Yes, you absolutely *should* be worried about your boyfriend's Girl Best Friend.

When my ex broke up with me, it came approximately a month after he'd reconnected with an old friend.

Not just any friend.

His Girl Best Friend. 

They'd had a falling out a couple of years prior, and hadn't spoken since then. But when COVID struck, she reached out.

His buzzing phone woke me up at 3am. I nudged him awake, he looked at the screen, leapt out of bed and left the room. I didn't think much of it, other than to hope everything was okay. A 3am call wasn't normal — but then, nothing in lockdown was normal.

He came back to the room, told me it it was "that girl" he'd told me about, who he hadn't heard from in years. He recounted their conversation — she was going through a hard time (ahem, weren't we all?). He apologised, told me he loved me (for the first time, actually), and we went back to sleep.

Naively, I thought that was that.

They spoke the next day, and the next. He told me every time she would message. And she messaged… a lot. I didn't mind though, not at first. I trusted him. (Or maybe I was so desperately trying to be the cool girl that I simply convinced myself I didn't care.)

It did feel like it was getting a bit excessive — she was messaging him daily, and as much as I didn't want to be the kind of person to ask my partner not to have a close friend of the opposite sex, it did start to irk me. So, like mature adults in a healthy relationship, we spoke about it.

He seemed surprised that I was upset, but didn't hesitate to reassure me.

"I haven't spoken to her in years; I don't have to keep speaking to her," he said with a shrug. "I don't care if we don't pick the friendship back up. I don't ever want to do anything that would hurt or upset you."

I didn't want him to cut off all contact with her. Truly! I just wanted… to meet her myself? To have her cool her jets a little. But he insisted on cutting her off.

Again, I naively thought that was that.

A month or two later we broke up. It was soul-crushing; I was devastated.

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I saw on social media that she came sniffing around pretty quickly, and while I don't engage with him (or her, lol) on those platforms now (at first it hurt too much to see; now I just don't give a s**t), my gut still tells me, four years on, he left me for her. Do I know for sure? No. But there were signs.

It might have been the pause — that tiny hesitation when I asked him, "Is there someone else?" the night he ended things.

It might have been her appearing on his Insta by way of likes and comments so soon after we split (she never had social media before this, I'd been told).

It might have been a… few other things I saw during the requisite post-breakup Facebook stalking (don't pretend we don't all do this) that took place before I realised I was hurting my own feelings and needed to move on.

But something in me knew I'd been left for the Girl Best Friend.

The moral of this story (which, BTW, is not an isolated incident — Girl Best Friends having been messing s**t up since the dawn of time, even if inadvertently), is not "this guy is a player/d**khead/loser" (although all of that may or may not be true).

It's this:

Beware the man with the Girl Best Friend.

I know, I know. I just sound like a bitter ex. And you know what? Maybe I am, but that's beside the point, because I'm definitely not the only one this has happened to either. Nope, the sample size is large my friends.

A TikTokker went viral earlier this year for claiming that "married men that genuinely love their wife and value their marriage, they don't have close female friends", and while I disagree with this as a general sentiment (of course guys can have female friends), literally thousands of jilted women shared their own experiences of being ditched for the Girl Best Friend.

They even made a movie about it (see: 1997's My Best Friend's Wedding starring Julia Roberts as the sneaky, conniving Girl bestie — and okay, Cameron Diaz's sweet innocent fiancée-turned-wife "wins" in the end, but it's Hollywood, remember? Happy endings and all that stuff).

Like me, they all tried to be the cool girl (turns out it's a classic mistake), and it bit them all in the ass. Make of that what you will.

And I know — I KNOW — not all GBFs. But the thing is, I'm not even necessarily blaming the friend herself for her part in this messy yet predictable real-life dating trope. Because while it comes down to the individual, it turns out, science might have a little something to say about the whole thing, too.

Plenty of research shows that both men and women experience sexual attraction toward their opposite-sex friends (that's a no-brainer, if we're being honest with ourselves — it's how a lot of great relationships start, right? And there's nothing wrong with thinking your mates are bangin'). But what's interesting is that men are more likely to report attraction to their female friends than women are to their male friends — and that holds whether they or their opposite-sex friend is in a relationship or not.

Another study found that, when women have partners, their level of relationship satisfaction can have an effect on whether they have a sexual interest in their male friends… As in, when they're happy, they're not looking to bang their buddies. For men though? How happy they are in their relationships didn't seem to have an effect on whether they want to shag their female mates.

Hmm.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that guys shouldn't have female friends. Of course not, that's ridiculous. I have plenty of male friends (both with and without partners), and have literally zero interest in them as anything more than friends. (And I'm pretty darn sure they feel the same way about me — absolutely no romantic or sexual inklings.)

But if your Tinder date keeps talking about that ONE Girl Best Friend, who you'll "totally love", or your new guy messages his GBF more than he texts you? Yeah, all I'm saying is, be alert but not alarmed.

Feature image: Sony.