The only problem with this approach is that you may not come across many people willing to open themselves up to you. I think that’s a good thing because this way you’ll steer clear of most betrayers. Sure, you might end up with fewer friends, but at least you can count on them.

The good news is that if someone makes the effort to open up to you and tries to cultivate trust with you, they’re least likely to betray you. Generally, the more trusting a person is, the less likely they are to break others’ trust. 4

If you still want to open yourself up first because you really like the person, you should at least be mindful of how much they’re reciprocating. Don’t open yourself up all at once, but gradually, making sure the other person is reciprocating.

Ultimately, however, you should always seek to balance the friendship. You know, make it an equal give-and-take. The best friendships are balanced. They don’t have an imbalance of giving and taking, sharing, and revealing vulnerabilities.

• Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange.  The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture ,  163 , 163-228.
• Jones, W. H., Couch, L., & Scott, S. (1997). Trust and betrayal: The psychology of getting along and getting ahead. In  Handbook of personality psychology  (pp. 465-482). Academic Press.
• Rempel, J. K., Holmes, J. G., & Zanna, M. P. (1985). Trust in close relationships.  Journal of personality and social psychology ,  49 (1), 95.
• Rotter, J. B. (1980). Interpersonal trust, trustworthiness, and gullibility.  American psychologist ,  35 (1), 1.

Hi, I’m Hanan Parvez (MA Psychology). I’ve published over 500 articles and authored one book. My work has been featured in Forbes , Business Insider , Reader’s Digest , and Entrepreneur .

13 Steps To Dealing With Betrayal And Getting Over The Hurt

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You’re feeling betrayed. Someone you care about, perhaps even love has broken the bonds of trust and done something that cuts deep at your heart.

What do you do? How can you get past this betrayal and heal? Will you ever be able to forgive them for what they have done?

Whether it’s a betrayal by a family member, best friend, partner, or someone else entirely, the steps you might take to get over the hurt caused are roughly the same.

8 Steps To Dealing With The Immediate Aftermath Of A Betrayal

1. name your feelings..

Betrayal is an act. The emotions that result from it are what we mean when we say we’re “feeling betrayed.”

In order to start recovering from the act, you must be more specific about the feelings it has given rise to.

Some of the more common ones you might encounter are:

Anger – you’ve been hurt and one of the most natural feelings in such situations is anger. “How dare they?! How could they?! They’ll pay for this!”

Sadness – you might become very low, weepy even when you discover a betrayal. This might be because you feel a sense of loss; a loss of trust, a loss of the person you thought they were, a loss of the happy memories you have of them, a loss of the future you saw with them.

Surprise – yes, you are probably shocked to find out that this person or persons have betrayed you. You might not have had any inkling that this was likely.

Fear – you may worry about the consequences of this betrayal. It might mean major upheaval in your life and these unknowns scare you.

Disgust – you can’t even bear to think about it or them because it makes your stomach churn.

Insecurity – you may question yourself and doubt whether you are worthy of love and care. After all, the person who betrayed you clearly felt you weren’t.

Shame – you may blame yourself and feel ashamed by what has happened and how others may now see and treat you.

Loneliness – this is your betrayal and nobody else’s. “How could they possibly understand?”

Confusion – you may simply not be able to comprehend what’s happened? None of it seems to make any sense to you.

It is an important step to identify what it is you are feeling at any given time. You may feel many or all of these after a betrayal – most likely a few at a time and swinging back and forth as you process them.

For instance, surprise and confusion might be the first things you feel, which then give way to anger and disgust or sadness and fear. You may then return to surprise tinged with shame.

There won’t be a clear or uniform progression from one to the other, but rather a turbulent maelstrom of emotion.

2. Resist retaliating.

With some betrayals, you may experience an overwhelming urge to retaliate.

You may be feeling angry about what happened and you may feel like they deserve punishment, but rarely is this ever a productive endeavor.

If there’s one way to prolong the hurt and delay the healing process, it’s by plotting and planning your revenge.

Consider the analogy of betrayal as a cut or gash in your bodily flesh. A scab soon forms over the wound, but there is often a desire to prod it and pick at it. It’s itchy, it’s sore, and you feel the need to do something about it.

Yet, you know from experience that the more you touch and pick at a scab, the longer it stays and the more likely it is to leave a scar.

Retaliation is a bit like picking a scab: it’ll only uncover the wound once more and cause you further pain. And the more you do it (even the more you think about doing it), the more likely you are to carry that pain with you for the rest of your life.

Resist the temptation to get your own back. The feelings will eventually fade and pass and you’ll be glad you held off from inflicting similar suffering on your betrayer.

3. Take time away.

When you’ve been betrayed by someone, the best short term solution is to avoid them as much as physically – and electronically – possible.

That means not seeing them, not messaging them, not checking their social media every 5 minutes.

Think of those feelings we talked about above as being fuelled by a fire. At first, the fire burns strong and the feelings glow white hot in the flames.

The most combustible fuel for that fire is contact with the one(s) who betrayed you. Thus, in order for the fire to burn out, you must stop adding fuel to it.

You must take some time away and break ties with that person.

Now, if they try to contact you (and they probably will), you can just tell them in a calm manner that you need some time and space to deal with what they’ve done. Ask them to respect your wishes and leave you be.

Your emotions will eventually begin to fade as the fire becomes mere embers. Now you’ll be in a much better position to think clearly and process the events and decide what to do next.

4. Talk to a third party.

In these situations, it can help to talk through the incident and the feelings you have about it with a trusted confidant.

It can be cathartic to express your emotions outwardly and tell another soul what is going on inside your head and heart right now.

The crucial thing, though, is to talk to someone who is able to remain fairly neutral.

The reason for this is that they will be able to offer honest advice and constructive feedback about your plan for dealing with the situation.

What you don’t want is a yes man or woman who will gee you on as you rant and rave about your betrayer and add fuel to that fire we spoke about earlier. This may feel good at the time, but it will not help you work through your feelings.

If you don’t have anyone you can talk to about this, we’d recommend speaking to a relationship expert from Relationship Hero who can offer the ear you need and the advice you are seeking. Chat to one right now to get compassionate and thoughtful advice.

5. Examine the betrayal.

People do hurtful things for all sorts of reasons and it might help for you to think about how this betrayal came about.

Was it carelessness? Was it caused by weakness? Or was it a deliberate, conscious act?

We all sometimes say or do something in a split second and instantly regret it. A careless act of betrayal such as revealing personal information someone told you in confidence is no doubt hurtful, but it is somewhat forgivable.

It can be easy, when involved in a conversation, to not be 100% focused on the importance of what you’re saying and things really can “slip out” by accident.

Of course, the greater the significance of the information, the less easy it is to believe that your betrayer revealed it by mistake. Some secrets just don’t come out naturally in conversation.

The next level up from a careless betrayal is one that comes about due to someone’s weakness .

Some people find it incredibly difficult to control certain urges, even if they have promised you that they would.

Addictions are a good example of this. You may, for example, feel betrayed that a partner or family member has said they will give up drinking, only to find out that they’ve been doing it behind your back and lying to you about it .

Other people may find it almost impossible to keep what you tell them confidential. They just have to talk to someone about it, perhaps as a means of processing their own emotions on the matter.

It still stings when you find out, but perhaps you can have some sympathy.

Then there are betrayals that are plain and simple deliberate acts, either of malice, opportunism, or heartless indifference.

Perhaps the office gossip overheard you talking about a particularly difficult time in your life, and they proceed to tell anyone who will listen about your private business.

Or maybe your partner cheats on you, a family member belittles you in front of your children, or a business partner reneges on a deal you had agreed.

These acts are taken consciously with little consideration of how you might feel. They are often driven by selfishness.

Understanding which of these is most true in your case can help you to overcome the negative emotions and move past the incident.

6. Examine the relationship.

Someone you care about has hurt you, but just how much emotional pain are you in?

It all depends on the closeness of that relationship. After a betrayal, you’ll probably find yourself asking just how much that person means to you.

Betrayal by a friend who you’ve drifted apart from and who you now see no more than once or twice a year is going to feel very different to betrayal by a spouse or parent who is very much a major part of your life.

How much you value the relationship will determine whether you choose to keep that person in your life or ditch them for good (which we’ll talk more about later).

7. Speak to the person who betrayed you.

This is a big step and one that requires some guts and determination to take. But what do you say to someone who has betrayed you?

Well, when you feel ready, it is worth speaking to them and communicating how their actions made you feel then , and how you still feel about it now .

One crucial tip is to structure what you have to say in a way that focuses on you and not them. This way, you can avoid putting them on the defensive and keep the conversation amicable.

So, start your sentences with “I” and try to stick to the facts. Saying, “I felt shocked and angry when you…” is better than saying, “You betrayed me by…”

Be specific. You should have a handle on all the different emotions that you experienced if you named each one as we advised above; use these words to convey the impact this person’s actions had on you.

Not only that, but be specific about what it was exactly that hurt you the most. Is it that you no longer feel able to trust them or have their actions caused repercussions in other parts of your life?

Put it all together and you might say, as an example, “I felt very ashamed, alone, and scared when you let slip about my pregnancy to our colleagues – it has put me in a difficult position with the boss and I’m worried about my future job security.”

If it helps you to put your thoughts and feelings into words, you might also consider writing a letter to those who have hurt you . You can either give it to them to read, or read it out to them. This is especially useful if you get flustered in situations where you have to confront someone face-to-face.

8. Cut ties with repeat offenders.

Whether you choose to forgive a betrayal and maintain the relationship will come down to a lot of things: the severity of it, how much you value the relationship, and the way the betrayal went down (see point 4), among others.

One thing to bear in mind, however, is whether or not this was the first time they have done something like this to you – or indeed to other people you may know about.

If someone has hurt you before, or if they have form that you are aware of, you should strongly consider whether keeping this person in your life is best for you (and best for other important people in your life such as children).

Generally speaking, the second strike will put so much more strain on the relationship and your interactions with each other that it is best to call time right then and there.

A third strike or more and you’re straying into the territory of enabling them. Reach this point and they will think they can betray you and get away with it.

5 Steps To Getting Over A Betrayal

When you feel betrayed, it’s not something that can be dealt with too quickly. You need time to process everything that has happened and this will vary depending on the specific events.

At first, you just have to do your best to cope with the storm of emotions inside while maintaining some semblance of a normal life. After all, you still have responsibilities to take care of.

In time, you’ll find you overcome the initial shock and start to heal your emotional wounds. There are certain things you can do to help with this.

1. Reflect on yourself.

When the dust has settled a little bit and your feelings are less raw, you might benefit from a period of introspection.

This is a time when you look inward and try to understand the betrayal, the aftermath, and the longer-term consequences in your life.

You might want to reflect on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors immediately after you were betrayed, and consider how you might try to avoid similar situations in future (or act differently if you do encounter one).

To get the most benefit from this, some psychologists suggest that you focus on asking what -based questions instead of why -based ones.

The theory, as summarized nicely in this article , goes that asking why something happened or why you felt or acted in such a way, keeps you trapped in the past, ruminating over events.

It may also instill a victim mentality whereby you focus on what has been done to you and who is to blame for it.

What , on the other hand, is a more proactive question: what am I feeling, what are my options, and what will really matter 5 years from now?

These are all forward thinking questions that can lead you away from the betrayal and toward a place where you can heal and recover.

So reflect, by all means, but try to make it productive reflection that doesn’t dwell too much, but seeks to move on.

You may have to address any obsessive thoughts you are having about the act of betrayal itself. After all, you probably have lots of questions about what happened, how it happened, and why it happened.

But unless you can realistically get answers to those questions, thinking about them over and over will only keep you stuck in the emotionally painful state you’re in now.

Stick to questions about you and how you responded to the betrayal – you can find answers to those.

2. Try to be realistic about the relationship.

Avoid idolizing the past as some perfect moment in time when everything was well in the world. Be realistic and accept that problems existed in your relationship before the betrayal took place.

This softens the blow somewhat because you won’t feel like you have lost some idyllic life with this person. You will acknowledge that you were probably going through a rough patch when this happened.

Part of the process of getting over what happened is to grieve. In some cases, that might mean grieving the relationship that has ended. In others, it might mean grieving the future you had imagined for yourself and this other person, regardless of whether you have managed to save the relationship.

This will involve anger and sadness certainly, but lots of other feelings too. You may even slip into a temporary depression. You need to feel these feelings rather than suppressing them.

You’ll need to accept that what happened happened. This doesn’t mean you have to be okay with it, but you do need to acknowledge that the act took place and that it led to a great deal of hurt.

3. See if you can forgive your betrayer.

It may not feel possible right now, but you should try to eventually forgive the person who betrayed you. Forgiveness isn’t for them; it’s for you. Forgiving them doesn’t say that you are okay with what they did; it says that you wish to release your hurt surrounding it.

Forgiveness involves deciding that it is better to move past the hurt than to let it consume you and poison your future. It also requires you to release any ill-feeling you may have toward the person who betrayed you.

It will take work and time and it won’t always be smooth sailing. You may think you have forgiven them, only to find that you are still harboring anger or resentment.

An important part of forgiving someone is to try to empathize with them and see their flaws as a part of their being human. You might wish to reflect on your own flaws to bridge the gap between you and them. You might not have betrayed anyone like they betrayed you, but you have undoubtedly hurt others through your actions.

Eventually, you’ll be able to consign the betrayal to your past… at least for the most part. You may never be able to let go of it entirely, but it will no longer affect your life in any great way. You may even be able to see it as an important moment in your life or your relationship that has benefits in the long run.

If you’d like more detail about forgiveness, you can read these two articles:

How To Forgive Someone: 2 Science-Based Models Of Forgiveness

17 Steps To Forgive A Cheating Partner And Get Over Infidelity

4. Take care of yourself.

‘Take care of yourself’ may sound like stale and tired advice that is given for every ill and woe there ever was. But it’s given so much for a reason – you heal much faster if you treat you body and mind with kindness.

By eating well, getting regular exercise, ensuring you get enough sleep, and spending time doing things you enjoy, you will feel better about yourself and about the situation.

That’s not to say that you can’t sit in your bed for a few days eating ice cream and chocolate, but don’t allow yourself to stay there. You have to say enough is enough and get back to your life and to doing the things that will generate those feel-good chemicals in your brain.

5. Get help.

If you find that you are unable to move past the pain or get thoughts of the betrayal out of your head, you may be suffering from betrayal trauma. This can happen in any kind of betrayal but is most common in betrayals that happen during childhood or that involve adultery.

If your behaviors have changed since the betrayal and they are affecting your day-to-day life in noticeable ways, you should seek professional help to overcome it.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What kinds of behaviors can feel like betrayal.

Not all betrayals look the same. Not all betrayals feel the same. Here are just some of the things that you might feel as betrayal:

Sexual infidelity: adultery is often the first thing that springs to mind when you think of a betrayal in a relationship. It’s a very difficult one to take.

Emotional affairs: even if no physical act took place, if your partner shares intimate feelings and vulnerability with someone else, it can be just as painful as adultery.

Lying: when you trust someone and they lie to you or conceal the full truth, it can break that trust and create feelings of alienation between you.

Breaking promises: much like lying, when a promise is broken, it can impact how and whether you can trust that person’s word again.

Siding with someone else on an important matter: you can have different views to someone and still love and care for them. But if they side with someone else on a matter where you thought you were one mind, where you thought they had your back, it can be difficult to accept.

Backstabbing: when someone you thought was a friend (that could also be a family member or partner) is kind to your face but then disrespects you behind your back, it will cut deep.

Not being present in the relationship: if you think you are in a relationship with someone but they do not act like you are, it can be confusing and very lonely. It can feel like they have broken the unspoken agreement you had for the relationship or even the marriage vows you spoken openly to one another.

Not being there when you need them: if you face a difficult time and you thought you could rely on this person to support you through it, and then they are nowhere to be seen or offer no help whatsoever, it can feel like a betrayal.  

What are the possible consequences of betrayal on the person who was betrayed?

Experiencing a betrayal can have wide-ranging negative effects. It is good to be aware of these things so that you can link them to the betrayal when you work to overcome them.

These things include:

• trust issues
• jealousy in future relationships or the current relationship
• feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem and self-worth, or an inferiority complex
• intrusive thoughts
• trouble managing emotions
• suppressing emotions
• attachment issues
• substance abuse
• eating disorders
• suspicion, paranoia, and hypervigilance
• guilt and shame
• betrayal blindness (overlooking potential red flags in current or future relationships in order to maintain that relationship)

How can I tell if the other person is truly sorry?

When a person has betrayed you, you will naturally expect an apology from them. But how can you tell if that apology is genuine?

It comes down to how that person acts and how they view the betrayal. If a person is truly sorry, they will:

• acknowledge their actions, share the full extent of them openly, and give a specific apology for them
• accept responsibility for their actions and not seek to justify them
• understand how they hurt you and why what they did was wrong
• demonstrate remorse through their body language and how they speak
• try to make things right in whatever way they feel they can
• try to improve their communication with you, which may involve being more open and vulnerable about how they are feeling
• try to make better choices going forward

The other person refuses to apologize. What should I do?

If the person who betrayed you offers no apology and refuses to take the blame for what they did – and you’ve given them plenty of time and ample opportunity to do so – you’ve got a lot of thinking to do.

If it’s a romantic relationship, you should consider breaking up with them, though it depends on the seriousness of the betrayal. Perhaps they will eventually come to accept the role they played in events and apologize, but they may not. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to be with someone who treats you that way and doesn’t even show remorse for it.

If it’s a friendship, you might also wish to consider whether this person deserves a place in your life going forward. Not all friendships need to last.

And it it’s a family member, you can still consider how much time you dedicate to that relationship. You can be civil and engage in polite conversation during family gatherings, but you needn’t put a lot of effort into repairing the damage if they aren’t prepared to take some blame for what happened. You don’t get to choose your family, but you do get to choose how you approach your relationships with them.

There are some people who simply cannot apologize or accept blame for any wrongdoing whatsoever. Those with narcissistic personality disorder, for example, will never be able to offer you the closure you need, so it is better to cut ties with them altogether where possible.

You may also like:

• 8 Ways Lying Is Poisonous To Relationships
• How To Cope When Someone Cheats On You
• 10 Telling Signs Someone Has Commitment Issues
• 7 Signs Of Fake Friends: How To Spot One A Mile Off
• How To Deal With Emotionally Unintelligent People
• Codependency Vs Caring: Differentiating Between The Harmful And The Helpful

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An open letter to the best friend who betrayed me, this is an open letter to the first close friend to stab me in the back..

