Would you be mad? March 13, 2007

Let’s play a round of “Would You Be Mad?” (in my head, that sounds like a studio audience shouting “WOULD! YOU! BE! MAD!?, just so you know).

Are you ready? (ARE! YOU! READY!?)

So, let’s pretend that you have a boyfriend. And he is gorgeous and smart and talented and lovely and totally into you and whenever you’re around him you feel compelled to just smush his cute face while making cooing sounds because he’s just that delicious (go with it, okay?). In sum: you are in love. He loves you back. Life is pretty good.

Your delicious boyfriend wrote a book, which he dedicated to you. You are no dummy; it means a lot to you that your boyfriend would essentially, as he told you, write a book for you. Nothing that is about to go down could possibly take away from the honor of seeing your name on the dedication page. It means the world to you.

You decide to pick up your boyfriend’s book and re-read a chapter that was recently excerpted in a major publication. Before flipping to the chapter, you stop momentarily on the acknowledgments page, realizing that you haven’t read it in its entirety.

Almost immediately – as if you have inner Whore Sensor – you zone in on her name.

Who is she? Why, only the bane of your very existence, the thorn in the side of your relationship. She was the woman in his life before you came along, and she has not taken kindly to being rocked off her pedestal. They never dated. He had a crush on her when he first met her – through work – but it dissolved into a close friendship. She’s the one who helped him pick out those shoes that you love. She’s the one who accompanied him to weddings and holiday parties. She’s the one he leaned on while going through rough times.

The fact that she was important to him once is not why you don’t like her. Well, not entirely. You don’t like her because she is a goldigging skank with loose morals. She sleeps with famous and semi-famous married men, uses them to both obtain material goods and for her own professional benefit. She is the woman that all women hate; she drags down the good name of the gender through her very existence. Since she doesn’t get much more than access to a black AmEx through her “relationships,” she leans on your boyfriend for emotional support. She even had him use his connections to put a halt to a very public scandal that would’ve outed her as a homewrecking whore.

He’s scaled back their friendship since the two of you have been together; no more nights at the movies, no more dinners, no more being a shoulder to cry on when her latest relationship goes south. He acknowledges that there is some validity to how you feel about her. But he cannot cut her out completely, he says, because they work together. But their relationship – as far as you know – is nothing more than a work acquaintanceship. A phone call or email every once in a while, but nothing more. Long gone are the days that he would consider dropping everything to be by her side. In light of that, you try to put it out of your mind that, at the very beginning of your relationship with him, you walked into a party and saw his hand resting in the small of her back. You try to convince yourself that that was then and this is now. You believe him when he says that he doesn’t have feelings for her, that you are the only girl he wants to be with.

So, imagine your surprise when you see her name among those he has thanked – his friends, his family, your family, his journalism professors, former bosses. There she is, grouped with a few of his colleagues. Not singled out, but still present.

You immediately shut down, chide yourself for being so naïve as to think he wouldn’t include her. Have you been duped? Has all that he said been a lie? Has he been hiding a friendship with her so as to spare your feelings?

You bring it up, when the TV and the lights have been turned off. When he’s thinking sex. Not so fast, buddy.

Okay, maybe you don’t so much “bring it up” as “scream about it.” You’ve lost your cool; you are furious. Why did he feel the need to include someone that has wreaked so much havoc on your relationship? And why didn’t he at least tell you about it, give you a heads up, offer a chance at a reasonable discussion? Why did he leave you to find it out all by yourself and fume quietly over it before eventually bursting Sunday at midnight?

So, this is where you come in. Because maybe I am crazy. Maybe I am, as he said in the heat of the moment, making a big deal out of absolutely nothing. Maybe I should just let it go.

But I feel that my reaction was valid. We’ve worked it out – we’re actively loving each other again, of course, despite the threats and crossed arms and turned backs of the other night – but it still eats at me. She will forever mar his book, something that is so special to me and us. She will always be in it, just as she will always be in our lives – for one reason or another. She always seems to find a way and he always seems to let her in. He says he included her not because of who she is to him today but because of whom she once was: someone who helped him along the way, in both life and his career. He doesn’t feel I should be threatened and in truth, I’m not. I don’t think he’s cheating or even carrying on an illicit friendship. But at the same time, I don’t want her in our lives anymore. This is someone who has never treated me or our relationship with respect. I can’t wrap my head around why he felt she deserved a place of honor in his book.

So, wise Internets, I ask you…

WOULD! YOU! BE! MAD!?