I slept with my best friend and it was an awful mistake (2024)

Metro’s agony auntEm Clarksonis here to solve all your problems.

This week she’s handing down sage guidance on whether a sex amongst friends spells the end of that relationship, and how to exclude siblings from your wedding party.

Read on for this week’s reader conundrums and Em’s advice.

I slept with my best friend in a moment of passion, can our relationship survive? I’m 25 and she is 23. We have been friends for years after we met at work. She works in my local gym so I see her often and we socialise and hang out together.

I came out of a bad relationship and she split up with her boyfriend soon after.

We agreed to meet to keep each other company and soon the tension was obvious. We gave into our feelings and spent the night together. It was a case of us being there for each other in that moment of being vulnerable.

The next morning it was clear we made a mistake and agreed to forget it happened. However, it has made me question if our friendship will be damaged. I love her as a friend but I worry it will impact our future.

Can a friendship survive something like this happening?

Yes, in my opinion, a friendship can absolutely survive something like this. Truthfully, I’ve never really understood how sex became such a poison to platonic relationships.

I don’t know if it’s our prudish nature when it comes to intimacy as a whole, and our subsequent resistance to delve particularly far below the surface of another person for fear of what we might find, or if it’s just our absolute fear of nudity that creates that devastating awkwardness between a duo whose bits have bumped each others’, but I think it’s such a shame.

Sex does not have to ruin a friendship, and this does not have to ruin yours.

As for the practicalities, I’d actually recommend not sweeping this under the rug and trying to pretend it didn’t happen, because that’s where things get awkward. You’re tiptoeing around something massive that you have in common, and that just breeds an uncomfortable dynamic.

Bring it up, acknowledge it, joke about it. Let it be a thing that happened, but don’t let it be the thing that happened that you pinpoint as the beginning of the end of your friendship.

It’s actually great, when you think about it, that you were able to be there for each other at your time of need. So I’d take a second to celebrate that, if anything.

Humans are so weird about this sort of thing. My old dog Dodger springs to mind as I write this, who used to make his move on Echo the Labrador like clockwork every month.

Even when they got stuck in the most unnatural and uncomfortable of positions, they were able to get along the next morning like they’d done nothing more intimate than high five. Channel that and good luck!

My mum is desperate for my sister to be a bridesmaid. We aren’t close and I feel so much pressure.

Of all the questions I receive in this role, wedding-related ones are by far the most common. And I think it’s because we’ve been sold the absolute dream when it comes to planning the ‘best day of our lives’.

Instead, we are faced with the painful reality of astronomical catering quotes, work colleagues we don’t even like that much petitioning us for a plus one, and the colossal demands of our families.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times: Perhaps the most underestimated inconvenience of wedding planning is managing the hopes and expectations of our nearest and dearest who, whether they will admit it or not, have also harboured their own dreams for your day, and their involvement in it.

This is compounded by our generation’s pull away from tradition. There was a time when it would have been expected that an unmarried sister might have been a bride’s maid of honour, while her bridesmaids would have been comprised of whatever little girls were in her life.

A bride-tribe is a new concept and I think that’s hard for our parents to keep up with sometimes too. If you don’t want to have your sister as a bridesmaid, bottom line is, you don’t have to have her as one.

But maybe it’s worth weighing up the toll your mum’s pressure, or sister’s disappointment, will take on you and whether or not it’s worth it.

I certainly found some concessions to be beneficial to the process. If you’ve already got five bridesmaids, a sixth might not hurt. Or it might. In which case I’m sure you could find her something else to do? Only you know that.

But I think accepting that wedding planning is a tightrope of compromise is the biggest first step, from there you can pick your battles. Good luck!

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.

Share your views in the comments below.

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