It’s been awhile since we’ve spoken. I would like to be able to say that I’m not still angry and hurt by what you did, but that would be a lie. You were my best friend, we literally did everything together. Everybody knew that wherever one of us went the other was there too. Do you remember hanging out after school in your room? You would do my makeup and hair, because I’ve always been terrible at both. We would make videos together that were downright spastic. If anyone had witnessed our shenanigans, they would think we were insane. We had a bucket load of inside jokes and code words so we could talk about people without anyone knowing. Yes, most of the time we did act insane but it was ok because we were insane together.

Our friendship wasn’t perfect. We were both selfish, always out for our own gain rather than being there for each other. We had our differences, and boy were we different in some ways. I was a lot more quiet and reserved around strangers, while you had a constant loud and vibrant personality. I cared a lot more about my studies than you did. You saw things as black and white and I could see gray. You were quick tempered and I was more controlled.We always envied each other. I envied your natural ability to charm anyone you met, and you envied my confidence. Nevertheless, at one time we were true friends and we loved each other like sisters. We told each other everything and we were each others back bone. I taught you how to be tougher and you taught me how to be more outgoing. It meant something to me, and I guess I thought it did to you too.

When I learned that it was you that had cost me all my friends and my reputation, I was stunned. What had I done that was so terrible to you, that you could go behind my back and lie about me? It was the first time that anyone I had genuinely trusted betrayed me so brutally. Every single secret, every single aspect of my personality, everything I’d ever said or done was exposed for all the world to see. I was stripped to the bone in front of the entire student body. When you learned the popularity trash talking could earn you, you went rampant. All you ever wanted was to be like the popular crowd at our high school, that’s something you told me. When the opportunity presented itself you went for it, even if though it meant hurting a person who would never hurt you. So you spread lies, vicious lies that circulated like wildfire. You completely dismantled my reputation, and stuck knives so deep into my back I’m still pulling them out to this day. It ruined my concept of friendship. I have a hard time trusting any friend now a days and I will never blindly trust the way I did with you again.

It’s been two years since our falling out and the only thing I have to ask you now is, was it worth it? You threw away all those moments we spent together, all the laughs, all the tears. Every memory we’d ever had together went from a memory of happiness to a memory of anger and pain. Do you remember a couple weeks prior to this when we went to some Italian fair in NYC with your family, and afterwards we felt closer than ever? Do you remember all those times you confided in me your deepest secrets and I returned with no judgement? You threw it all away for a bunch of fake friends, who in the end wound up leaving you the way I never would. You wound up sitting alone at lunch. You wound up with your only friends being in another state because no one in our town would associate you. If you hadn’t done what you did I would feel sorry for you. If you hadn’t done what you did I would still be your best friend now. So was destroying your best friends life worth your 15 seconds of fame?

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25 beatles lyrics: your go-to guide for every situation, the best lines from the fab four.

For as long as I can remember, I have been listening to The Beatles. Every year, my mom would appropriately blast “Birthday” on anyone’s birthday. I knew all of the words to “Back In The U.S.S.R” by the time I was 5 (Even though I had no idea what or where the U.S.S.R was). I grew up with John, Paul, George, and Ringo instead Justin, JC, Joey, Chris and Lance (I had to google N*SYNC to remember their names). The highlight of my short life was Paul McCartney in concert twice. I’m not someone to “fangirl” but those days I fangirled hard. The music of The Beatles has gotten me through everything. Their songs have brought me more joy, peace, and comfort. I can listen to them in any situation and find what I need. Here are the best lyrics from The Beatles for every and any occasion.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

The End- Abbey Road, 1969

The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful and so are you

Dear Prudence- The White Album, 1968

Love is old, love is new, love is all, love is you

Because- Abbey Road, 1969

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be

All You Need Is Love, 1967

Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend

We Can Work It Out- Rubber Soul, 1965

He say, "I know you, you know me", One thing I can tell you is you got to be free

Come Together- Abbey Road, 1969

Oh please, say to me, You'll let me be your man. And please say to me, You'll let me hold your hand

I Wanna Hold Your Hand- Meet The Beatles!, 1964

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. They've been going in and out of style, but they're guaranteed to raise a smile

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-1967

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see

Strawberry Fields Forever- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Can you hear me? When it rains and shine, it's just a state of mind

Rain- Paperback Writer "B" side, 1966

Little darling, it's been long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it' s been here. Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun, and I say it's alright

Here Comes The Sun- Abbey Road, 1969

We danced through the night and we held each other tight, and before too long I fell in love with her. Now, I'll never dance with another when I saw her standing there

Saw Her Standing There- Please Please Me, 1963

I love you, I love you, I love you, that's all I want to say

Michelle- Rubber Soul, 1965

You say you want a revolution. Well you know, we all want to change the world

Revolution- The Beatles, 1968

All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong

Eleanor Rigby- Revolver, 1966

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

With A Little Help From My Friends- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better

Hey Jude, 1968

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday

Yesterday- Help!, 1965

And when the brokenhearted people, living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.

Let It Be- Let It Be, 1970

And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain. Don't carry the world upon your shoulders

I'll give you all i got to give if you say you'll love me too. i may not have a lot to give but what i got i'll give to you. i don't care too much for money. money can't buy me love.

Can't Buy Me Love- A Hard Day's Night, 1964

All you need is love, love is all you need

All You Need Is Love- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird- The White Album, 1968

Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more

In My Life- Rubber Soul, 1965

While these are my 25 favorites, there are quite literally 1000s that could have been included. The Beatles' body of work is massive and there is something for everyone. If you have been living under a rock and haven't discovered the Fab Four, you have to get musically educated. Stream them on Spotify, find them on iTunes or even buy a CD or record (Yes, those still exist!). I would suggest starting with 1, which is a collection of most of their #1 songs, or the 1968 White Album. Give them chance and you'll never look back.

14 Invisible Activities: Unleash Your Inner Ghost!

Obviously the best superpower..

The best superpower ever? Being invisible of course. Imagine just being able to go from seen to unseen on a dime. Who wouldn't want to have the opportunity to be invisible? Superman and Batman have nothing on being invisible with their superhero abilities. Here are some things that you could do while being invisible, because being invisible can benefit your social life too.

1. "Haunt" your friends.

Follow them into their house and cause a ruckus.

2. Sneak into movie theaters.

Going to the cinema alone is good for your mental health , says science

Considering that the monthly cost of subscribing to a media-streaming service like Netflix is oft...

Free movies...what else to I have to say?

3. Sneak into the pantry and grab a snack without judgment.

Late night snacks all you want? Duh.

4. Reenact "Hollow Man" and play Kevin Bacon.

America's favorite son? And feel what it's like to be in a MTV Movie Award nominated film? Sign me up.

5. Wear a mask and pretend to be a floating head.

Just another way to spook your friends in case you wanted to.

6. Hold objects so they'll "float."

"Oh no! A floating jar of peanut butter."

7. Win every game of hide-and-seek.

Just stand out in the open and you'll win.

8. Eat some food as people will watch it disappear.

Even everyday activities can be funny.

9. Go around pantsing your friends.

Even pranks can be done; not everything can be good.

10. Not have perfect attendance.

You'll say here, but they won't see you...

11. Avoid anyone you don't want to see.

Whether it's an ex or someone you hate, just use your invisibility to slip out of the situation.

12. Avoid responsibilities.

Chores? Invisible. People asking about social life? Invisible. Family being rude? Boom, invisible.

13. Be an expert on ding-dong-ditch.

Never get caught and have the adrenaline rush? I'm down.

14. Brag about being invisible.

Be the envy of the town.

But don't, I repeat, don't go in a locker room. Don't be a pervert with your power. No one likes a Peeping Tom.

Good luck, folks.

19 Lessons I'll Never Forget from Growing Up In a Small Town

There have been many lessons learned..

Small towns certainly have their pros and cons. Many people who grow up in small towns find themselves counting the days until they get to escape their roots and plant new ones in bigger, "better" places. And that's fine. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought those same thoughts before too. We all have, but they say it's important to remember where you came from. When I think about where I come from, I can't help having an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for my roots. Being from a small town has taught me so many important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

1. The importance of traditions.

Sometimes traditions seem like a silly thing, but the fact of it is that it's part of who you are. You grew up this way and, more than likely, so did your parents. It is something that is part of your family history and that is more important than anything.

2. How to be thankful for family and friends.

No matter how many times they get on your nerves or make you mad, they are the ones who will always be there and you should never take that for granted.

3. How to give back.

When tragedy strikes in a small town, everyone feels obligated to help out because, whether directly or indirectly, it affects you too. It is easy in a bigger city to be able to disconnect from certain problems. But in a small town those problems affect everyone.

4. What the word "community" really means.

Along the same lines as #3, everyone is always ready and willing to lend a helping hand when you need one in a small town and to me that is the true meaning of community. It's working together to build a better atmosphere, being there to raise each other up, build each other up, and pick each other up when someone is in need. A small town community is full of endless support whether it be after a tragedy or at a hometown sports game. Everyone shows up to show their support.

5. That it isn't about the destination, but the journey.

People say this to others all the time, but it takes on a whole new meaning in a small town. It is true that life is about the journey, but when you're from a small town, you know it's about the journey because the journey probably takes longer than you spend at the destination. Everything is so far away that it is totally normal to spend a couple hours in the car on your way to some form of entertainment. And most of the time, you're gonna have as many, if not more, memories and laughs on the journey than at the destination.

6. The consequences of making bad choices.

Word travels fast in a small town, so don't think you're gonna get away with anything. In fact, your parents probably know what you did before you even have a chance to get home and tell them. And forget about being scared of what your teacher, principle, or other authority figure is going to do, you're more afraid of what your parents are gonna do when you get home.

7. To trust people, until you have a reason not to.

Everyone deserves a chance. Most people don't have ill-intentions and you can't live your life guarding against every one else just because a few people in your life have betrayed your trust.

8. To be welcoming and accepting of everyone.

While small towns are not always extremely diverse, they do contain people with a lot of different stories, struggle, and backgrounds. In a small town, it is pretty hard to exclude anyone because of who they are or what they come from because there aren't many people to choose from. A small town teaches you that just because someone isn't the same as you, doesn't mean you can't be great friends.

9. How to be my own, individual person.

In a small town, you learn that it's okay to be who you are and do your own thing. You learn that confidence isn't how beautiful you are or how much money you have, it's who you are on the inside.

10. How to work for what I want.

Nothing comes easy in life. They always say "gardens don't grow overnight" and if you're from a small town you know this both figuratively and literally. You certainly know gardens don't grow overnight because you've worked in a garden or two. But you also know that to get to the place you want to be in life it takes work and effort. It doesn't just happen because you want it to.

11. How to be great at giving directions.

If you're from a small town, you know that you will probably only meet a handful of people in your life who ACTUALLY know where your town is. And forget about the people who accidentally enter into your town because of google maps. You've gotten really good at giving them directions right back to the interstate.

12. How to be humble .

My small town has definitely taught me how to be humble. It isn't always about you, and anyone who grows up in a small town knows that. Everyone gets their moment in the spotlight, and since there's so few of us, we're probably best friends with everyone so we are as excited when they get their moment of fame as we are when we get ours.

13. To be well-rounded.

Going to a small town high school definitely made me well-rounded. There isn't enough kids in the school to fill up all the clubs and sports teams individually so be ready to be a part of them all.

14. How to be great at conflict resolution.

In a small town, good luck holding a grudge. In a bigger city you can just avoid a person you don't like or who you've had problems with. But not in a small town. You better resolve the issue fast because you're bound to see them at least 5 times a week.

15. The beauty of getting outside and exploring.

One of my favorite things about growing up in a rural area was being able to go outside and go exploring and not have to worry about being in danger. There is nothing more exciting then finding a new place somewhere in town or in the woods and just spending time there enjoying the natural beauty around you.

16. To be prepared for anything.

You never know what may happen. If you get a flat tire, you better know how to change it yourself because you never know if you will be able to get ahold of someone else to come fix it. Mechanics might be too busy , or more than likely you won't even have enough cell service to call one.

17. That you don't always have to do it alone.

It's okay to ask for help. One thing I realized when I moved away from my town for college, was how much my town has taught me that I could ask for help is I needed it. I got into a couple situations outside of my town where I couldn't find anyone to help me and found myself thinking, if I was in my town there would be tons of people ready to help me. And even though I couldn't find anyone to help, you better believe I wasn't afraid to ask.

18. How to be creative.

When you're at least an hour away from normal forms of entertainment such as movie theaters and malls, you learn to get real creative in entertaining yourself. Whether it be a night looking at the stars in the bed of a pickup truck or having a movie marathon in a blanket fort at home, you know how to make your own good time.

19. To brush off gossip.

It's all about knowing the person you are and not letting others influence your opinion of yourself. In small towns, there is plenty of gossip. But as long as you know who you really are, it will always blow over.

Grateful Beyond Words: A Letter to My Inspiration

I have never been so thankful to know you..

I can't say "thank you" enough to express how grateful I am for you coming into my life. You have made such a huge impact on my life. I would not be the person I am today without you and I know that you will keep inspiring me to become an even better version of myself.

You have taught me that you don't always have to strong. You are allowed to break down as long as you pick yourself back up and keep moving forward. When life had you at your worst moments, you allowed your friends to be there for you and to help you. You let them in and they helped pick you up. Even in your darkest hour you showed so much strength. I know that you don't believe in yourself as much as you should but you are unbelievably strong and capable of anything you set your mind to.

Your passion to make a difference in the world is unbelievable. You put your heart and soul into your endeavors and surpass any personal goal you could have set. Watching you do what you love and watching you make a difference in the lives of others is an incredible experience. The way your face lights up when you finally realize what you have accomplished is breathtaking and I hope that one day I can have just as much passion you have.

SEE MORE: A Letter To My Best Friend On Her Birthday

The love you have for your family is outstanding. Watching you interact with loved ones just makes me smile . You are so comfortable and you are yourself. I see the way you smile when you are around family and I wish I could see you smile like this everyday. You love with all your heart and this quality is something I wished I possessed.

You inspire me to be the best version of myself. I look up to you. I feel that more people should strive to have the strength and passion that you exemplify in everyday life.You may be stubborn at points but when you really need help you let others in, which shows strength in itself. I have never been more proud to know someone and to call someone my role model. You have taught me so many things and I want to thank you. Thank you for inspiring me in life. Thank you for making me want to be a better person.

Waitlisted for a College Class? Here's What to Do!

Dealing with the inevitable realities of college life..

Course registration at college can be a big hassle and is almost never talked about. Classes you want to take fill up before you get a chance to register. You might change your mind about a class you want to take and must struggle to find another class to fit in the same time period. You also have to make sure no classes clash by time. Like I said, it's a big hassle.

This semester, I was waitlisted for two classes. Most people in this situation, especially first years, freak out because they don't know what to do. Here is what you should do when this happens.

Don't freak out

This is a rule you should continue to follow no matter what you do in life, but is especially helpful in this situation.

Email the professor

Around this time, professors are getting flooded with requests from students wanting to get into full classes. This doesn't mean you shouldn't burden them with your email; it means they are expecting interested students to email them. Send a short, concise message telling them that you are interested in the class and ask if there would be any chance for you to get in.

Attend the first class

Often, the advice professors will give you when they reply to your email is to attend the first class. The first class isn't the most important class in terms of what will be taught. However, attending the first class means you are serious about taking the course and aren't going to give up on it.

Keep attending class

Every student is in the same position as you are. They registered for more classes than they want to take and are "shopping." For the first couple of weeks, you can drop or add classes as you please, which means that classes that were once full will have spaces. If you keep attending class and keep up with assignments, odds are that you will have priority. Professors give preference to people who need the class for a major and then from higher to lower class year (senior to freshman).

Have a backup plan

For two weeks, or until I find out whether I get into my waitlisted class, I will be attending more than the usual number of classes. This is so that if I don't get into my waitlisted class, I won't have a credit shortage and I won't have to fall back in my backup class. Chances are that enough people will drop the class, especially if it is very difficult like computer science, and you will have a chance. In popular classes like art and psychology, odds are you probably won't get in, so prepare for that.

Remember that everything works out at the end

Life is full of surprises. So what if you didn't get into the class you wanted? Your life obviously has something else in store for you. It's your job to make sure you make the best out of what you have.

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7 Strategies You Can Do to Heal After a Friend Betrayal

Updated: Sep 25, 2022

Do you remember a time you experienced a friend betrayal? I’m sure you do. A friend is a person who cares and supports you. The last thing you might expect is feeling deceived by someone who is supposed to have your back. In this article, I discuss examples and reasons for a friend's betrayal. In addition, I review helpful strategies you can do to recover and heal after a friend betrays you.

Examples of a Friend Betrayal

As a therapist in Orange County , I have heard several examples of how individuals feel betrayed by their friends. It’s hard navigating the social world. Particularly, trying to figure out what is a good friend and how to be a good friend. Sometimes, people will share private information about their friend to someone else. Sometimes, others will talk negatively behind their friend's back.

A common friend betrayal is when a friend drops their close friend because of their new romantic relationship. The close friend goes from spending a lot of time with their friend to none at all. A person can feel like their friendship isn’t of any value anymore.

At times, a person can be overly self-centered. They might betray a friend by not reciprocating in the friendship. The friendship can feel one-sided where someone is left putting in all the effort.

Lastly, if a friend is going through a major life event such as a loss, mental health problem, or illness, they are going to be seeking out their close friend for support and comfort. It can be painful if that supposedly close friend is nowhere to be found when they desperately need them.

Why a Friend Betrays You

There could be many reasons or motivations why a friend betrays you. Some friendships aren’t healthy from the beginning. When listening to individuals talk about their social conflicts, I can’t help to think these friends weren’t good friends in the first place. A friend who does not treat their friendships with respect and kindness has a higher chance of betraying their friend’s trust.

Another motivation could be the friend is angry and is having a difficult time communicating that anger appropriately. The friend does not know how to resolve conflict so, they purposely hurt others to take out their frustration. This betrayal is more direct and purposeful.

Another explanation could be having difficulty juggling friendships and romantic relationships. People who have a fear of abandonment or lower self esteem have a difficult time seeing themselves outside the romantic relationship. The romantic relationship becomes all-encompassing and all consuming. Thus, the other friend is left high and dry.

The Effects of Being Betrayed by a Friend

I feel hurt..

It is incredibly hurtful when a friend betrays you. Most people feel broken trust and emotional pain. You love and care for the person who betrayed the friendship and that is painful.

I Feel Disappointed.

Your friend did not meet your expectations. Your friend has been there for you in the past however, not this time. You probably banked on the fact your friend would never have done this to you, but you were “proven wrong.”

I Feel Confused.

How can my friend do this? I thought everything was fine between me and my friend and now, it’s not. Some individuals turn inward and consistently ask themselves, “what did I do wrong?” Sometimes, a friend's betrayal might end a friendship all together. The person is left with no closure and incredibly confused.

