I'm In Love With My Best Friend, And Others Disapprove
*Original Content By Dr. Gilda Carle
Q.
I am recently (three months) divorced and I have fallen in love with my best friend. He is divorced about a year and he feels the same. We have been friends for 25 years. While our feelings for each other didn't cause our divorces of long-term marriages, in the past few years, we've spent more time together — as friends — but I think it awakened us to how misfit we each felt in our relationships. When we each turned 40, we decided to make changes in our lives.
We both have teenage children and some very close family (parents, siblings). We've started appearing in public together as a couple, but the disapproval is strong — not for each of us as people, but because it looks like something was going on before the divorces and that's what caused them. I know I didn't leave my husband for him, and I feel lucky to have found love again. Should we put it on hold for the sake of appearances, or do we tell them life is short and we're happy? Help!
—Best Friends & Lovers
A.
Dear BF&L,
Who’s running your lives? My book, “Don’t Bet on the Prince!,” distinguishes between internally controlled people and those who are externally malleable. For externals, onlookers always have something to say — once you give them a bullhorn!
To put your romance on hold, or even respond, “for the sake of appearances,” invites further judgments. Instead, show who you are and what you deserve by following this Gilda-Gram: “Praise and blame are both the same.”
Internally-directed people ignore both! Smile at objections, as though you never heard them, alter your body language, and change the subject. Commentators will either get it, or get going. Either way, you’ve learned the valuable lesson of asserting your power. Congrats!
—Dr. Gilda
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