I just got married – but I’m still in love with my best friend

Dear Roe,

I have never admitted this before, but I am in love with my husband and my best friend. I married last month, to a man I adore. We’ve been together for more than a decade, since college, and have the perfect relationship in so many ways. We are both independent but complement each other very well. It is a very supportive, equal and loving relationship. We have a great sex life, and a really wonderful mix of mutual friends, and friends from before we met. We travel a lot, have good jobs and great excitement in our lives as well as future plans.

Yet I cannot get my best friend out of my head. We had a fling years ago (which my husband knows about, and is never threatened by), and there is unfinished business there. My best friend and I drunkenly spoke about our feelings for each other a few weeks ago, and I feel heartbroken since. I don't want anything to happen with him, and I would not cheat on my husband, but I feel so sad for what might have been. I had put all my feelings to bed after our fling years ago, but now I cannot stop thinking about them.

Can you love two people at once?

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You know you can love two people at once. We do it all the time. We love parents, siblings, children, friends. You’re asking can you romantically be in love with more than one person at once. And that’s where it gets tricky.

I think you can love a multitude of people, in a multitude of ways; that we get to define what that love means for us; that love doesn’t have to be dependent on a till-death-do-we-part relationship, but can be part of any meaningful connection.

But to be in love is different. And I think the “in” is the important part; the being in a relationship, in whatever form that takes. To be in a mutual, shared connection with someone. To be in the work of love. That’s what you have with your husband. You chose each other, chose to commit to each other, chose to spend your life and marriage working on your love.

And you chose this a month ago. It’s a huge step, and now that the excitement of the engagement and the wedding has settled into the day-to-day reality of being married, you have time to think about what this huge transformation means. You get to focus on what your life will look like with your new husband. It’s a shift, realising that you’ve chosen one person, that you’ve chosen them over all the drama and misadventures and great dates and disasters and endless possibilities of singledom.

You can appreciate your husband and love him dearly and be happy that you’re married – and also feel daunted by that. You can find yourself thinking about the other possibilities, the other people you could have chosen. It’s natural, and doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice.

Your situation is complicated by the fact that you’re thinking of one particular person. But I actually think if you delve a little deeper, thinking about your friend will show you exactly why your husband is the right choice.

Your husband chose you, and you chose him in return. You’ve had a relationship, you’ve fought, worked through it, talked about what you want from life and decided to take it all on together. You looked at all your other options and still thought “You. I choose you.”

You know who didn’t choose each other? You and your friend. You’ve known each other years. You even had a fling. And yet the fling ended, and you never restarted it. You never tried to have a full-blown relationship. You never committed to each other. You never even tried the work of love. There were very valid, important reasons that shaped that decision. I don’t know what the specifics were, but there were reasons the fling didn’t develop. There are reasons you both got into relationships with other people and not each other. There are reasons you both decided that friendship was the best type of relationship for you.

And neither of you is making a different choice now. Expressing your feelings for each other now that you’re married keeps you in the same position: you can say that you’re mad about each other, but never have to prove it. You’ll still never have to commit to each other, still never have to do the work of love – work you have proven, over the course of your years-long friendship, that you have never been willing to do.

There is no unfinished business between you and this man. This is what your dynamic has always been. There are two friends who never chose to be in a relationship, hiding behind the drama of cowardly, non-committal declarations of feelings, still choosing not to commit to each other.

Your friend is not offering you love, or commitment. He’s offering you dysfunction, confusion and fleeting attention. In contrast, there’s a husband and wife, who took vows, and have been choosing each other every day since their relationship started. Your husband is offering you transparency, love, an equal partnership, and a fulfilling life.

That’s your unfinished business: your marriage. That’s the relationship that is going to evolve and unfold, that you’re going to have to work on every day.

There’s also the unfinished business of yourself. And there’s some work to be done there, too. Examining whether you have a pattern of engaging in dramatic, self-destructive behaviour, like declaring feelings for another man within weeks of getting married. Asking what kind of friend would try sabotage your happiness by declaring feelings for you within weeks of getting married. Making some more important choices: choosing to set boundaries with your friends, to refocus your attention onto your new husband, to think about all the reasons you never ended up with your friend instead of the fictional alternate reality where you did.

There can be many different kinds of love. But each depends on seeing people how they are, and knowing what they’re offering you. Look at your friend clearly. Look at your husband clearly. Look at yourself clearly. See the difference in the love you’re being offered, and feeling. Only one of them is in it for the long haul.

Roe McDermott is a writer and Fulbright scholar with an MA in sexuality studies. If you have a problem or query you would like her to answer, you can submit it anonymously at irishtimes.com/dearroe. Only questions selected for publication can be answered