I Feel Doubtful.

Being betrayed by a friend can leave you feeling doubtful of other friendships. You might not want to reach out to others for emotional support for fear of getting betrayed again. You might be telling yourself, “If this person betrayed my trust, then I am sure others can too .”

I Feel a Sense of Loss.

In extreme situations, a possible result of the betrayal is the end of the friendship. Your friendship meant a great deal to you. You invested a lot of time and energy into the friendship. You can feel a sense of grief and loss because the friendship is now over, or the friendship isn’t what it was anymore.

How to Recover from a Friend Betrayal

The first step in recovering after a friendship betrayal is to clarify any misunderstandings in the friendship. It could be your friend is going through psychological or emotional struggles which is clouding their judgement and insight. Talk with your friend and clear up any misinterpretations. If your friend is willing to listen attentively, respond with compassion, and reflect on their part in the situation; that can be a good sign of recovery.

When going through a friend's betrayal, it’s important to be aware of all your feelings. Take the time to sit with your feelings and recognize all your emotions. It is crucial to name those feelings by verbalizing to someone you trust, “I feel hurt by my friend who said negative things behind my back.” When we name those feelings, essentially, we are validating and acknowledging those feelings are important and significant to us!

How to Heal After a Friend Betrays You

1. reflect on the friendship.

Reflect on the possible red flags that went on in the friendship. “Has this friend had similar offenses in the past?” When you take time to think about the friendship, you might figure out maybe this friend wasn’t as much of a friend as you thought they were.

2. Assess on what qualities you want in a friendship

A betrayal in a friendship is a good opportunity to think about what qualities you wish in a friendship. As you go through stages in life, there might be certain qualities you are looking for in friendship. For example, in this season, you are struggling with loss and you notice yourself gravitating towards friends who are emotionally available for you. I suggest writing down qualities you want in your friendships right now.

3. Give your other friendships a chance

A lot of times, we get so wrapped up in the friendship that is causing conflict that we forget about the other wonderful relationships you have. After you figure out what qualities you want in your friendships, identify which current friendships have those qualities you are looking for. Put effort and time towards those friendships that meet your needs.

4. Surround yourself with love and support

Healing is a painful and slow process. It’s super beneficial to surround yourself with people who love and support you. For example, reach out to any family members or trusted loved ones that will offer you emotional support.

5. Do not partake in retaliation

Feeling betrayed by a friend can lead to feelings of anger. If you aren’t in control of your anger, sometimes you can lash out especially at people who have hurt you. Some examples could be gossiping, spreading emotionally harmful information, or betraying back. Hurting others because you are hurt disrupts the healing process. Retaliation only keeps you in the thick of the betrayal.

6. Forgive or not forgive?

You have two options accept the misunderstanding and apology from the friend or accept the friend doesn’t have the qualities you are looking for in a friendship. At that point, you can make the choice to forgive or not forgive. Moving forward and healing is ultimately coming to a state of forgiveness where you accept the result. If that means, giving your friend an opportunity to improve the friendship or putting effort into making other friendships more meaningful. The act of forgiveness is for you not for the friend who betrayed you.

7. Find professional help

Lastly, depending on the type of betrayal and the amount of emotional pain seeking professional help can be effective. Healing from a friend's betrayal encompasses a lot of emotional energy and big emotions. It can be incredibly helpful to have a professional who’s a third-party help guide you through that process.

Any type of betrayal is going to be hurtful especially coming from a friend. Being aware of the motivations and effects of the betrayal will help you begin the recovery process. Allow yourself to recognize and name all those valid emotions. Reflection is crucial in the healing process. Reflection gives you the opportunity to understand your needs, assess your friendships, and decide how you want to move forward.

Needing more help:

Sometimes the pain of a friendship betrayal can become problematic, or you might be experiencing more symptoms than warranted. Specifically, teens and young adults who are trying to figure out where they belong in the social world. During this time, it’s inevitable to come across friends who you might feel betrayed by. I help teens and young adults navigate through depression, anxiety, grief and loss, and life transitions in a safe and therapeutic space.

If you are in the state of California and looking for therapy services, please feel free to contact me to schedule a free consultation.

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Betrayal Essay | Short Paragraph and Long Essay on Betrayal in English

July 22, 2021 by Prasanna

Betrayal Essay: Everybody commits errors in their day-to-day existence. In any case, there’s one thing that is something awful to do, Betray. Deceiving is exceptionally passionate and can hurt somebody profoundly (embarrass). Individuals typically lie now and again as well. In the book Uglies, the fundamental person lies and deceives her dearest companions. The book instructs us that we should feel remorseful about deceiving and should attempt to fix our betrayals.

Trust is established for connections. It requires a very long time to assemble, seconds to annihilate. All through life, an individual gives one’s trust to individuals she thinks often about. Betrayal. A demonstration of unfaithfulness. In a moment, all that was based on that common trust can be broken. It will all come disintegrating down with one mix-up. One demonstration of Betrayal.

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Short Paragraph on Betrayal

The closest companion is the individual you depend on the most. She’s somebody you would trust with your life, your mysteries, and your feelings. You gradually let her into your heart and the trust gathers over the long haul. A bond is framed over those mysteries, a kinship that will last. Never again is anything untouchable, and if that individual ever needs to talk, somebody will be there.

One second can transform everything. The individual you thought was your comrade ends up being a deceiver. The entirety of the mysteries and shared feelings are convoluted and utilized against you. Your shortcomings are played until you separate and are gradually destroyed. At last, the individual is perceived as the truth about. The entirety of the reports and the alleged untruths are valid. You, being the better individual, attempted to look past them, assuming the best about your companion. Yet, when reality comes out and the untruths begin to disentangle, what do you have left? When do you know to release a fellowship and when to hang on? Starting there on, all the trust you once had for your companion is gone and it can never be reconstructed.

At the point when you depend on somebody with your privileged insights, you are depending on her to respect them. Your sentiments ought to be brought into account in dynamic. Yet, when you are overlooked, deceived, there is no returning. The individual you however she was is gone. All that is left are sensations of hurt, addressing where you turned out badly and how excessively more forward. Unexpectedly, companionship is finished.

Long Essay on Betrayal

Betrayal is a word from Middle English and it was initially betrayed. There are numerous types of disloyalty, and it is entirely expected inside a culture to have shifting levels of discipline for double-crossing, the vast majority of which are somewhat extreme as it is viewed as one of the more difficult and unsympathetic demonstrations an individual may do.

Practically all selling out includes a type of deliberation, including if the double-crossing is through a demonstration of omittance. It includes utilizing the trust that has been developed and procured for individual use or gain. The trust is frequently broken once the double-crossing is plainly apparent.

It is viewed as an extreme demonstration since it is something beyond lying. Individuals may deceive to acquire trust to double-cross it, yet the truth of the matter is that lying on its own legitimacy isn’t just about as awful as disloyalty. An individual may deceive another with no type of trust existing, and the more trust that has been fabricated then the greater the double-crossing. There is frequently a measure of lying engaged with selling out, however, this isn’t generally the situation.

An individual may kill out of retribution or assist with facilitating enduring, yet since selling out requires trust and the breaking of that trust, it is viewed as more unsympathetic. An individual may comprehend a robbery to take care of a family, however, individuals once in a while comprehend a planned demonstration of building trust to break that trust for individual increase.

Assuming a trust has been set up, supporting the foe of the one that trusts are still disloyal. It is additionally selling out in the event that one uses the trust of one individual (or thing) to acquire the trust of someone else (or thing); the thing might be an organization or even a country. The more drawn out the trust is kept up with after the double-crossing, then, at that point the more serious the demonstration of Betrayal is.

Following six years of marriage, a lady may lay down with another man. This is a Betrayal on the grounds that there was a guarantee of monogamy, in addition to the inferred feelings and sentiments that are attached with the lady asserting she is infatuated are all important for guarantees dependent on trust. The lady says she has certain sensations of adoration to where she weds in a huge representative motion inferring she means to go through her life with only one man–both inwardly, truly and physically. These are generally the trust-building components, and the genuine issue is the place of Betrayal. If the man discovers, he has still been deceived. The selling out deteriorates the more drawn out the lady denies enlightening the man concerning her betrayal.

Betrayal is the demonstration of building trust and afterward utilizing that trust for individual addition. It frequently includes breaking the trust and regularly includes lying. Betrayal is anything that carries on the interest of a person or thing when that person or thing has been persuaded that would not occur.

FAQ’s on Betrayal Essay

Question 1. What is betrayal?

Answer: Betrayal is the demonstration of building trust and afterward utilizing that trust for individual increase. It regularly includes breaking the trust and frequently includes lying. Treachery is anything that carries on the interest of a person or thing when that person or thing has been persuaded that would not occur.

Question 2. What does betrayal do to a person?

Answer: The impacts of double-crossing incorporate shock, misfortune and distress, dreary pre-occupation, harmed confidence, self-questioning, outrage. Not rarely do they produce life-changing changes. The impacts of calamitous disloyalty are generally significant for uneasiness issues.

Question 3. What is an example of betrayal?

Answer: An illustration of a sell-out is the point at which you confess to insider facts and deceive trust. An illustration of a sell-out is the point at which you wheeze and your adversary is then ready to discover you. To convey under the control of a foe by injustice or extortion, infringing upon trust; to surrender misleadingly or irresolutely; as an official double-crossed the city.

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What to Do When Your Best Friend Betrays You

It's an unfortunate truth that sometimes the ones we love are the same ones who hurt us most. That's certainly how it can feel when your best friend betrays you , which is what it seems like we're seeing go down between Kylie Jenner and Jordyn Woods right now. Whether your friend divulged your secret she swore she'd never tell or she hooked up with your crush, it can certainly send you into a tailspin when your closest confidant goes behind your back. And what can be especially painful is she is probably still the one you want to vent to about your feelings.

Of course, some betrayals are more serious than others — and what might feel like a betrayal might actually just be a blip in your friendship. But if something has happened from which there's no turning back, it's hard to know where you should turn. To help you figure it out, we turned to the experts. So, without further ado, here's how to cope if your best friend hurts you.

It's tempting to throw ourselves into our school work, or immediately start hanging non-stop with another friend group if we're feeling hurt in an attempt to distract from the negative emotions. But that might not be the most healthy course of action. Instead, Rachel O’Neill, Ph.D., an Ohio licensed professional clinical counselor and Talkspace Therapist, said it's best to allow yourself to feel whatever emotions rise up after a betrayal.

"You have a right to feel whatever you’re feeling," O'Neill told Teen Vogue. "It’s important to allow yourself space to experience your emotions without judging them or trying to push them away."

Rather than telling yourself how you "should" feel and chasing that, O'Neill recommends focusing on "what you are feeling." Embracing those emotions might be uncomfortable, but it's part of the process.

Your first instinct might be to confront your friend and tell her exactly how she hurt you, but O'Neill encourages taking a moment to think about what you actually want from that kind of situation. Rather than rushing to text your friend all your hurt emotions, O'Neill recommends thinking through what you hope to glean from doing so.

"What are you hoping to have happen if you do confront? What’s the best case scenario? What are the potential negative consequence of confronting?" she asked.

If you do decide a confrontation might be helpful for you, O'Neill said "it can be helpful to have a little bit of time to process your emotions first. Otherwise, the confrontation could result in an argument."

If your friend comes to you with a heartfelt apology, will you be open to it? According to O'Neill, that's totally up to you.

"Consider what the apology means to you," she said. "Everyone makes mistakes and no one is perfect but that doesn’t mean you necessarily have to accept the apology either."

If you do feel ready to accept an apology, O'Neill also noted that doesn't mean you've necessarily forgiven your friend.

"Accepting an apology and forgiving are also to separate concepts," she said. "It’s possible for you to accept the apology but then also not be prepared to let the person back into your life right away."

That means you have to put thought into both things: 1. are you willing to accept an apology, and 2. are you prepared to forgive your friend. Ultimately, it's your decision and you need to consider what you would need from your friend should you decide to pursue forgiveness.

If you do decide that a friend break up is necessary, know that you'll need some time to grieve.

“People have this idea that a broken heart from a romance is what is supposed to be mourned, while a broken heart from a friendship isn’t," Isaiah Bartlett, LCSW, previously told Teen Vogue . "But this doesn’t make sense at all...and it means that people try to prematurely push themselves into feeling better when they are not yet ready to do so.”

This is similar to O'Neill's advice about what to do immediately after the betrayal. Bartlett goes on to suggest “radical acceptance” for anyone experiencing a friend breakup, which basically means accepting any feelings that arise without judgement. That way you can parse through the pain that losing a pal will inevitably cause, and eventually move on.

If you're the one in the wrong and you betrayed your friend, know that you likely have a tough road ahead of you. O'Neill said you should do your best to apologize to your friend and take steps to make things better, but keep in mind that it might not work in your favor.

"Try your best to make amends. There’s nothing you can do to change the past but you can take full ownership over what’s happened and apologize for the pain you caused," she said. "Remember that your friend may need time to get through what happened; be prepared to give them space as they work through some of those feelings at their own pace."

Since apologies aren't always easy, it's best to do things right the first time. That means really thinking about why you're apologizing, and how you want to make things better, Cynthia V. Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and Talkspace provider, previously told Teen Vogue.

"When should we apologize to a friend? When we have analyzed the situation, we feel concerned about it, and we have found a way to compensate or make the other person feel better," she said. Compensation may mean taking your friend to dinner, sending them a card, or doing something else heartfelt that you know they would like.

Ultimately this can be a hard situation for everyone involved. But with some careful planning and thoughtfulness, friendships can be restored or moved on from. The most important thing is to be respectful of yourself and others through the process, whatever happens.

Related: How to Apologize

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The 10 Worst Ways A Friend Can Betray You (& How To Deal When It Happens)

Friendship is supposed to be one of the things that make life worth living, but what happens when your friends betray you? Being screwed over is never pleasant, but it always seems to hurt just a little bit more when it comes from a person with whom you were once really close. If you’ve been betrayed by your friends in any of these ways, you’ll know just how awful it feels. Here’s how to deal with each situation.

• She slept with your boyfriend. There are few things that say so much about a person’s shoddy character like sleeping with their friend’s SO. There are also few things as painful because you also know that you can’t trust her (or your man) ever again. Should this happen, shut them both out of your life and never allow either of them near you again. Those two Benedict Arnolds deserve one another, and you deserve better.
• She sabotaged you from achieving your dreams .   If you found out that your friend actively hurt your chances at a job or kept you from achieving something major, it’s often best to confront her. While it’s always up to you to decide whether or not she should be forgiven, my advice will always be to distance yourself from her as soon as possible.
• She turned your other friends against you.   There aren’t too many things that can be done when people have decided to listen to someone else’s word above your own, aside from proving them wrong. When you see that you have a friend who’s spread rumors about you, or even just squeezed you out of your own social circle, you can only ameliorate it by either confronting your friends or letting time make its karmic rounds.
• You caught her sh*t-talking you behind your back.   In all reality, all that you need to do here is confront her , then break off any contact that you had. Clearly, she doesn’t respect you as much as she claimed she did.
• She bailed on you at the worst possible time. Whether their sudden Houdini act embarrassed you or left you defenseless, the fact is that a friend who bails when you really need them isn’t a friend. When she comes around again (and they almost always do), confront her, then tell her that you no longer want anything to do with her. Why would you stick with people who have no problem ditching you when things get bad?
• You lent her money and she won’t pay it back. When someone chooses to screw you out of money, what they’re basically saying is that they valued the money more than you. Since she’s basically stolen from you, it’s safe to say that the friendship is done . If it’s possible and the sum is big enough to make a serious dent in your wallet, take her to court. If it’s not, sever the ties you have with her immediately, and do damage control on your personal finances.
• She seriously embarrassed you.  This kind of betrayal is not always done in malice, and not always done on purpose. If you feel the need to do so, confront her in private. However, it’s important to realize that there are people who have personality traits that just make them prone to very awkward behavior. It’s important to fully gauge whether or not she did it out of jealousy or because she just didn’t know any better. If you have reason to believe it’s out of jealousy, it’s best to avoid being seen in public with that friend, and it’s even better to remember that they probably made herself look worse than you.
• She’s judged you based on things outside of your control.  I’ve personally seen this happen to people who had gotten pregnant, as well as people who had decided to come out of the closet. There’s really nothing that you can do to change the mind of a person who judges you and distances themselves from you. Truth be told, she did you a favor by keeping her sorry ass away from you. The funny thing I’ve noticed about judgemental people is that they tend to come back around if they need something from you, or if the situation that made them judge you has dissipated. When this happens, feel free to remind them of their wonderful treatment of you in the past, and slam the door in their faces.
• She threw you under the bus. If she expected you to take the blame for something she did or basically put you in a direct line of fire so that they wouldn’t have to deal with something, then your first focus is most likely going to be damage control. You will likely need to prove that you’re not the one in the wrong in order to get out unscathed. Once you’ve done damage control, it’s best to cut ties immediately with the person who did this to you – along with anyone who sided with her without being interested in the truth.
• She decided to believe a complete stranger over you. There’s something particularly painful about having a friend or relative pick a stranger’s side over your own. More often than not, someone who’s known you for a long time will eventually see the error of her ways, apologize, and try to make things better. Just because she realized that she was wrong for believing you doesn’t mean that you should allow her back in your life. Depending on the severity of the lie, and the severity of the consequences, you may just want to permanently distance yourself from her.

The fact is that a friend’s betrayal will almost always cripple your ability to have a healthy friendship with her. While it may be possible to overcome it, the truth is that you might not want to do so. Life is just too short to waste time on people who have betrayed you.

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Four Friends, Two Marriages, One Affair — and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It

A tale of literature and treachery..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

The broad empirical facts are not disputed. Four friends: Hannah Pittard, Andrew Ewell, Anna Shearer, Ryan Fox. Two marriages. Years ago, they fell in together in and around the world of postgrad creative writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There’s a photograph from back when things were still good, all of them huddled together on a couch in a pose of easy camaraderie: four artists only beginning to discover the ways ambition might reshape their lives. They all stayed friends until, in the first week of July 2016, Andrew, who was married to Hannah, slept with Anna, who was married to Ryan. A couple of weeks later, Hannah found out. Soon, both marriages were over.

It’s the kind of story — one of turmoil, epiphany, evolution, damage, hope, betrayal, rancor, joy — that, as specific and tumultuous as it may be to each person living it, plays out thousands of times every day. And in its wake, each of those involved finds their own way to deal with it. Some suppress it all in silence. Some lean into forgiveness, some dive headlong into recrimination. Some endlessly replay, some yearn to forget. But whichever choices are made, the blast radius is usually localized. Explosions like these are forever going off all around us, but you’d barely know.

Then there are writers.

