Hey Meredith,

About two years ago, I started seeing a guy. We became best friends and started sleeping together. The relationship became intimate really fast. We’d spend the night, have steamy showers, go on dates, take trips together – the whole thing. A few months in, he started seeing another woman. He and I had agreed that we weren’t looking for anything serious, so I was OK with this. After a little while, though, it seemed like they were spending a lot of time together, so I asked him if she knew about us and was OK with everything. He said his relationship with her was nothing serious, they weren’t dating, and there were “no expectations of exclusivity.” This went on for a while, and it became clear that he was telling me little lies about when he was with her. But every time I asked, the answer was the same: they weren’t dating.

Fast forward to this summer, and through weird happenstance, a mutual friend introduced me to Other Girl over Facebook. Other Girl told me she was excited to be put in touch with me, since it was weird that she still hadn’t met her boyfriend’s best friend. The cat was out of the bag and I confronted my guy about the situation. He confessed that they had been dating, and that he had been lying to both of us about the other. Eventually, we agreed that he would come clean with her and we could talk about basically sharing him in a poly sort of setup. Well, apparently, he never got that far because she started to suspect that something was up, they fought about it, and she broke up with him.

But here’s my issue. When they were fighting, he went into panic mode and told her a whole bunch of lies. He said that I knew she was his girlfriend the whole time, and that I had tried to hit on him a bunch of times but that nothing had ever happened. When I found out he had lied to her, I was shocked. Especially since the lies put me in a pretty bad light. He insisted that there was no reason to hurt her any further by telling her the truth. That was over the summer, and believe it or not, I think they’re in the process of getting back together. He and I still have the exact same relationship: best friends with benefits, talking all day every day, etc. And he still hasn’t told her the truth.

He gets angry when I tell him that Other Girl deserves the truth. He says that if she found out the truth, he would be so ashamed that it would wreck his life, and that he would end our friendship if I talked to her myself. He told me last week that he has no interest in dating her anymore, but he spent the night at her apartment twice last week. What do I do? I don’t want to lose my best friend, but I’m willing to do that if it means doing the right thing. But is it really my place to set the record straight with her, especially if it just means unnecessarily hurting her? Do I just walk away from the whole thing? Do I just ignore the issue with her until it all blows up?

– Another girl