I’m holding my Mom accountable for maybe ruining her own friendship

I’m venting here because me being “officially” engaged is apparently a huge gamechanger for my Mom. She’s obviously trying to compensate or keep up with the Joneses through me. We have yet to have a hard boundaries conversation because she keeps dodging.



I recently found out she’s been “hiding” my decade long relationship from her best friend. Why may you ask? Well it’s story time (names changed for personal privacy):

Her best friend, let’s call her Mrs. H, has been like an aunt to me. Mrs. H has a son, let’s call him Cody, who was my childhood through highschool friend. It is openly known he has a crush on me since probably 5th grade. Mutual friends used to drop hints or outright tell me I should ask him out (purely out of sheer pity might I note). His mother would tell others I was “an ideal daughter in law”. Cody’s ex girlfriends have told me he would compare them to me (ultra-cringe for all those poor women.)

I never had feelings for Cody beyond friendship. I’m pretty sure I’m a dreamgirl to him: an idea of a good partner rather than an actual person. For starters, he’s never asked me out directly himself and assumed I would come around to him. Unfortunately, this meant I never got to reject him outright so thus, he can maintain his dreamgirl fantasy. A good bit of evidence was highschool prom. His family and friends implored him to ask me to be his prom date. He brushed them off with “She’ll be dateless so I’ll just slide in during prom.” I showed up with a prom date from the LAN party I frequented. Cody is sulking in every single prom night picture. Anyhow, we did not talk much through college and post.

Recently, Cody is set to be deployed to a foreign country. Mrs. H brought up to my Mom that they should play matchmaking and set us up on a date since she believed I was also interested in living in said foreign country. I found out Mom NEVER EVER told Mrs. H I was in a committed relationship; FH and I will have been together 10 years this year. Oh, I also found out only because I had sent Mom a rough draft guest list including Mrs. H and family (who I truly don’t mind attending since I figured Cody would be out of the country anyway) so Mom was forced to bring this up.

My Mom initially tried to blame this on me (“You never share on social media, you never visit, blahblahblah) but I firmly reminded her she was the one who chats with Mrs. H on the regular. If she couldn’t be tossed for a whole decade to say I have someone in my life, that’s on her. Mom tried to defend herself by saying she didn’t want to break Cody’s heart, “love is complicated, that’s why he couldn’t confess to you”, “Why do I have to tell him bad news?”, etc. I’m keeping firm and also letting her know that sending Mrs. H a wedding invite will be much less awkward than having to tell her I’m married when she inevitably asks on Cody’s behalf again.

I think Mrs. H will take this fine. She’s aware of Cody’s shortcomings as a person but will still go to bat for him as his mom. My Mom is scared she will lose Mrs. H as a friend but I wish she could see that that would be her own doing.

Anyhow, I’m mostly sharing this because I need to break to my Mom that FH and I have been cohabiting for a long while now (a big Evil Horrible Sin in her book, an absolute minimum requirement to me for lifestyle compatibility assessment). I need the validation that my mother makes bad choices and I can definitely make my own AND deal with my own consequences.

Funny bonus story: Cody has met FH already some time ago. He did mental gymnastics to get him out of the picture. We had a small highschool friends reunion during a major comic convention because we were all in the same area. FH accompanied me and we were cosplaying together as characters who were a canon couple from a well known game. Somehow, despite FH and I comfortably posing for many couple pics together and spending a lot of time near each other, Cody convinced himself that we were just doing it to be in-character. Even other friends trying to tell him otherwise had him arguing I was just doing it for cosplay. Heck, I even introduced FH as “my boyfriend” and Cody insisted I was just being in-character.