Somewhere in the void between “Write what you know” and “Do no harm” sits a whole world of possibility. In this, too, everyone involved must find their own way. I’m sitting outside a restaurant in the center of Charlottesville discussing such things with Andrew Ewell. Earlier this year, Ewell published a novel, Set for Life. Its narrator is unnamed, but his initial circumstances closely mirror what Ewell’s once were: a frustrated writer married to a more successful novelist, the two of them teaching in the English department of a liberal-arts college, his job offered as a “spousal hire” to help lure her. In the novel’s first chapter, the narrator, on his way home from a writing fellowship in France, stops over to see his and his wife’s good friends, a couple living in Brooklyn. (In the book, they are named Sophie and John and his wife is named Debra.) Near the end of chapter one, the unnamed narrator sleeps with Sophie.

Over the next two days, Ewell and I will spend much of our time discussing the abstract parameters that govern what one can and can’t do when one sits down to an empty page. Which, in his view, is mostly can. “I think that’s the only rule for writing: Everything’s fair game,” he says. Later, he clarifies this somewhat. “I think if you produce shitty work and you’re just airing dirty laundry and it doesn’t rise to the level of art … I mean, then what’s the point? But if it communicates something sincere in the manner that you hope art does, then that justifies the risk. Don’t make shitty art, I guess is what I’m saying.”

Ewell is far from the first writer to pivot on the intimate details of their personal life. But one circumstance in which he finds himself is somewhat less commonplace. In May 2021, he sent the manuscript of Set for Life to an agent. That November, he learned some disconcerting information.

In his novel, the narrator — who in this fictional world initially returns to live with his wife, his affair still secret — eventually realizes that his wife has known about the affair for some time and has been writing a book that will chronicle the disintegration of their marriage. Now, in the real world, Ewell discovered that a version of his story was actually happening. His ex-wife had written a book about their falling apart, and it would be published nine months before his.

Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many, a book billed in its subtitle as “A Memoir [kind of],” was published in May 2023. The scene is set by the first sentence of its back-cover précis: “In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish.”

Exactly how fully this event defines either book is something that the authors at times fiercely dispute — an argument that will seem sometimes to be about writing, sometimes about the contested debris of past relationships. But let’s use a term that both books employ in different contexts: the “inciting incident.” At the very least, these two books share the same inciting incident. And often much more than that.

A few weeks after I speak with Ewell in Charlottesville, I meet Pittard at a Mexican restaurant in Lexington, not far from the University of Kentucky, where she is a professor in the English department. Before any food has arrived, she is already describing herself to me. “I can’t remember when I wasn’t writing and making shit up,” she says. “I think everyone in my family now, if you ask them, would tell you that I am a liar. And they would say that, I think, with great love. I always thought there was a better way of telling something that happened. There was always a better ending. There was a better twist.”

Pittard tells me that when she was young, she had trouble fitting in. She went to Deerfield, a fancy boarding school in Massachusetts, and she used to talk to her reflection in the mirror about becoming a different version of herself — one who was outgoing and fun, and could admit to wanting to be pretty, and would say “yes” to going to parties, and wouldn’t cry so much. It was a long process, but by the time she arrived in Charlottesville, it was beginning to happen. Her new friend Anna Shearer, whom she met on her first day of the writing program (Shearer was beginning her second year), was part of it. “She was stunning,” Pittard says. “She stood out. She was cool. She looked Parisian. She was confident. She looked the way I wanted to look, and she paid me attention, and it was so addictive and flattering.”

Soon Pittard also knew Ryan Fox, a poet and bartender who was dating Shearer. Ewell was the last of the four she met. After Pittard’s first published short story appeared in McSweeney’s in 2005, someone told her that there was this musician who had dropped out of grad school “who was going to write a takedown of McSweeney’s and how it was just like this hipster place to publish stories.” They were talking about Ewell. Soon afterward, she was taken to see a well-liked local band, American Dumpster. Ewell was the guitarist and, at the time, dating the band’s washboard player. It was Shearer who introduced the couple-to-be — in Pittard’s memory, she said, “You’re the only two dorks I know who play Scrabble — you guys should play Scrabble together.” So they did. For a couple of years, they were friends. Then they were together. Five or six years after becoming a couple, in December 2012, they married.

Pittard’s first novel was published in 2011, a second two years later, and one version of her marriage leaks around the edges of her promotional interviews for these books. In 2013, she referred to Ewell as “the love of my life.” Later that year, facing down a pushy TV interviewer who wanted her to talk about infidelity, she declared that she would never cheat on her husband and he would never cheat on her: “He’s an open book. He’s great. He’s the best. He’s the most loyal person in the world.”

This rendering of their relationship does resurface now and then in my conversations with Pittard. “I had wonderful times with him,” she tells me. “When we were good, we were so fucking good. He could be fucking funny as shit. He could be charming. He could be so sweet.”

Much of what she most treasured seems to have been anchored to their shared passion for the written word. “I’ve never talked to somebody about writing fiction and enjoyed it so much as I have with Andrew,” she says. “One of my favorite things to do would be to read the same book and to talk about it at the craft level. We’d read lines aloud to each other. That really sustained us for a long time.” She pauses, as though assessing whether to voice the sentence cued up in her head. “I never loved his writing,” she eventually continues. “I thought that it read like somebody who had read a ton and understood story as much as anybody understood ‘story,’ in quotes. But I’ve never liked reading my work aloud to anybody as much as I liked reading it aloud to him. And I loved his feedback, and I miss it. Like, it made me a better writer.”

That was one fissure. Another was the unstated dynamic between two writers who can’t help but notice the uneven validation they are receiving from the world. “There’s a pro, and there’s a con,” she says, “and the pro is This fucker gets it. The downside is it’s a fucking competition and no one’s saying it. And you’re a woman, he’s a man, and you fucked up getting there first.”

Before I spoke with Ewell and Pittard, I trawled through everything I could find that they have written or said. Pittard had left the busier trail and, in one interview, offered the following perspective: “Everything in my life that has been traumatic or difficult has at some point or another become material for either a short story or a novel. I’m so used to cannibalizing my own life. And when I got to this particular event, this betrayal, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I was going to write about it. In fact I think one of my greatest fears, because everyone involved is a writer, was that one of them would get to it before I did.”

In the introduction to We Are Too Many, Pittard rues a moment in grad school when she used a privately shared revelation about a classmate’s husband in a story, and also explains how, in the wake of using aspects of her grandfather’s suicide and its aftermath in her second novel, Reunion, “there are people who have never forgiven me for the trespass.” In an earlier essay, she related how she realized, some way into writing what would become her third novel, Listen to Me (eventually published the same month her life with Ewell exploded), that she’d been subconsciously basing the novel’s warring couple on herself and Ewell. Once she became aware of this, her response was not to pull back. Instead, she started mining her troubled marriage in the most deliberate of ways — for instance, purposefully wading into an argument with Ewell and then excusing herself to the bathroom so that she could get down the best of the back-and-forth on her iPhone’s Notes app.

Last year, Pittard offered another kind of take on such dilemmas. Around the release of the memoir, she had a brief dalliance with making TikTok videos, and one begins with this caption:

“POV You’re a writer and the guy you’re seeing asks you not to write about him.”

The viewer then sees Pittard speaking, as though addressing someone just off-camera, in a tone both beseeching and conciliatory:

“I would, I would never, oh my gosh, I feel bad that you would even think you have to ask me that, I would never, I promise, I would never write about you — that’s just not how it works.”

The caption then changes to:

“Later that day.”

Now, we see Pittard’s hands typing on a keyboard and, on the computer screen, the words she is typing.

“Chapter one.

“His name was Bruce. He was bald. He made me promise that I would never write about him. I promised.”

Set for Life is Ewell’s first book. Before that, he had published a handful of short stories. The first of these, called “Everything in Its Place,” appeared in the UVA literary magazine, Meridian, back in 2007. Ewell’s story was accepted for publication by the magazine’s fiction editor, Pittard, before they were dating, in a role she took over from Shearer, who had been working alongside the magazine’s poetry editor, Fox.

Over the years, Ewell wrote three unpublished novels, each of which, he now says, “didn’t work.” In retrospect, he tells me, he had been writing books that he felt he was supposed to write rather than ones he truly cared about. Before starting Set for Life, he had more or less given up, and it was in that spirit that he proceeded: “It was like, All right, here’s my last hurrah — nobody’s going to publish this, nobody’s going to read it. I might as well just say whatever the fuck I want to say.” What it was that he did want to say he discovered along the way. “Even when I wrote this book, I didn’t consciously decide I’m going to write a book about my last marriage or something,” he says. “It’s just things swirl in your head and they come to take a shape.”

I quote to him Pittard’s words about worrying someone else would write about all of this before she did. “That tracks,” he says evenly. “I mean, that’s how she is. One of the ways in which I feel like we didn’t get each other ultimately is I think we have very different attitudes toward the reading public and about how we want to write books. It makes sense that she would think she has a story and she wants to get it out there before anyone else does.”

In truth, Pittard could hardly be accused of getting the account in We Are Too Many out there with reckless haste — it appeared nearly seven years after what happened happened — though she did address the subject in print for the first time long before that. In May 2017, ten months after that inciting incident, she published an essay, “Scenes From a Marriage,” in the journal The Sewanee Review in which she laid bare her version of some fault lines in her marriage to Ewell: how, after they moved to Kentucky to take up twin tenure-track academic jobs, Ewell relentlessly complained about everything; the stresses caused by her greater success as a writer; how she mined their marriage for the novel she was working on; what she saw as his contemptuous response when she begged him to see a therapist (asked to commit to a date by which he’d do so, he picked February 14). Near the essay’s end, she explained how she had come around to seeing the infidelity as “a paradoxical gift” because she believes that she would never have walked away, however aware she was of all that was wrong between them.

We Are Too Many begins with a hundred or so pages of conversations. Most, as she explains in the book, are re-created from memory, though a few are imagined. The opening conversation reveals how, when she comes to New York in July 2016, a friend tells her the news of her husband’s affair. The third conversation details how, at six o’clock the next morning, she confronted Trish (as Shearer is named in the book) on the phone, eventually getting confirmation: “He says you’ve always been terrified of this happening,” Trish tells her. In the fourth conversation, she speaks with Patrick (as Ewell is named in the book), who likewise acknowledges the truth.

HANNAH: Thank you for your honesty. I get the house. I get the car. I get the dog. I’ll see a lawyer on Monday. PATRICK: Did you rehearse that?

Then, later in that same back-and-forth:

HANNAH: There are like 9 million women you could have had sex with, and we would have worked it out … But I’ve made it incredibly clear from the beginning that there is one woman who is off-limits. PATRICK: You’re so self-righteous. It’s disgusting.

And off it goes from there. One aspect of the book’s spirit is that it is brutal and unsparing (to its author, too) and yet at times seems calibrated and compassionate, a balance summarized in a pointed turn of phrase Pittard used in an interview about it, explaining that she “wanted to make sure that I was never being unnecessarily cruel.” There’s enough weight on the word unnecessarily in that sentence to push whole cities into the ocean.

Ewell is probably the worst placed of any potential reader to appreciate the book’s merits, and so it proves. “I didn’t feel that I saw anything of myself, really,” he says. “And I don’t think I really saw anything of Anna either.” (Ewell and Shearer stayed together and are now married.) “I guess I would say I feel like the portrayals of everyone are not fully convincing.”

It would be inaccurate to say that Ewell doesn’t strain at times to show respect to Pittard and to her work, or to the best parts of the life they shared together, but it would be wrong to suggest that these efforts are entirely successful. “I think that Hannah has a great deal of confidence in herself as a writer and deems pretty much whatever she puts down on paper worth publishing. So that’s a very different way of …” he says, breaking off. “And again, I don’t want to sound like I’m disparaging her. I often wish I had more of that kind of confidence, that pride of production, but I don’t.”

Later, he explains more explicitly what he means. “She is good at tapping into what’s fashionable and what the marketplace desires. And right now, divorce memoirs is a fashionable subject. Again, I don’t mean to say that’s a bad thing, necessarily. I just think it’s a way that she thinks about writing that it turned out I feel quite the opposite.”

One further peculiar aspect of all this is that Ewell had already touched on these events in fiction several years before his novel, in a 2019 story called “Halloween” that was published in Juxtaprose magazine, but appears strangely unaware that he did so. “I don’t think of that story as being very rooted in experience or anything,” he says when I mention it, seemingly mystified that I might bring it up in this context.

I point out he is clearly using his marriage in it. He seems perplexed. “There’s an ex-wife with a boyfriend or something?” he asks. To which, well, yes, but rather more than that: The narrator’s ex-wife has stayed in the college town where they’d both once worked and married a man named Bruce, the former chair of the department, who has a daughter from a previous marriage. She is made full professor in three years. All of this mirrors Pittard’s subsequent life (aside from the fact she and her partner, Jeff Clymer, are not formally married). But that’s far from the main part. When Ewell continues to profess puzzlement, I have to pull out a copy of his own story from my bag and read back to him the relevant paragraph:

“Before Maisie and I got together, she had said, ‘Fuck anybody but her. Seriously, I don’t care. Just not her.’ I was about to leave on a research trip. I’d be in New York for a few weeks, where Maisie and her ex-husband were then living. When I eventually told Angela that I had fucked Maisie, and that in fact, I loved her, she responded — thoughtful pause, glasses removed — with what seemed like a prepared statement. ‘Okay, I’ll call a lawyer in the morning.’”

“Weird!” Ewell says. “I don’t remember that at all. But, yeah, I mean I guess I’m calling on my experiences and memories more than I thought.”

All of which takes on greater significance for a very particular reason: This is a story in which the narrator’s ex-wife, Angela, is stabbed to death by a homeless man on the university campus. In other words, if we accept that Angela is based on Pittard, Ewell has written a story in which he imagines and depicts her murder.

I ask whether he didn’t consider what Pittard would think if she read this.

“It didn’t occur to me at all,” he says.

As I dug into everything in the days before I flew to Charlottesville, I discovered something else, something I suspected Ewell perhaps might not know. This turns out to be the case.

Ewell is already aware that Pittard has a new book in the works, but in the publishing announcement’s relatively anodyne brief, the book is referred to as an “autofictive story of a 43-year-old author” facing unforeseen disruptions after various members of her family relocate to the small midwestern university town where she teaches. Deep into a podcast she recorded last year, Pittard gave a differently angled description of what the book will be, one relevant to our discussions. I quote it to Ewell: “It’s a dark comedy about a writer, Hannah, who finds out that her ex-husband is publishing his debut novel, and his debut novel is about the dissolution of their marriage.”

Ewell looks at me, and, as often in our conversations, he waits in silence for an actual question.

That’s news to you?

“Fuck, yeah! I didn’t know that. I mean, it’s exhausting.”

I ask for his thoughts.

“I guess my thought is it just seems ridiculous to me. I mean, Jesus. Like, she can write whatever she wants.”

The other thing she says, I tell him, is that the novel is about how the discovery that you’re writing this book slowly drives her crazy.

“Well, I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t get it.”

When Pittard and I meet, I think she genuinely strains, as Ewell had done, not to disparage her former partner. (Though maybe within her declared metric: not unnecessarily.) But as with Ewell, the dam holding back the rawest feelings has severe structural failings. One of many emblematic horror stories, which she explains in layered, convincing detail, is her recollection of the day she got her first book deal (for the novel The Fates Will Find Their Way ). She describes Ewell’s rising irritation as the increasingly high-flown book auction continued throughout an afternoon, culminating in his demand at what she believes should have been the moment of celebration: “What does this mean for me?” “It was one of the first times,” she tells me, “that I remember thinking, I’m going to have to break up with him — I might not love him anymore. ” (This was not a version of reality Ewell recognized. “As I recall, I remember being really excited about her first book and being really excited for her. That doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t have some feelings of kind of some envy or whatever about it, but I don’t know. Those mixed emotions seem more interesting to me than someone saying, ‘What does this do for me?’ That just seems very … that seems not true to history.”)

Some of the roughest stories Pittard tells about Ewell are about money: in the early days, his drinking cocktails in a pricey Charlottesville restaurant, waiting for her to finish her shift waitressing and spend what she had just earned on picking up his tab; Ewell frittering away her latest book advance gambling in New Orleans when she was neck-deep in credit-card debt. Even so, she’s clear that she let this happen, all of it. “I knew it was wrong because I am not unintelligent — but I fucking wanted him,” she says. “I wanted him. He was handsome. He made me feel cool. He made me feel validated. I thought he was so smart. I’ve never had a boyfriend like him before who looked good and, like, other girls envied. And I wanted to keep him.”

She describes to me where their relationship was in the buildup to its final rupture, when they were disagreeing about almost everything and she was working on Listen to Me : “I was thinking, I’m still fucking mad at you. It doesn’t matter, because this is a thing I love, and the thing loves me back.”

So, to be blunt, “This is more important — I care more about this right now?”

“Absolutely. That is why it is not his fault. When he said — I don’t know if this made it into the memoir — ‘You don’t want to have sex with me, but you also don’t want me to have sex with other people,’ that is true. I did not want to have sex with him. I was mad as fuck at him. And I didn’t want him to have sex with other people. But, like, fuck him! And yet, did my book mean more to me? For sure. Yes, I privileged this book over my marriage because I was mad, because the marriage wasn’t giving me anything.”

The book’s dedication — they were still together when it went to press — reads “For Andrew, without whom this story wouldn’t exist.”

If some readers find the clarity Pittard just expressed about her priorities a little chilling, it’s worth pointing out that she and Ewell appear to agree on this matter. When I mentioned Listen to Me to Ewell, he said that a friend told him he couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if his wife had written a book like that. From there, our conversation continued like this:

“I don’t think it’s accurate to say I don’t care or didn’t care, but I suppose I did have, and do have, the feeling that it’s her prerogative to write whatever she wants to write. Did that contribute to difficulty in the marriage? Probably, looking back, yeah … but I suspect that neither one of us would have chosen to sacrifice or compromise what we wanted to work on for the sake of the marriage. I mean, at least to my mind, that comes second.”

The marriage?

“Yeah. I don’t know. Yes. I guess that’s my answer.”

Some people will be horrified by that.

“People who are writers or artists, or people who are not?”

Fair question. Maybe both. But I get why you’re asking. Let me put it in a more awkward way: Would Anna be comfortable hearing you say that?

“Yeah, for sure. She might add a caveat, which is that the writing had better be good as a result. I mean, why does anyone become a writer, a writer of fiction, particularly if they don’t think that there’s something a little more important to them, a little more natural to them, in the fictional environment than in the real world? Isn’t that kind of what draws one to fiction to begin with?”

But is that worth potentially destroying things in the everyday world?

“You hope the value is that you communicate something to a reader to make them feel less lonely. Here’s one person talking to another and saying something truthful about how they look at the world. And I think there’s something about that communion that for those of us who care about it, it makes us feel less lonely. It makes us feel like someone gets us.”

I’m not saying I completely disagree with you, but I can hear people’s voices objecting, saying: “What about the person sitting next to you on the sofa going, ‘You want someone who gets you? There’s someone who gets you right here who you’re ignoring to do this!’”

“Sure. Well, okay. Yeah, it depends who that person is. It would be too simplistic to say that I married the wrong person when I married Hannah. But I also think that at some point along the way, we started to feel like we didn’t really get each other. I mean, she had intimated divorce earlier in that year, before anything happened with me and Anna. And at that time, I was probably a pretty difficult person to live with. I was unhappy. I didn’t like being in Kentucky, and I didn’t feel particularly successful in my career, my writing life, my creative life. And I was probably kind of a bitch to deal with. So I don’t know. I imagine that Hannah probably felt like maybe if I was the person next to her on the sofa, then I probably didn’t get her very well either.”

As for what actually happened in those weeks in the summer of 2016, much of it is depicted in their writing, and more is clarified or qualified in the conversations we had. In June, Ewell was at a writing retreat near Bordeaux, after which he and Pittard met in Paris for a few days that didn’t go well. Then they flew back separately to the U.S., Ewell arriving in New York on the afternoon of June 29, planning to stay with Fox and Shearer for the next week. There, Ewell and his married friends went out for the evening, though Fox ultimately wandered off in his own orbit. (His and Shearer’s marriage was already fractured in complex ways.) As Ewell put it to me, “That’s when Anna and I started just talking and kind of finding out we were both in really depressed places in our lives, and kind of reconnecting with an old friend and also kind of that feeling of, like, I don’t know, What other kinds of lives are out there for us? … I mean, it was pretty immediate.”

He and Shearer spent the next few days together, then Ewell went up to Yaddo. On July 19, Pittard came to town ahead of a book event the following evening. That night, just before bed, a friend she was staying with told her about Ewell and Shearer. She called Shearer at six the next morning. In retrospect, she’s proud of how she handled what ensued. “It was really like a conversation of my fucking life — it was so good,” she declares. She says that at first Shearer denied what had happened, at which point Pittard said, “I can’t talk to you,” and hung up. Then Shearer called right back, and they got into it. Pittard remembers, at the end, Shearer asking, “Do you want me to have him call you?” which infuriated her: “I’m like, ‘Go fuck yourself. He’s my husband.’”

She says it was a few hours later when Ewell phoned her: “I thought, No, I don’t want to be the one to call him. I want him to call me. And I also thought, She’ll have called him; they’ll have talked it out. Whatever conversation we end up having will be closer to grounded than if I do a gotcha. Which is clearly what I did with her. I did a gotcha with her. That should give you a sense of how, in many ways, I felt more betrayed by her than by him.”

After her conversation with Ewell, Pittard emailed someone who knew those involved and whom she had long considered a mentor, the writer Ann Beattie, sharing the abrupt change in her circumstance:

Well, shit. I’m getting divorced. It’s going to seem strange and out of the blue that you’re one of the few people I want to tell about this but, Ann, I have to tell you: in part because it is so stupid it’s almost funny: Andrew and Anna Shearer think they’re in love. (!!!!????!!!!) … He’s always known that she is the one person an affair with whom I could never forgive.

Pittard still had five hours to kill before her book reading that night, so she went to Zara. In her unhappy early 20s, she’d developed an unusual habit: She’d go to Bloomingdale’s in Chicago, gather up an array of expensive clothes she couldn’t afford, then lock herself in the well-lit safety of a dressing room, undress, and go to sleep for hours surrounded by the outfits she would almost never buy before waking and trying them on, playacting the personalities she imagined she one day might have. Now she sought a new version of the same kind of safety. She locked herself into the Zara dressing room and then, sitting in her underwear, texted messages to two men she thought might be interested in her, each beginning with the sentence “Guess who’s getting a divorce?” “I was mad and I felt ignored and I felt pissed,” she explains. “And this motherfucker just had sex with that person.” She wasn’t actually interested in pursuing anything with these men, but she wanted their attention and successfully got it. She also bought a skirt that she wore at that evening’s event at Housing Works.

Fox came to the reading — he had found out about the affair that day, too — and afterward they went out to dinner with friends. She says that night at around midnight, she spoke to Ewell again: “He and I had it out. He said, ‘I think you’re fucking other people.’ And I was like, ‘The only person not getting fucked here is me.’ It was this horrible conversation. That was the only time I ever remember yelling at him.”

The next day, she took the train to Washington for a book event. On the train, she was bawling and texting and talking on the phone about all of it, and blowing her nose into a shirt, then weeping some more, and at one point she said to the man in a suit next to her, by way of a retort to the disapproval she’d imputed to him, “I’m not contagious.” Then, when he rose to leave the train at Philadelphia, the man simply said, in a way that seemed to her almost unbearably empathetic, “It’s going to be okay.” And she lost it all over again. Before the reading, she had her sister smear hemorrhoid cream on her puffed-up eyes.

In the aftermath, Ewell kept his teaching position in Lexington for the next couple of years, so he and Pittard were still working in the same English department when she published her essay in The Sewanee Review about their marriage. But when I mention the essay to Ewell, he tells me he’s not sure he’s read it.

“What’s it about?” he asks. “I mean, I know that I heard about it. I know that people called me and said, ‘Oh, did you see Hannah’s piece?’”

Pittard’s account of that time is different. Ewell knew she was working on it, she said. “And he wrote me an email after it came out. It was, like, classic Andrew. He congratulates me and he says I did a really good job and I got most of it right and I should be really proud of myself. It was very paternalistic and a little bit patronizing and a little bit generous. It was everything that was wrong with us in one email.”

When I relay to her what Ewell had told me — that he couldn’t remember whether he actually read her essay — she responds carefully. “I’ll say this: It’s not strange to me at all that he would have said that to you,” she says, “and that was a problem.” When I ask whether she thinks Ewell believes what he told me, or thought I wouldn’t find out otherwise, or whether there’s some other explanation, she responds, “I literally live for, like, imagining what the answer to that is,” and then expands on her own nuanced approach to how writing and the truth must intermingle and on how she believes this differs from Ewell’s. “For somebody who is also a liar and who loves to then tell stories, I have this very fine understanding of: This is where it became a story, and this is what the fact is,” she says. “When I was married to somebody who did not have a fine grasp of obvious facts, I felt gaslit a lot. I understand your question. Do you think he really believes it? I don’t know. We talked about the essay! It drives me crazy. But maybe he forgot!”

In my inbox the next morning is a copy of Ewell’s email.

Hi, Hannah, I just want to say I read your essay. It’s candid, elegant, and true — in the Keatsian sense, which is to say, beautiful. (I confess I cried a little.) I admire your honesty, and I envy your bravery. (There’s not a little talent in there, too …) It’s hard to reckon with the truth, let alone make that truth unassailably convincing to your reader (especially if he’s your ex-husband). Anyway, I guess I just want to congratulate you. And I want to say: Maybe we won’t be the best friends we once were, but your essay gives me hope we won’t forget the friends we were for a long and important time … Envoi: You wrote a beautiful and heartbreakingly honest essay. Damn, Pittard! You’re a hell of a writer, and you got to the heart of the matter, you really did. Brava, Andrew

When shown this email, Ewell responds, “I have zero recollection of writing that, or of reading the essay, but it appears that I did,” and suggests that he wrote it “to take the high road.” Furthermore: “It’s also worth noting that a big part of the reason I don’t think her memoir came off very well, aesthetically, I mean, is that it accomplished so little of what I seem to praise in that email.”

It was toward the end of 2018 when Pittard first began to make notes in a file on her computer, short episodes experimenting with different ways she might possibly reexamine this material. One was titled “I GET THE HOUSE, CAR, DOG.” Another, “Stanley Lleweling was in love with his own charm” — Lleweling being some mutant version of Ewell. Another, “There were so many reasons to hate Minnie Grizwald.” Grizwald was her. (“I gave me a really horrible name,” she notes.) Around that time, she says, her momentum as a writer felt stalled. She’d been very happy with Listen to Me — “A brilliant book,” she contends — as she had been with her first. But she felt she’d misjudged some decisions with the fourth, Visible Empire, set in Atlanta in the aftermath of the real-life 1962 air disaster in which a plane full of Atlanta grandees on a European museum tour died on the Paris tarmac. “I had deadlines, I was going through divorce,” she says. After that, she’d written a novel called Hot Stuff but no publisher accepted it, and she says that on reflection it “didn’t have oxygen in it.”

In late 2019, she turned her focus back toward her own recent experiences: “I thought, Here’s a great story, right? It’s like a classic story of betrayal. Every story has been told, but this is my story, and I have intimate understanding of it.” She resolved to write it as fiction: “I thought this was going to be so easy. It’s just fill-in-the-blanks.”

Off she went. Along the way, she experimented with writing passages in Shearer’s voice, in Ewell’s voice, and in the voice of a fictionalized version of herself. “I especially tried writing it from Anna’s perspective,” Pittard says. “Because I thought it was going to be very easy to make fun of me. I thought, That’s a funny place to start a book — a woman who’s gotten the guy and what she’s thinking about is how much she hates the woman that she got the guy from. And I had some fun with that.” But as she pressed forward, she realized that it wasn’t working. “I guess I thought, What’s at stake? ” she says. “What made my story interesting to me is it was my story, at the end of the day. I’d rather just fucking tell the truth. Let’s get it over with.”

By now the pandemic was raging and she was shuttered in the attic of her new home with Clymer and his daughter down below. “I felt so like a caged animal up there. And I was just thinking of these conversations, and I was thinking of, You are so pathetic that you let them say this thing to you. And so I wanted to just write it to exorcise it.

“It’s Henry James in The Art of Fiction who says a good writer is someone on whom almost nothing is lost,” she says. “And I was interested in the conversations where things had been lost for me that I hadn’t noticed. Because I like to think of myself as a good writer on whom very little is lost. Which is why this setting and situation — I think it hurt my ego. The fact that they cheated on me, and that I missed it, hurt my ego sometimes more than it hurt my heart.”

At one point in our Charlottesville conversations, Ewell reflects that what has been happening between Pittard and him may, when it comes to writers, just be the natural order of things.

“I think that it’s telling that lots of people get divorced, but two people who are writers get divorced and go off in different directions and write stories that help them to make sense of their experiences,” he says, “rather than clash in front of each other or face-to-face or whatever. And that may be something that happens in a lot of literary marriages. I mean, it makes sense to me that if the way that you organize your thoughts is in writing, then you would probably go to the page to do that and maybe not hash it out in real-life conversation with that person, especially once you’ve decided it’s over.”

There’s a glib way of summarizing what you’re saying, which is, “Now the relationship is over, you can both get down to really getting started with it.”

“Sure,” he replies, considering this. “Yeah. I don’t think that’s that glib.”

Pittard sent me a draft of that next book I’d told Ewell about, which is titled If You Love It, Let It Kill You and will be published in July 2025. On the first page, the narrator, Hana, has been told by a friend that her ex-husband has written about her in a novel. Upon hearing this news, she Googles her ex-husband, looking for more details. “In doing so,” she writes, “I accidentally discovered a story he’d written in which I’d been knifed to death by a homeless man.”

Hana subsequently tells her boyfriend (who, as in life, is a professor with a daughter from his previous marriage) about this — that she’s found a story by her ex in which both she and he feature and in which he is called Bruce. The narrator then announces to the readers of this book that she will be borrowing the name Bruce for her partner from Ewell’s story; for the rest of the book , that is what he is called.

Pittard tells me that she actually heard about Ewell’s book in March 2022, when her agent sent her an email with a screenshot of the Publishers Weekly announcement. Pittard forwarded the screenshot to her friend, the poet laureate Ada Limón, with the note “The motherfucker wrote a memoir.” (Limón had to point out, reading more carefully what Pittard had sent, that it was a novel.) “I was crazed,” Pittard says. She indignantly asked Clymer what he thought about this turn of events and quotes to me what she clearly considered an infuriatingly reasonable response: “Hannah, I think you gotta let it go. You wrote a book about it? He’s written a book about it.”

That was when, in real life too, Pittard resorted to Google. “Which I haven’t done,” she says. “Because who the fuck Googles him?” Sitting across the kitchen table from Clymer — “He’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Nothing’” — she chanced upon “Halloween” and began to read.

“First of all,” she says, “it’s my favorite thing he’s ever written. It was great. I actually really liked it.” Second, though, it was a story in which she was murdered, something she found “pretty fucking creepy.”

This macabre scenario became a kind of punch line in Pittard’s circle — “I’d say to Ada, ‘I’ve been walking around for three years murdered — I had no idea!’” But it started to get to her. She began some new writing, imagined conversations and scenes that she enjoyed reading out loud to Clymer — scenes inspired by this discovery. Eventually these scenes coalesced into her next book, whose catalyst was both the announcement of Ewell’s novel and this dark short story he had written. “ ‘Halloween’ was necessary, a hundred percent. And then it like clearly blossomed. I want him to know” — she breaks into a long, deep, wry laugh — “this book is because of him.”

And taking his name for your partner, Bruce, and using it throughout your book?

“It is one of my favorite things I have done. And it’s a great name. I’m so grateful for Andrew for giving him such a good name.”

Pittard says she hasn’t read Ewell’s Set for Life. Or rather, she says, she has only read the 26 pages that Amazon allows you to read as a free preview. “And I skimmed them,” she says. “I thought, That’s plenty. I’ve seen what I need to see.”

Ewell and Pittard were not the only writers involved in this turmoil; indeed, the evidence available to me suggested that neither of them were the first to have published a written reflection on any of this. These days, Ryan Fox is a transactional-IP lawyer, but he remains — just as he was when they were all together in Charlottesville — a poet. And in early May 2017, a few weeks before The Sewanee Review published Pittard’s essay, a poem written by Fox titled “And Both Hands Wash the Face” appeared in The New Yorker. In it, the poem’s narrator opens a copy of Four Quartets and is confronted by the handwriting of the person with whom, it is implied, he used to share the book. Pittard writes about this poem in We Are Too Many, and how Fox had texted her about it . “He wrote: ‘It’s about being caught off guard by your ex’s marginalia.’ Then he wrote: ‘Sad!’ To which I responded: ‘Sad!’” To me, in Lexington, she says, “That poem was really lovely, and I was so proud of him that it was in The New Yorker. You know, I took a book to capture what he took ten lines to do.”

But when Fox meets with me one evening at a bar in Greenpoint, the first thing we establish is that there’s been a misunderstanding. His poem, which he wrote a few years before it was published, when he was in law school, is about a different, earlier ex. He registered Pittard’s misreading in her book but saw no need to contact her about it. “It didn’t bother me that much,” he says.

No matter. Fox did write about this part of his life, though not immediately. For a while after the summer of 2016, he was, he says, “in life mode. I was in a new relationship right after. I didn’t really have time to process what had happened. I was sort of, like, focusing on survival and things like that.” Then, in the fall of 2017, taking some time off from his day job, on a retreat at Yaddo (these are Yaddo-punctuated lives), he started to write a long poem, “Eppur Si Muove.” The poem flies widely through the disjunctions of mid-teens America before circling in on the violence at Charlottesville and its implications. As he did this, Fox found himself juxtaposing these broader upheavals with his memories of Shearer — he wasn’t really in touch with her, or Ewell, at the time — and what had happened to them. “Addressing,” he says, “a lost love.”

Where have you gone, my eyes and ears, Dumpster of a dozen years? Where are you, hand of my glove, What became of courtly love?

This poem stands alone as the final section in Fox’s as-yet-unpublished poem collection, Nineteenth Symphony, which he has sent to me ahead of our meeting. Many of the poems in its first section, “After Love,” offer earlier reflections on the unspooling of his relationship with Shearer, written — and often published — as it was happening. “Accessing,” he says, “the sort of gallows humor and the tenderness of a failing marriage.”

No one is really home but the lights turn on anyway — no one is really sure what compulsions remain —

The first lines of the first poem, “Nights and Weekends,” are:

“Where you can’t do anything about it, can’t do anything more to save it,” says Fox, of that poem, “and sort of helpless but recognizing that there’s some tenderness still left or something.”

I ask whether he and Shearer would discuss what these poems were saying about the two of them when he wrote them.

“I mean, no,” he says. “That would have been a classic us. We weren’t discussing that. She was like, ‘Great job — that’s an awesome poem.’ Like, ‘Let’s celebrate.’ That was our M.O., honestly. It was something that became clear after a certain time — that there was a problem we needed to address. But weren’t able to. In our marriage. And we probably had ways of addressing it that were nonverbal — like through the poems.”

After Fox moved to Charlottesville in 2003, he met Shearer at a party that he and his then-girlfriend threw: “I think she did some dumb graffiti to our toilet.” Within a year, they were together. He became friends with Pittard through Shearer.

He tells me that he found Pittard’s We Are Too Many “exhilarating” to read. He particularly liked the scenes between Pittard and Shearer back in those early Charlottesville days. “Even though it was maybe not the nicest stuff that was happening between them,” he says, “it brought back a time in my life that was carefree and enjoyable to think about.” On the other side of the ledger, he says, “obviously I didn’t love the way I was portrayed.”

How would you say she portrayed you?

“Um, I guess as a maudlin drunk.”

Why do you think that was her take?

“There’s nothing defamatory in that portrayal of me. And nothing probably untrue. There were some nights, you know, when I was the maudlin drunk and tried to call her. That part’s not untrue. It’s that it’s at the expense of the rest of the character that I take issue with. Also, I feel like that character maybe bore the brunt of the drinking for all four. Which I understand from, like, a literary perspective.”

He says he enjoyed Ewell’s Set for Life a lot more. “I love the levity of it and the caper aspect of it,” he says. “I like a good comedy.” He enjoyed his own character, George, too. In Ewell’s book, Fox’s stand-in approaches people in bars and serenades them with poetry or sometimes with a Charlie Chaplin routine. “It’s a comic character, so it is larger-than-life in a way,” he says. “But also it’s a very charming character.”

As for both books’ depiction of his and Shearer’s marriage as essentially already broken, he says that’s fair enough.

“It was, I think, an open secret among our friends,” he says. “Especially as that summer neared, it was clear that some sort of drastic intervention would have had to happen for us to save it.”

In fact, he had separately started seeing a new girlfriend in those same weeks and had taken a suitcase over to her house a few days before learning the truth about Ewell and Shearer. He received that information on the day of Pittard’s New York book reading. Shearer texted him, asking if they could speak: “I took the phone call, and I heard her voice, and she was, like, full of fear and shaking almost. So I went into the conference room and shut the door, and she told me that she was in love with Andrew. And, I mean, honestly, my reaction was some mix of, like, hilarity and histrionics and, like, exhilaration. Nonbelief. How was this happening? Like, what? Shock. I mean, I don’t know what people usually feel in these circumstances, but for me it was, first of all, just like an incredibly juicy item of gossip.”

You’re not supposed to think that about your own life.

“Sure. But also I think I sort of immediately understood that this was sort of the intervention that our marriage needed to be over. I was like, ‘Well, I guess y’all won’t be at the reading tonight. And we’ll be in touch about whatever paperwork or whatever we need to handle with the lease. And the divorce.’”

As for the reading, “a really great night” is how he describes it.

“Hannah and I were like, ‘Yeah! No rings anymore!’ Literally that was how we greeted one another.”

Fox echoes what Pittard had told me — that he actively tried to remain friends until it became clear that she no longer wanted this: “It took me a while to understand she didn’t feel the same way that I did about wanting to stay in touch with this group which was quite magical and an important part of all our lives.” Pittard also told me that Ewell considered her inability to stay friends with the group “a failure of imagination.” By this measure, Fox was more successful. He acknowledges that some people are surprised he is now friends with Shearer and Ewell — “I have been made to feel strange about it” — but says that for him it was never really a question. “Andrew helped me move the dresser into my new girlfriend’s place when we were moving out of Anna’s place,” he says. “He and I had beers every time he was in town thereafter. It was a little bit tense or different at first. It took us a couple of years to get back into sort of the fullness of the friendship, both with Anna and Andrew.”

I explain to Fox the premise of Pittard’s next novel, which he does not know about.

“Okay,” he says. “People can’t get enough of each other.”

Any thoughts?

“Can’t wait to read it.”

When I’m in Charlottesville, Ewell tells me about a novel Shearer had written but never published. He describes it to me as “about her years in New York. It’s somewhat about her marriage, but it’s really about kind of like a woman’s loneliness in her life and in her marriage and also kind of a snapshot of Brooklyn in those years … a very dark book about just a very lonely person.” Wondering whether it might contain yet one more take on what had happened between the four of them, I ask Ewell whether the novel went as far forward as 2016. “No, not really,” he says.

Fox tells me he has not read Shearer’s book, though he does know its title is Nights and Weekends. He’d reminded Shearer that he’d used that title first. “I don’t think she cares,” he says. “Not that I do either.” He points out that it’s the name of a bar they used to go to at the very end of Bedford Avenue. “It’s also just a nice title, you know?” he says.

I didn’t meet Shearer when I was in Charlottesville, but I later contact her, and we arrange to speak by video. She also sends me a draft of Nights and Weekends beforehand, characterizing it to me in an email as “a work of autofiction” and telling me this: “It was about my time in New York, being married to Ryan, alcoholism, self-destruction, an addiction story that is harrowing and horrible and thank God it didn’t get published.” Her description is accurate enough; it’s gripping in its chaos, recklessness, and despair, and artfully so. Pittard, who clearly has a bounty of negative feelings about Shearer these days, had nonetheless told me this about Shearer’s writing back when they were in the UVA writing program together: “I think she is an instinctively excellent storyteller. I think Nabokov talks about the thing that can’t be taught, the sort of magic, and some of her stories had that kind of magic. And I wasn’t alone in thinking this.”

When we speak, Shearer explains to me what she was aiming to achieve with the novel: “So there’s a lot of ways that women try to write about self-destruction, alcoholism, and being very unwell. But I couldn’t find a real version of what it felt like to be in the throes of this. Often, the women, they have too much wine, and then, like, they get confused. And they always remember how they got home. They’re, like, embarrassed: ‘Oh, I made a fool of myself at that party.’ And I would read that and be like, ‘Really?’ There’s something real here, and women don’t really know how to write about it, for whatever reason. So I was trying to tackle that.” In great detail, it lays out her unraveling — one that far transcends too-much-wine befuddlement — and the parallel unraveling of her life with Fox (here named David), a downward trajectory that for most of the book seems to be picking up pace. At one point she writes: “I thought there must be something that people did, to keep the sadness away. But I couldn’t figure out what it was.” “I thought I was going to die,” Shearer tells me. “I was pretty sure of it.” If she’s mostly now glad not to have all of those details out in the world, there’s one aspect she regrets. “I feel bad for the girl in New York killing herself, wishing she could find a voice like that to relate to,” Shearer says. “That’s who I wrote it for.”

That downward trajectory does eventually break — in the novel as, thankfully, in life. The predicament was, as she puts it, “How am I going to end this relentless onslaught of horrible decisions?” Even if she ultimately had to find the answer within herself, one catalyst would be an old friend. In the novel, we first meet Ewell when Shearer first met him, back in Charlottesville. Well, when I say “Ewell,” of course I mean the autofictional character representing Ewell, and here I need to pause to point out but one more surreal uncanniness: the name Shearer chose for Ewell’s understudy. Patrick. Precisely the same name that his ex-wife had used for him in We Are Too Many. “It was very, very strange,” says Shearer, who nonetheless prefers not to read too much into this. “It has about the same amount of syllables, and it’s a strong main-character name.”

When Patrick reappears in her book, much later, he now has a wife, Elisabeth. But given what Ewell had told me, I still didn’t expect Nights and Weekends to go where it does toward its end. But it does. Suddenly Patrick is on a visit to New York, on a layover after a writing fellowship in France, and we are hearing another version of what we have heard elsewhere:

Patrick and I had found each other kissing at midnight at an empty bar somewhere I’d never been before … We had come back to the apartment, slept together on the futon while David was passed out in the bedroom. I was mortified the next day, ashamed of myself — I’d had sex with my oldest friend, the friend I used to joke had never made a pass at me, one of the only friendships I had left that I had somehow never sabotaged.

There’s one more thing I should note that I have come to realize about these multiple fictional and semi-fictional accounts of what happened in the summer of 2016. Shearer was writing Nights and Weekends in 2020 in the early months of COVID. That’s the same time that Ewell was deep in Set for Life. And also the time when Pittard was writing We Are Too Many.

I tell Shearer this and say that in the bad movie of this, you’d see these rooms across America in which everyone was writing about the same thing.

“Bad movie?” she asks. “That movie sounds fantastic.”

Right at the beginning, Shearer says, when she knew him in Charlottesville, she and Ewell — the first of the four to meet — bonded over writing: “He was a musician, and I would drive him to some of his gigs, and we would just talk and talk and talk about writing.” In time, the four of them shared this. “We were all serious,” she says. “It mattered a lot to all of us. We didn’t really see another path necessarily. We were kind of all in, in a way.”

She describes their collective mind-set with a kind of affectionate mockery. “There’s this expression about graduate programs: that they make you feel like a star when you haven’t even done anything,” she says. “You feel that you were chosen, and you are special, and you’re going to make it.”

Shearer had some stories published (including one under the pen name Ernest Langbaum — “I don’t know why I did that,” she says). But when she and Fox moved to New York, she declared to herself that she was done. She already had a good job — these days she’s a marketing director at a financial-technology company — “and I just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ I’m tired of feeling guilty. I’m tired of feeling like I failed. I just want to move on.” She insists that she was never jealous of the others as they continued to pursue writing with varying degrees of validation. “I just have the gift of not giving a shit about that,” she says.

But eventually, writing drew her back.

Before Shearer sent out Nights and Weekends in January 2021, there was one more bridge to cross. She knew that Ewell needed to read it.

“I was terrified,” she says. “It was horrible.” Whatever she had told him about her New York life, she certainly had not told him all of it. “He didn’t know how bad it was. He didn’t know the exact type of relationship that Ryan and I had at that point. But I didn’t want to say it. I had to give it to him. Sometimes I think I wrote it just so I had it as a record so he could see it.”

Maybe that’s just one part of the broader utility of capturing one’s life in words.

“Sometimes it’s easier to write about things than think about them,” she says. “You don’t have to think about reality. You think about a description. It’s an escape. You can live in the pages of your book.”

She says she also thought about showing Nights and Weekends to Fox. But she didn’t and still has not.

“I think it would have made him sad,” she says, “and I think he just would have felt a little bit that I betrayed some things that were personal to our relationship and to each other.”

She’s retrospectively aware of one further reason to be glad that Nights and Weekends never reached the public: “After seeing everything that has been happening with Andrew’s book and even Hannah’s book, I’m relieved I can stay out of it.” She points out that this aspect has been difficult for Ewell. “It’s unfortunate that his book keeps getting drawn in to this Hannah planet,” she says. “He didn’t want to write a memoir. He never wanted these people to be treated as real individuals. This isn’t a game to Andrew to try to secretly say stuff about real people. I keep telling him, ‘Just write another book. Don’t involve any of these people — just don’t think about it.’” (Both he and Shearer are working on new novels that have nothing to do with the events of July 2016.)

“He’s been doing this seriously for as long as I’ve known him,” Shearer says. “I mean, he’s just committed. He’s dedicated to the form and to the art. It’s not like a hack opportunity for him. He’s old-school. Saul Bellow. He wants to be thought of as the best writer of his generation, you know.”

This past December, Ewell told me, he and Shearer, stepping into the lobby of a Charlottesville hotel with thoughts of getting a martini before heading home for dinner, ran into a famous writer and her husband. (Ewell hesitates to identify the writer, but when I point out that it is obviously Ann Beattie, he agrees that this is so.) They talked, caught up, and when his novel came up, Beattie expressed enthusiasm for reading it. (In Ewell’s version, Shearer had a copy in her bag, though she told me that she had to go home to get it.) The encounter ended warmly.

In the following days, Ewell received communications from Beattie that he considered contradictory. On the one hand, he and Shearer were invited to brunch. On the other hand — and I am quoting here from an unpublished essay Ewell wrote around the publication of his novel — “She had read the first chapter of my novel, she said, and liked it very much, but couldn’t continue, the reason being that she hadn’t known what it was going to be about, and now that she did, she could not in good conscience read any more of it. She was, after all, still friends with my ex-wife.”

This baffled him. “It’s just a funny stance for a writer in her 70s who’s been around the block,” he says. He notes that Beattie’s most recent book, Onlookers, names real people in Charlottesville, “like a guy who owns a bookstore and someone who works at the gym.” His point seems to be that there is a literary principle that applies here, maybe something about the sanctity and separation of the work, one at which Beattie is a master. When I put to him that perhaps her response indicates someone prioritizing other values, like friendship, his reaction suggests that he believes her to have made a curiously inexplicable category mistake.

Pittard had told me that she and Beattie email occasionally, so I ask whether Beattie had mentioned running into Ewell. She had not, so I briefly explain to Pittard the above story.

She pauses. There were moments while I was in Lexington when her eyes welled, but this was the only occasion when the obvious trigger was not some kind of hurt.

“I have to tell you,” she eventually begins, “I have a really bad back. And once a year, almost always on my birthday, I go to the ER because it cripples me. And only one time have they ever given me morphine. And there’s a reason that morphine should be kept away from me because the feeling of warmth that washes over my body … I have to say I have a feeling of morphine-induced warmth right now for Ann. And it’s not because I don’t want people to read Andrew’s book, and it’s not because I don’t want him to be successful. But I’m brimming with love for Ann right now.”

As they each express versions of what was, there are a few stark areas of contention. To Pittard, it is an evident truth that Shearer had intentions toward Ewell: “I think it was a long hand that she’d been playing for several years.” Shearer is adamant that this isn’t so. “I always thought it was pretty clear that I didn’t feel that way toward Andrew,” she says.

“I never had a glimmer of it,” Fox concurs. “There was plenty of people who I was jealous of with respect to Anna. But Andrew was never one of them. And I was genuinely shocked that it was him. And I don’t, in fact, think that Anna was interested in him until this happened.”

Why do you think Hannah thinks otherwise?

“I mean, I think it fits with her conception of Anna as a more conniving sort of villain. Whereas, if anything, I think her sort of mistake, or whatever, is her impulsiveness. I don’t think Anna has the patience to hatch a plan like that over a multiyear period of time.”

A key moment in Pittard’s We Are Too Many, the second conversation in the book — the one that really sets the tone that suggests the transgressions described will go way beyond sexual infidelity — is a remembered transcript of a call between Pittard and Shearer in the period when Ewell and Shearer’s relationship had already begun but Pittard had yet to discover it. Pittard is out walking her dog in Lexington; Shearer is in a New York bar.

In the book, the conversation begins like this:

TRISH: I’ve met someone. HANNAH: You’re always meeting someone. TRISH: I mean it. He makes me want babies. HANNAH: Gross. TRISH: He makes me want to leave my husband. HANNAH: You say that several times a year. TRISH: I want him to put babies on me. I’m serious.

That, to Pittard, was a betrayal on a whole other scale. “For a long time — it doesn’t hurt anymore — but for a long time,” Pittard tells me, “that phone call, and realizing a week later that she was talking about my husband, and that she’d gone out of her way to tell me that, I couldn’t parse the evil in that. I couldn’t parse it. It didn’t make sense to me. My brain sort of shut down.” It was, she says, a call that will never leave her. “I fucking hate being hoodwinked. And I hate being hoodwinked by people that I think I have a pretty good read on. And I was hoodwinked that day.”

When I first mention any of this to Shearer, she’s somewhat dismissive, saying that she supposed the conversation depicted in We Are Too Many was intended to be one of the book’s imagined set pieces. “I wouldn’t have done that,” she says. I press that I feel sure Pittard believes that she remembers this quite specifically. “I mean, I don’t doubt she believes she remembers a lot of things,” responds Shearer. I press on, quoting to Shearer the above dialogue from the book. After I read the “babies” line, Shearer exclaims, “That’s disgusting. I would never say that.” Likewise, when I reach “I want him to put babies on me,” she says, “Oh, my God. I have never said that sentence in my life.”

Pittard is infuriated to hear of this denial. “There are some things that I feel so certain of,” she says, “and one of them is this conversation.” Pittard at first assumed Shearer was talking about someone older whom they’d previously discussed. “I said, ‘You want to have babies with this guy?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s someone new — you don’t know him.’ And I asked his name and she said, ‘He’s our age.’”

Somehow, this single issue seems the rawest of all, a proxy for everything else they will never agree on. As I go back and forth between them, the battle lines only harden, and any fragile sense of mutual respect seems to shatter.

“I think she’s just getting things mixed up,” says Shearer. “She probably put it in her book, and now she remembers it that way. That’s what writers do.”

“I mean, it would be convenient for Hannah’s story to have that betrayal, is what I would say,” echoes Ewell. “If it’s convenient for her story, for her narrative, then I suppose she would have to believe it, wouldn’t she? I’m not trying to say she made something up. I think a creative mind hears things in strange and interesting and different ways.”

In turn, Pittard’s affect is one of a long-simmering exhaustion. “It doesn’t matter to me anymore,” she says, “but I know that I’m right.”

When you take someone real and place them inside a book, one way you may steer a reader before saying another word is by the name you call them. In various published and unpublished novels, stories, and drafts by the participants, these are the names used: Some version of Andrew Ewell is Percy Winters, Fred, Danny Winters, Stanley Lleweling, and Patrick (twice); Hannah Pittard is Debra Crawford, Elisabeth, Hannah, Hana, Minnie Grizwald, Penny Sneed, and Angela; Anna Shearer is Trish, Sophie Schiller, Maisie, Wanda, Emily Pruitt, and Georgia Pruitt; Ryan Fox is George, David, Mitchell, and John Reams.

Occasionally, such a name may have a sweetly private reference point — for instance, Shearer is called Sophie in Ewell’s novel, a name which relates to a circumstance from her first days on this planet. An early tale, you might say, of how the words we choose often have consequences we don’t see. After Shearer’s father, an emergency-room doctor, delivered her at home, her parents decided that her first name should be Anna and her middle name Sophie. So it was, until three months later her older sister, who had told her classmates of this new arrival to the family, rushed home with some disturbing news about what sweet baby Anna Sophie Shearer’s initials spelled out. Her middle name was quietly changed to Christina.

But sometimes a name carries a toxic charge — or at least that is how it may seem to those so renamed. Perhaps it’ll come as no surprise that those most affronted in this regard are Pittard and Shearer.

Shearer’s objection is to Pittard calling her Trish. When I meet Ewell, he has previewed her objections. “Trish is cheap, right?” he says. “It signifies sort of slutty or something. I mean, I think that’s a cheap low blow.”

“Are we at the point where authors who go to private schools their whole life can make fun of people from West Virginia and call them out as being stupid and say they don’t have a good vocabulary and name them Trish?” Shearer, who is from just across the border, in Ohio, asks me. “Weirdly, everything else — the other woman, make it a mean girl, a little slut shame in there, whatever — I felt like I could deal with. For some odd reason, it’s that dig at being uneducated from West Virginia and just being an idiot because of where I’m from. That just burned a little bit.”

Pittard is no more taken by the name Ewell chose for her.

“They named me Debra,” she says. “And I’m going to say ‘they’ because I think it was a joint conversation. I think of the two of them at breakfast, having coffee, going, ‘Dawn?’ ‘No.’ ‘Meg!’ ‘No,’ ‘Debra!!!’ And then the two of them just cackling. Did they know I’d hate it? They sure as fuck did. They might as well have named me Nell! And I bet you Nell was on their shortlist.”

The first time Ewell and Pittard saw each other after their split, he visited her in Lexington and, as she remembers it, they went out for a long walk. When Pittard talked about this in a 2018 podcast, she related how there were both tears and laughter, but how then Ewell started to explain to her how awful it had been that he hadn’t been able to just call her up and tell her how funny Shearer was. Hadn’t been able to share, in other words, all his new excitement with the person he was used to sharing his excitements with.

At which point Pittard said she stopped him. She had something she needed to tell him right away. She had written a conversation in her new novel two days earlier, she told him, and it was important for Ewell to know, when the book came out, that the words she had written had not been taken from, or inspired by, this conversation they were now having. (Here, for reference, the relevant passage, on page 28 of Visible Empire : “Robert smacked his own forehead. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that all I’ve wanted to tell Lily about for the past year is Rita? … Wouldn’t Lily die laughing if I told her what Rita said this afternoon? I couldn’t get Rita off my mind. She’s all I thought about. I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to talk about her to Lily because Lily is my best friend …’”)

On the podcast, Pittard described what happened next: “He was like ‘This is why you’re fucking awful!’ And then we started fighting. But it’s true. I mean, this is why I am awful to be in a relationship with — that I’m able to, while I’m supposed to be having this really dramatic moment, step back and be like, ‘I just want to make sure you know, in two to three years, when this book that I’m working on finally comes out, this wasn’t your idea — it was already mine.’ He was like, ‘Are you fucking real?’”

“I’m sure,” Pittard tells me, “that I did it in part also to hurt him and to undermine his experience. By saying, ‘I’ve already imagined the thing that you’re going through, and I’ve written it down — that’s how unoriginal you are.’”

Just four friends who wanted to write: about themselves, and about one another, and about writing and being written about.

“That’s how things go,” Ewell says, “especially when you hang out with artistic people who have, you know, large egos and imaginations.”

“The smallness will go away,” Pittard tells me, “because what will always linger is: I am so fucking lucky. I get to write. I would love for young people everywhere to get to experience art and conversation in this way. And, oh my God, let’s keep doing this and being frustrated by it for as long as we can. Let’s make eye contact. Let’s piss each other off. Let’s say, ‘You stole that from me’; ‘I stole this from you’; ‘That’s not true.’ Andrew and me, at the end of the day, we’re nothing. But are you kidding? I’d rather be a character in somebody else’s book than not acknowledged at all.”

At one moment in my conversations with Ewell, I pointed out to him that most of the people reading this will not be writers. And that one of the questions they may well be pondering as they do so is whether people should be fearful of writers in their midst.

Yes, he said. “I think it would probably be wise.”

Pittard told me that about six months into dating Clymer — as we talked, she and I were sitting in the living room of the house they share — he told her that he needed her never to write about him.

She described to me her reaction: “I was like, ‘I heard what you said.’ And what I had been thinking at the time — and this I have told him — was, ‘Yeah, this relationship isn’t going to last, because I write about the people in my life.’ But then we kept dating, and I didn’t have an immediate inclination to write about him. And there was a day where he came home and he said, apropos of nothing — I had not brought it up — he was like, ‘I trust you. You can write about me.’ And I was like, ‘Good. Because I’ve been thinking of some stories …’”

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I found out my boyfriend had 3 other girlfriends. Then I became friends with the other women.

• Samantha Tsang was dating a man for three years before finding out about his lies.
• She reached out to the other women, and formed friendships with some of them.
• Those relationships helped her heal, she said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Samantha Tsang . It has been edited for length and clarity.

I met my ex on a dating app in 2020. I was ready to settle down, and he seemed to be too, so things got serious quickly. We bought a dog and picked out an engagement ring.

Then, it all fell apart when I learned he had three other girlfriends , all of whom thought they were exclusive with him.

When I learned the truth I was devastated. I felt not only heartbroken but traumatized. I couldn't sleep in my bed for three months and lost a dangerous amount of weight. I was terrified my ex would try to take our dog. I got tested for STDs , knowing he'd been sleeping with other people.

I have a doctoral degree in public health, specializing in social and behavioral sciences. I'm a smart person, so I blamed myself for missing the signs — though even in retrospect, I couldn't see any.

Almost immediately, I realized there were only a few other people who could understand what I was going through: My ex's other girlfriends.

I decided to message all his girlfriends

When I decided to message the other women on social media, my motivations were a bit selfish. I wanted to understand what had happened to me, and I thought they might have information that would help.

First, I told the three other women my ex had been seeing at the same time as me. All were very shocked, and none of them knew that he had been cheating on them . When I found out he'd cheated on previous partners, I messaged them, too. All in all, I got in touch with about 130 women.

Most of them were very open to hearing from me, but not everyone was. I messaged one girlfriend who had briefly overlapped with me. She took months to send a short response, and we haven't been in touch since. That's fine. I know how traumatic it is to live through betrayal . I want to meet other women where they are in processing what happened.

We supported each other as we started to heal

However, I've got to say that my ex knew how to pick women. All of the girlfriends were kind, compassionate, and smart. Most were Asian, like me, and professionals: lawyers, engineers, and artists.

Related stories

The other women really understood what it was like to go through the gaslighting and manipulation that we all went through. They helped me in moments of doubt, fear, anger, and sadness. And they felt those emotions right along with me.

With their support, I started to heal. I saw doctors to care for my physical and mental health and even went on medication to help with depression and anxiety for a time. I talked to lawyers, but they informed me that my ex technically hadn't broken any laws. I worked with a therapist because the biggest breach of trust I had was with myself. I wanted to know why I was such easy prey for him.

These relationships are the silver lining to my cheating ex

My relationship with two of the women developed into a deep friendship beyond the short messages I exchanged with the others. In the year since this happened, they've provided me with so much encouragement. We all cheer each other on when it comes to healing, dating, and just living life.

Our relationship has never felt competitive but has always felt the complete opposite: supportive.

I've dated a bit since my ex, but for better or worse, it's easier for me to say no to people now. I'm not in a serious relationship, but I'm working on rebuilding my confidence and practicing self-compassion and love. Luckily, I have two new friends who can understand exactly what I'm going through. I'm so grateful I crossed paths with them, even under very disturbing circumstances.

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My Mother, the Gambler

“Give me three numbers, baby.” My mother made this request often—so often, in fact, that when I try to remember her voice this is what I hear. I can see her, too. She’s in the kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table, the green wall phone behind her, the phone she’ll soon pick up to place her bet. She’s smiling, because this moment is capacious: everything’s possible. It’s a moment in which—unless you’re a pessimist, and my mother is not—Fortune is on your side.

She’s dressed for the occasion, in a flower-print top and stretchy yellow slacks, as if to advertise her innocence before breaking the law. Of course, for a long time I didn’t know that what my mother was doing was illegal. She certainly didn’t look like a criminal, sitting there with her blond hair intricately coiffed. The stylist had made it look like a sfogliatella , a kind of Neapolitan pastry that we often had in the house. My mother’s hair possessed the same golden hue, the same artful construction of multilayered swoops. Plus, the glossy lacquer of Aqua Net was not unlike the sugar on the pastry. That this delectable human might want my advice made me feel giddy.

I don’t recall her ever asking my brother for numbers. My brother was older, more confident, more defined as a person. Perhaps, as such, he lacked mystery. So my mother looked to me, the quiet one.

Possibly my inwardness gave the impression I might be in contact with whatever invisible forces were responsible for luck. No doubt she’d also noted my fervent superstitions, which involved the need to arrange things perfectly or to perform an action a certain number of times. It was important, for instance, that the hanging bits of my shoelaces not touch the floor and that everything on my desk be an equal distance apart. When leaving for school, I made sure to touch three separate leaves on the maple tree just outside our door. These rituals, done correctly, could stave off doom—though perhaps my mother interpreted my behavior not as an attempt to avoid misfortune but as a spell to invoke success.

What would later be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder was, at this point, just another aspect of what was openly called my oddness. I had heard my father say to strangers that he had no idea where I’d come from. Sometimes he said he’d found me in a garbage can. I was also referred to as “the Polack,” since I was light-haired and fair-skinned, unlike my swarthy parents and my brother, who looked robustly Italian; the one-quarter Polish heritage from my paternal grandmother had staked its claim in me.

At least I had my mother’s nose, and, more important, I had inherited her belief in magic. Both of us understood that in order to survive it was necessary to arrange things in a certain way. You had to take life’s terrifying unpredictabilities and rally them, by ritual or formula, into an army that would do your bidding.

There was a period of several months when I kept suggesting my mother play the same three numbers. Seven, one, four. Something about that arrangement seemed friendly, not to mention that the numbers added up to twelve, which, when added again—one plus two—gave you three, meaning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I saw no sacrilege in this reference to the Trinity. Gambling, I sensed, was a kind of prayer—though my mother didn’t always direct these prayers toward God. Sometimes she invoked the dead, playing the birth date of a deceased relative, often her grandmother. Such bets were akin to lighting candles in church, which you had to pay for, too. Both transactions were a request to be remembered by Heaven—to be helped, or saved.

And we needed help. We were poor—though this word was not one my family used back then. “Hardworking,” my mother might have said with a smirk, rightly indicating that the people who worked the hardest often had the least to show for it. “No pot to piss in,” as my father liked to put it. A waitress and a barber, they could get only so far.

Welfare, for which we likely would have qualified, was unthinkable. My parents, the descendants of immigrants who had never been naturalized, had inherited a residue of fear and shame when it came to the government. They didn’t want their names in the system or on a list .

Besides, we weren’t starving , and we’d recently moved to a house in the suburbs of New Jersey. The first time I suggested the numbers seven, one, four to my mother, she said, “Do you mean seven, one, two?” The address of the apartment building in Hoboken where we used to live was 712 Adams Street. “The penthouse,” my father called it—a tenth-floor walkup, with ill-lit stairwells reeking of urine. The tiny cold-water flat had no heating system other than the stove in the kitchen, which explains why in holiday photographs from that time my brother and I sit under an artificial Christmas tree as if dressed for an Arctic expedition.

Still, my mother occasionally played the old number—712. Her commitment to the past was baffling. Why look to that horrible apartment building for luck, especially now that we had a house of our own?

My mother’s parents had moved in with us, too, as had my father’s widowed mother, pale and skinny—the other Polack. At first, my grandmothers seemed less than happy. In Hoboken, they’d been able to walk everywhere. Now a car was required, and neither had ever learned to drive. In fact, neither had attended high school. They were quiet and humble women who, for many years, had worked as laborers—one in a laundry, the other as a housekeeper. But their real vocation appeared to be religion. My nonna and my babcia were so devout that they seemed like witches. When mumbling their prayers over rosary beads, their tongues turned thick and foreign. And, in their bedrooms, they kept a menagerie of plaster saints—figures that lived in a flickering garden of ever-blooming candles. To me, those tiny altars were the pilot lights of our house.

I loved my grandmothers with an intensity that was almost febrile; I flushed in their presence, greedy for attention, as well as in the knowledge that it would be given. They were the women who fed me, dressed me, put me to bed. To have both of them now under the same roof was the epitome of luck.

When I was feeling particularly anxious, I would sit beside my Polish grandmother; I’d take her hand and, using one of her fingers like a pen, trace circles on my palm. At a certain point, she would understand what I needed and begin to trace the circles herself. But eventually she’d toss my hand away and say, “Enough.”

Downstairs, in a separate apartment on the first floor, my Italian grandmother was always ready to receive me. Even if I wasn’t hungry, I’d claim that I was, and soon I’d be offered a piece of crusty bread with butter, or a bowl of steaming farina.

My mother had always taken a back seat in regard to child rearing, but now she had more freedom than ever and could focus more fully on her passions. In addition to playing her numbers, the so-called Italian lottery, she bet heavily on football. Watching the games on television, she would shout at the screen, gesticulating with her perfectly manicured hands. Shocking four-letter words emerged effortlessly through scarlet lips, in a voice deeper than my father’s.

Often, she watched with my uncles, and the shouting grew so loud that it terrified me. At the time, I didn’t understand how much money was riding on the outcome. I was aware only of the cheering that would lift my mother and the men from their seats or the swearing that would make my grandmothers retreat into the kitchen. I would escape, too, usually to the closet in my bedroom. It was around this time, when I was eight or nine, that I learned the comfort of tight spaces and the pleasure of rocking my body—both of which seemed to short-circuit the fear centers in my brain.

I also began to keep notebooks in which I wrote poems with tyrannical meters—another kind of rocking. I drew pictures, mostly animals, and kept lists, often mundane—the titles of all the movies I’d seen or the first names of the kids in my class. I might record an overheard conversation, one that had confused or upset me. Some days, all I could manage was to scribble endless spirals, or to write the word “win” over and over, doing my part to help my mother prosper.

My father wasn’t a gambler, though he had come from one. His father was a truck driver who’d once, in an all-night poker game, won enough to buy a vehicle and start his own short-haul delivery business. I was also told that he’d won a horse named Lollipop—a name he thought demeaning and quickly changed to Lady. My grandfather’s plan was to train her to race, illegally, on bush tracks. But Lady, kept at a cheap stable in Weehawken, died of colic. The following year, after another winning streak—this time on boxing matches—my grandfather died, too, of cirrhosis of the liver.

The cycle of the gambler—from despair and lack to hope and reward—was endless, both frustrating and beguiling. My father had experienced this long before he’d met my mother. He understood how her addiction could lead the family in one of two directions—either up the ladder or down.

Living in a new house seemed like a miracle to me; I didn’t understand how precarious our situation was, financially—the growing debts, the heavy burden of the mortgage. Nor did I understand the kinds of people my mother was involved with. My father has never been completely forthcoming about those years, but I do know that the down payment for the house was funded in part by gambling wins.

During those early days in the suburbs, my mother seemed as optimistic as ever. She’d managed to secure a number of credit cards, on which she could access cash advances. Perhaps it was these, along with the occasional windfall from the Italian lottery, that accounted for some of the over-the-top Christmases I experienced as a child—holidays in which my brother and I received a ridiculous amount of presents. There were Easters when, instead of dyed eggs, our egg hunts featured plastic eggshells stuffed with money. Certain years, the bills were singles, but other years there were fives and tens, even twenties.

In September, before school began, my mother would drive my brother and me to Schlesinger’s, a clothing store in West New York, where we were each allowed to pick out ten items. My mother was usually in a good mood and, for the most part, unconcerned with price or appropriate attire. She’d let my brother buy two pairs of sneakers or five football jerseys. But once, when I found a skintight shirt with a sparkly rose emblazoned across the chest, my mother seemed hesitant. “You’re skinny enough,” she said—focussing more on the fit than on the fact that I’d chosen something clearly meant for a disco queen. “It looks like diamonds,” I said. The comment was strategic. My mother had recently lost the stone in her engagement ring—or had she sold it? Anyway, I managed to sway her. “Just don’t wear it to school,” she said. I promised—a lie. When my brother scowled, I understood the reason. Kids in the neighborhood had started to call me “faggot.”

I knew the word, though in my mind then it meant something like “girl”—or, rather, a boy who was like a girl. And though the insult stung I could bear it by reminding myself that my favorite people were women, and these women had once been girls.

Every Friday, my parents went out to dinner. Sometimes they attended a concert or a Broadway show. Other activities my mother did alone. On a whim, she’d get dolled up and go to the track. Some weekends, she drove to a private club, where she liked the blackjack table. I remember my father, one day, accusing her of straying too far. After that, she did what she could to make her fun at home. Once or twice a month, she hosted late-night card parties. These parties were attended mostly by women, many of whom, like my mother, sported impressive confections of hair. Cigarettes dangled intrepidly from their lips—cigarettes they could inhale without the use of hands. All it took was a deft smirk, leaving their fingers free to focus on the cards.

The games were played around our kitchen table, after my brother and I had gone to bed. My father hovered at the periphery, watching TV in the living room until he fell asleep on the couch. Even from down the hall, I could smell the women’s perfume, my mother’s Opium coming through the strongest. As the night progressed, the scents grew wilder as they mingled with the women’s sweat. These gatherings, I later learned, were high-stakes affairs. Hundreds could be lost or gained.

The day after a card party, my mother would stay in bed later than usual. Before leaving for school, my brother and I would slip into her room to ask for money. She always allowed us to peel a few singles from the roll of bills she kept in her pocketbook. Sometimes that roll was skinny; other times it was as fat as a ball of mozzarella, and just as tempting. But, even as I could read my brother’s mind (“Why not take a little extra?”), my mother could read it, too. “Don’t even think about it,” she’d growl, her voice thick with slumber.

Not long after my eleventh birthday, the house began to hum with a new energy. The phone rang constantly. “Your mother’s friends,” my father called them. “Is Sophie there?” they’d ask, if I happened to pick up the phone.

By this point, she was not only playing her numbers but also taking bets for others. There was a pad beside the phone, on which she would write the caller’s name and a dollar amount, along with their hopeful chain of digits. Sometimes the word “box” or “straight” was included.

Since my mother was often out, she instructed my Polish grandmother to take down the information in her absence. When she asked what it was all about, my mother said she was doing someone a favor. Once, she said it was a game some girls were playing at work. No one questioned her, not even my father.

Now and then, the calls would come during dinner. My mother always sat closest to the wall where the phone was. Nearby, she had a tiny metal table on which she kept her pad. Mostly she’d finish these mealtime transactions quickly, but occasionally she’d get up, pulling the phone, which had an extra-long cord, all the way into the living room.

Whatever secrets she had seemed connected to our growing prosperity. During the summer, we were able to go to the shore for a week, stay at a hotel, eat three-course dinners in restaurants that looked like fishing boats. In the evenings, on the boardwalk, we’d play the wheels, shoot the guns, toss the balls. When the vacation was over, we drove home with the fruits of our good fortune—stuffed animals, cartons of cigarettes, goldfish in plastic bags. My brother and I put the fish in a water pitcher or a mixing bowl, hoping they wouldn’t die. Eventually, my father installed a pond in the yard, and the goldfish flashed around for years, reminding us of our luck.

That is, until the day my brother and I came home from school to find police cars parked in front of the house. My fear, always a trickster, convinced me that the police cars had something to do with me; I was not a normal person, and I knew that one day I’d be punished. My impulse was to get away, maybe hide in the woods near our house. But then my brother ran up the front steps and through the door, and I followed him.

Inside, all the lights were on—something my father never allowed. There were men everywhere, some in uniforms, some in suits. I rushed down to my nonna’s apartment, but neither she nor my grandfather was there. When I climbed the stairs again, a female neighbor was stationed in the kitchen, saying she’d take me and my brother to her place. I refused. “Where are my grandmothers?” I kept asking. Watching the men opening drawers and looking in closets, I felt a kind of nauseous outrage. When I saw the strangers in the hallway outside my bedroom, I thought of my notebooks. “You can’t go in there!” I screamed. My brother, in a moment of tenderness, touched my arm. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

For days after the raid, I worried that the police had read my notebooks—all that incriminating evidence. I felt certain they would return to fetch me.

Of course, the cops had no interest in the scribblings of an eleven-year-old boy. It turned out they had my Polish grandmother on tape, implicated in what I heard called a “numbers racket.” She was arrested, as was my mother. The two of them were booked, their photographs taken, their fingerprints. My grandmother was humiliated. I was told that she asked to remove the crucifix around her neck before they photographed her, but that this request was denied.

I prayed at her bedroom altar, kept her candles lit. My grandmother was released. The authorities believed her when she said she had no idea what she was doing. Besides, the police were after bigger fish—one of them being my big blond mother.

But she got off, too; I’m not sure how. “Friends in high places,” I recall my father saying, while my brother, using pulp-fiction logic, had the audacity to ask my mother if she’d turned other people in. I was sure she was going to slap him. But she fell into a stunned silence, and tears came to her eyes.

“I would never do that.”

Many years later, long after my mother died, I spoke with her brother, my uncle Frank, and asked him about the people my mother had worked for. My uncle tilted his head: “Let’s just say they weren’t people you wanted to screw with.” He mentioned some names and then immediately encouraged me to forget them. He was cagey and kept trying to change the subject.

But, in the end, he did tell me a little more about the nature of the business. “Your mother was a runner,” he said. “Like a salesman. She brought bets to the bookie, got a commission.”

“But what were the numbers?” I asked. “How did that work?”

My uncle explained that, every day, there’d be a notice in the newspaper which listed the previous day’s earnings at a New York racetrack, and that the game was to guess the last three numbers of that amount.

When I asked about the meaning of “box” and “straight,” he looked at me like I was an idiot.

“You could play the numbers in their exact order,” he said. “That’s straight. Or you could box them, which meant that if your numbers came out in any order you’d win something. It cost more, but you won less.”

I was curious if my mother had ever won big. My uncle shrugged. “What’s big? Sometimes it gave her a little extra. Your mother hated having no cash in her pocket. She said it made her feel naked.” He added that most of what she’d won had gone to the princes.

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I assumed my uncle was speaking about the men my mother had worked for. But when I asked, “Who were the princes?,” he said, “Don’t be stupid. You and your brother.”

For a while after my mother was arrested, she seemed to be a changed woman. At this point, she was working as a waitress in the skyboxes at Giants Stadium. She often pulled double shifts and came home exhausted. There were no more card parties. At night, she’d drink coffee and watch police procedurals on television. She slept very little. Sometimes she played electronic poker on a small device whose chirps and dings I could hear in my bedroom. In the mornings, I’d find her sitting at the kitchen table, paying our bills or figuring out the household budget.

Strangely, even with my mother’s propensity for gambling, my father had always let her take care of the finances; he claimed that she was better with numbers.

Now and then, my Italian grandmother would climb the stairs to check on her daughter. “ Tutto bene ?” she’d ask unsteadily, clearly out of breath. She’d started to speak more often in her native tongue. Curses? Prayers? Accusations? I comprehended none of it.

My other grandmother resumed her housekeeping duties with a demented vigor, as if the scrubbing and polishing could remove the stain of her sins. She rarely spoke to my mother, the tension between them palpable. The silence was toxic; I could feel it in my chest, like smog.

My mother was too proud, or perhaps too ashamed, to apologize; and my grandmother, I assume, was too aware that she lived in our house by the grace of my parents’ kindness.

After the arrest, my babcia was easily overcome by emotion. Sometimes the cause of a breakdown seemed trivial. Once, I heard my father ask her what was going on with the towels—why were they so rough, shouldn’t she be using fabric softener? My grandmother made a strange gulping sound and walked out of the kitchen. I found her downstairs, crying as she stood beside the washing machine. “He treats me like a servant,” she said. “Your mother, too.”

A moment after her outburst, she wiped her eyes and began to defend my father: “I know he works hard. I know he didn’t mean it.” She was petting my face now, in an effort to distract me from her brush with honesty.

I understood then that there was a warning here. It seemed that if you didn’t express yourself you ended up a prisoner. And, though you might blame others for this, in truth the jailer was yourself. I was a prisoner, too. There were many things I couldn’t bear to say; instead, I buried them in notebooks. I was a coward, and my silence, like my grandmother’s, had a lot to do with shame.

No one in the house was speaking honestly. We went about our days, as before, but all of us were just pretending things were fine. Every time the phone rang, I could see the worry on my father’s face.

But, as the months passed and nothing happened, life resumed its ease. My parents had even befriended a priest. My mother, who never cooked, once spent a whole afternoon making cream puffs before he came to visit. I watched, disgusted, as he ate five, then six, then seven. I counted, of course, and later wrote the number in my notebook.

The priest wasn’t from our church; I’m not sure where my parents met him—maybe at a party. In addition to having a sweet tooth, he drank a lot of wine, and his smile was often counterfeit; I could tell by the way his eyes failed to participate.

My grandmothers, however, seemed charmed by him. When my babcia asked him to bless the house, he happily obliged, using a tiny vial of holy water. I recall feeling upstaged; apparently my own rituals were no longer sufficient to insure our safety.

Sometimes I wondered why I was working so hard. The worst had happened and my family had survived. Perhaps I could learn to resist the tyranny of my compulsions. Slowly, I let down my guard. When I tapped the maple leaves now, it was out of habit rather than as an obsessive act of magic. My grandmothers became less vigilant, too. Every so often, I would notice that, in one of their bedrooms, no candle was burning. Even today, I blame this laxness for what was yet to happen.

About two years later, I was sitting at the dinner table with my family when suddenly my brother began to cry. The moment was disorienting because my brother rarely shed a tear.

My father seemed more annoyed than sympathetic. “What?” he said.

Finally, my brother looked up. “Are you selling the house?” he asked.

My father was scowling now. “What are you talking about?”

When my brother spoke again, his words came out in jagged, breathless shards—something about a kid at school, something the kid’s mother had read in the newspaper.

Apparently, there was a notice in the paper that our house was up for sale. “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. My father added, “Your friend is full of shit.”

My father didn’t rush through dinner, which calmed us. But, afterward, he got up and went into the living room, sat in his easy chair, and unfolded the local paper, where he learned that what my brother had said was true. Our house was to be auctioned off at the end of the month—not by my father but by the county sheriff.

I’m not sure what happened next; there’s a gap in my memory. Certainly, there must have been an argument, accusations, apologies. I have a vague recollection of my mother saying something about “a mistake.” My memory wakes up a few days later. My parents are whispering in the kitchen. And then the whispering turns to shouting. My mother, defending herself, sounds like an unrepentant child: “It’s not my fault!”

I later came to understand that for nearly a year my mother had failed to make the mortgage payments. She’d also secured a line of credit against the equity, and it seemed that my father’s signature on this loan was forged.

The money, most likely, had gone toward more of my mother’s prayers—numbers and horses and blackjack. “I was almost there,” she said once, her martyred eyes looking toward the ceiling. If there was sadness, it didn’t appear to be about what she’d done; it seemed to be about the fact that her magic had failed her.

My father had a new voice now, hammering, unkind; he had no patience for any of us. I was often afraid to talk to him. My father says he doesn’t recall this part of our life; other times he actively denies his aggressive behavior. My brother denies it, too. But I clearly remember the way my father would suddenly turn violent. “Get on my bed!” he’d scream, marching us toward his room. I’d hear the jangle of buckles as he opened the door to his armoire, inside of which his belts hung. I knew my father was taking things out on us that he’d never take out on my mother. Although he yelled at her, he never struck her. Some days, I feared that if my father did not whip my brother and me he might end up killing our mother.

Discipline became the doctrine of the house. There were new rules, new lines my brother and I had to be careful not to cross. When my father saw me in a ripped T-shirt I’d let dangle off one shoulder, he said I looked like a pansy. I tried to defend myself, saying the shirt had come that way and the rips were part of the style.

“Are they?” my father said. He walked toward me, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and proceeded to rip it further. In my memory, this assault feels more terrible than the whippings. I am flayed, ridiculed, reduced.

Everything about my presence seemed to irritate him. Noise was a particular issue—the volume of the television, the way I closed a cabinet, the clamor of my laughter. Of course, my father’s voice wasn’t subject to such rules. During one particularly loud argument between my parents, my grandfather lumbered up the stairs—I assumed to defend his daughter. But, instead, he joined my father and began to shout at her: “What are we supposed to do, girl? Live on the fucking street?” As he turned to go back downstairs, his grumbled invectives descended, too, into his dark Neapolitan dialect.

Later that night, I heard my father crying. The sound jerked out of him in strange squeaks, as if someone were wiping a mirror. My grandmothers, in their rooms, were crying, too.

Despite the chaos of those weeks, my father came up with a plan. He talked to relatives, friends, colleagues, and, though it must have pained him to do so, he asked each of them for a loan, any amount they could spare. Some folks could offer only a few hundred bucks, but others gave more. My mother said she could borrow a little money, too, but my father, suspicious of her sources, said no.

My mother was no longer herself. A few days after we learned about the loss of the house, she cut her hair. She now had a short, dense bristle, almost mannish. She looked like a thug, or a Buddhist nun. It was hard to understand if her new style was an act of aggression or of renunciation. While my father made frantic telephone calls, my mother was often pacing in the back yard, smoking cigarettes.

Sometimes, through a window, I’d watch her; if she spotted me, she’d offer a little wave, shake her head. I always thought she was saying, “Leave me alone, go away.” But now I think perhaps she was trying to tell me something else, the same thing she kept saying to me when she lay dying: “I’m sorry, baby.”

My father kept track of his loans in a ledger, which he stored in the bottom drawer of his armoire. Before the auction was held, he managed to borrow enough to save the house—though what should have been a triumph felt more like a funeral. My father was pale, his features frozen.

As the years passed, he’d pay off what he could. At the end of every week, he’d place his hard-earned cash in envelopes, many of which he’d hand-deliver, in increments of ten or twenty dollars. All accounting went into the ledger. My father’s penmanship was like a child’s; he wrote in print, having never learned cursive. When I finally left for college, he was no longer the slim, fit man he’d been in his youth. His hair had thinned, then grayed. I didn’t recognize him.

It was the same with my mother. She was a mystery to me, her undeniable generosity chafing against the fact that she was willing to risk everything our family had.

Ultimately, my father made good on all his debts. When I asked him once how long it took, he said, “Years! I wanted to strangle your mother. But I always knew what I was getting into. Your mother was trouble from the start.” Even as he said this, though, I could see the smile held in check.

By the time my father had paid everyone back, he and my mother appeared to have made peace with each other. I’d moved to Arizona, but when I came to visit for the holidays I’d notice my parents laughing together, and sometimes I’d see them kiss. My father didn’t even seem to mind when my mother said she wanted to take a trip to Las Vegas with some of her cousins.

I flew out from Tucson to meet her. I wasn’t a gambler, but, still, I enjoyed watching her at the blackjack table, with her short blond perm, a Scotch-and-soda sweating in her hand. Whenever she won—not often—her shout was loud, and always directed upward, as if to the invisible ones who’d facilitated her good fortune.

My mother seemed happy again—but soon after turning sixty she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Once the treatments began, she had very little energy. There were no more visits to Las Vegas. My father told her to quit her waitressing job, but she said, “How can I?” The medical bills were piling up.

By then, I was determined to make my living as a writer—and though most of my family, especially my father, didn’t seem to understand my ambitions, I could tell my mother did. Now that she was no longer gambling, she began to put all her chips on me. When I won my first literary award, she threw a party that clearly cost more than the amount of the small cash prize I’d received.

“Risk everything” had always been her motto. And she seemed to understand that this was exactly what I was doing in choosing to become an artist.

Late into her illness, I began writing my first novel. After she learned I was dedicating it to her, she always referred to it as “our book.” “What’s going on with our book?” she’d say. “How much are they giving us?”

“It hasn’t sold yet,” I had to keep telling her.

“It will, baby.” I could feel her shaking the dice in her hands.

The book sold a month after she died, on her birthday. I didn’t get a fortune, but it was more money than I’d ever made in my life, and surely more than my mother had ever won at any of her games. It was hard not to feel superstitious—that my luck was somehow related to her.

Lately, I can see my mother clearly. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table with her shining tower of hair, playing cards or placing bets. Despite all the darkness and loss that was to come, I can glimpse the romance behind her schemes. And so I often think of my own work as a bet I’m placing for her.

Let’s do it , Mom. Let’s win . ♦

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JD Vance, an Unlikely Friendship and Why It Ended

His political views differed from a transgender classmate’s, but they forged a bond that lasted a decade — until Mr. Vance seemed to pivot, politically and personally.

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By Stephanie Saul

Stephanie Saul, who covers education, reviewed about 90 emails and text messages spanning between 2014 and 2017.

When his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was published in 2016, JD Vance sent an email apologizing to a close friend from his Yale Law School days. The friend identified as transgender, but Mr. Vance referred to them in the book as a lesbian.

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“Hey Sofes, here’s an excerpt from my book,” Mr. Vance wrote to his friend, Sofia Nelson. “I send this to you not just to brag, but because I’m sure if you read it you’ll notice reference to ‘an extremely progressive lesbian.’”

“I recognize now that this may not accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that I am really sorry,” he wrote. “I hope you’re not offended, but if you are, I’m sorry! Love you, JD.”

Nelson wrote back the same day, calling Mr. Vance “buddy” and thanking him for “being sweet,” adding, “If you had written gender queer radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean.” Nelson asked for an autographed copy, then signed off with, “Love, Sofia.”

That exchange is from a series of emails between two friends, part of a close-knit group of 16 students who remained together throughout their first law school semester in the fall of 2010. As now-Senator Vance seeks the vice presidency, Nelson has shared about 90 of their emails and text messages, primarily from 2014 through 2017, with The New York Times.

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104 episodes

Smoke Screen is an investigative documentary series on people with complex motives and morals. Follow characters on the fringes of society — con artists, cult leaders, corrupt politicians — as they seduce their marks and bend communities to their will. Join us as we unravel their stories and bring justice to the people they’ve deceived. SEASON 10: The Greatest Scam Ever Written - Coming August 1st What would you do if one handwritten letter promised to change your life forever? All of us want magic, to feel like there is some sort of exterior force guiding our next steps, to believe our fate is written in the stars. This is the story of 1 million hopeful Americans, the global scam that took $200m from them, and the mastermind who managed it all by sending out thousands of letters a week.Investigative journalist Rachel Browne takes us through the facts of the fraud, from its brilliantly simple conception to the revelation and imprisonment of the fraudster themselves. Speaking through letters from behind bars, the con artist maintains their innocence, saying:  ‘Maybe it's not moral, maybe it's bullshit, but it doesn’t mean it's fraud.’ And that is the question at the heart of The Greatest Scam Ever Written: What happens if you want to believe that sending $50 to a psychic will change the course of your destiny? Are you a victim, or a willing participant? SEASON 9: My Friend, the Serial Killer In the 1970s, Steve Fishman was an intern at his local newspaper, when one day he hitched a ride back from Boston with Robert Carr III, better known as “Red.” Red seemed trustworthy enough, but he was hiding a secret: by the time he had picked up Steve, he had already killed three people—and all of his prior victims were hitchhikers themselves. Unlock all episodes of Smoke Screen, ad-free, by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. SEASON 8: My Fugitive Dad Ashley’s Dad was her favorite person in the world. He drove fast cars and sold them for a living. He was a scratch golfer and the love of her Mum’s life. Ashley thought she knew him better than anyone. But at 38, she found out he wasn’t who he said he was. Inspired by his favorite movie the Thomas Crown Affair, he had pulled off a robbery in Cleveland then disappeared. It turns out he evaded the authorities for half a century, living in their sleepy Massachusetts town. His secret upended his family’s life, but another family’s too. Because from the moment this 20-year-old vault teller escaped with $215,000 in 1969, Deputy U.S. Marshal John Elliott made it his life’s mission to bring him to justice. After he retired, his son even took up his mantle. For this six episode podcast, host Jonathan Hirsch teams up with Ashley Randele to unravel the mystery of how her Dad got away with it, and ultimately, why he left behind everyone and everything to start over. SEASON 7: Betrayal on the Bayou For almost two decades, DEA Special Agent Chad Scott ruled the streets just North of New Orleans. He controlled a network of snitches by convincing people he arrested to work for him as informants. Chad would stop at nothing to put drug dealers behind bars. His successes won awards at the DEA, but his willingness to bend the rules earned him a terrifying reputation on the streets. Some called him the Golden Boy. Others called him the White Devil. But when one of guys on Chad's team is caught dealing drugs, Chad’s life is overturned. His right-hand men betray him and confess everything to the FBI. Investigators go over his career with a fine-toothed comb, asking the question: is Chad Scott the greatest DEA Agent in the South, or is he a criminal?  SEASON 6: Just Say You're Sorry SEASON 5: Deadly Cure SEASON 4: Puppy Kingpin SEASON 3: The Sellout S

Smoke Screen: The Greatest Scam Ever Written The Binge

• 4.0 • 2.5K Ratings

Listen on Apple Podcasts Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher

• AUG 1, 2024

The Greatest Scam Ever Written | 1. Your Devoted Friend

What would you do if you got a mysterious letter promising to restore your health and vitality? Doreen Robinson wrote back and sent money to the French psychic named Maria Duval who’d written to her. As their relationship deepened, Doreen had no idea that she wasn’t the only one. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people had gotten a Duval letter, and gave an estimated $175m. How was this possible?  Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• AUG 7, 2024

The Greatest Scam Ever Written| 2. Psychic to the Stars

Who was Maria Duval? Her son says she had a gift, an ability to see people’s futures. She helped locate missing people and worked with the French elite, befriending Jacques Chirac and Brigitte Bardot. In the late 80s, when two businessmen approached Maria Duval with a life-changing deal, her name becomes synonymous with one of the greatest scams ever written. Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts.

• AUG 14, 2024

The Greatest Scam Ever Written| 3. One Man's Trash

The Maria Duval letter scam began in Europe—so how did it make its way to America? U.S. Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber begins to unravel the threads of the scam when he discovers an address on Long Island, where victims are sending their replies to Duval. They also send intimate items like locks of their hair, hoping for the psychic’s help. Clayton’s team goes dumpster diving on Long Island and finds bags of return letters – proof Duval herself wasn’t getting the replies. Why were their replies ending up here, of all places? And who’s responsible? Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts.

• AUG 21, 2024

The Greatest Scam Ever Written| 4. The Swiss Swindlers

To find out how the scheme is operating in the present, we go back to how it all started. We know that two Swiss businessmen had bought Maria’s name and image to add legitimacy to their mailing scheme and launch letters across Europe. But who were these men? What motivated them to cheat hundreds of thousands of people out of their life savings? And where are they today? Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts.

• AUG 28, 2024

The Greatest Scam Ever Written| 5. The Runner

U.S. Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber discovers that the letters are entering the country via Albany, NY, and that they’re originating from a company in Montreal. Locating criminals across the border for extradition is no simple task, but eventually Clayton finds two of the scam’s top lieutenants. Can he get them to give up the name of their boss, the true mastermind of the scheme? Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts.

• SEP 4, 2024

The Greatest Scam Ever Written| 6. DNA of a Scammer

The mastermind behind the Maria Duval scam is revealed. Who is he and how did he operate one of the biggest scams in U.S. history? Investigative reporter Rachel Browne discovers this wasn’t his first mail-order operation and that Terry Polevoy, an amateur scam-buster, had helped expose that scheme. Rachel discovers the mastermind’s M.O. Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts.

• © Sony Music Entertainment

Customer Reviews

2.5K Ratings

Missed question

Why wouldn’t he ask if he had planned to kill him and if so why did he change his mind????

Twenty stars

Donna thank you for sharing your story. You are a very resilient woman. Hope you have a great life.

So I have no idea what Carr said in any of the tapes - absolutely terrible audio. Second - Steve - my god, do you have any kind of intuition? This whole series was like listening to your ambition - never really looking for the story but just trying to see yourself in it. Gross.

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