My (30F) husband's (29M) childhood best friend, Jake (31M) and I don't get along well at all. Now I'm tempted to cut Jake out completely, but I can't because Frank and Jake run an online project together.
To give you some background, Jake was my husband's best man for our wedding. For the entire length of our engagement, my husband told Jake not to bring strippers. My husband, Frank, was wildly uncomfortable with the idea of strippers. Frank made Jake promise there wouldn't be strippers, I overheard this conversation from another room, and subsequently heard Jake promise that he wouldn't bring strippers. Come the night of the party, Frank comes home, drunker than he ever has been, vomiting violently, and the first words out of his mouth were that there were strippers and do I still want to marry him and that he only got as drunk as he did to try and forget. I stayed up that entire night fuming at Jake, watching over Frank to make sure he didn't start vomiting in his sleep. From what Frank's other friends, my own brother, and Frank himself told me, Frank tried not to engage with them, was too scared of being called names to leave, and was forced to do coochie shots from the strippers (turning his head to try and refuse and eventually relenting when they wouldn't leave him alone). The other friends there said they were uncomfortable with the situation. When I confronted Jake later, he said he never made that promise about the strippers and didn't apologize for it. I will likely die mad about this.
Later on, Jake talked Frank into investing several hundred dollars into a bitcoin project so that Jake could get to a higher buy-in level, or some such nonsense, which immediately failed.
Now, Jake talked Frank into starting a new online project with him, and Frank and I had to get a friend to help us manage the online presence because Jake doesn't believe in social media (although he did use one account personally to message women, nothing untoward, but still made us uncomfortable that he was doing it to begin with). Jake has promised to record live in-person events they host because he doesn't want to be on camera, and then left me to both record and manage the event because he had to take care of something else in the area. And then had the audacity to complain about the way we packed up the camera gear when he collected it hours after the event ended.
Part of this project included doing live collaboration videos with other people across the country, George (28M) and Michelle (29F), no webcams for Jake, because Jake and cameras don't mix. Frank was uncomfortable with this at first and asked Jake not to do this, but Jake went ahead with it anyway, and had Frank participate. George and Michelle are pretty chill, and we've all talked regularly and become friends.
Now George and Michelle have bought plane tickets and are coming to meet us. We're putting them up in our house. This visit coincides with Frank's 30th birthday.
Jake has just told us that he won't be coming to celebrate Frank's birthday, because George and Michelle will be there and he has no interest in actually meeting people from his online project.
They're staying in our house for several days. We're picking them up from the airport. All he has to do is show up for an hour or two and go home on one of those days.
Frank has tried to explain this to Jake, but Jake's doubling down. Now he says that he feels that they're weird. And it makes him uncomfortable. And we planned this all without him, even though he had previously said he'd be able to meet them in person if they ever came over to visit. And, of course, he's claiming that he never said that.
Obviously, I cannot make Jake do anything he is uncomfortable with. Jake's his own person who makes his own decisions.
But I'm tired of Jake using Frank's friendship and betraying Frank's trust. I want to talk to Jake, but I'm not sure how and not sure if I should. Jake knows he's on thin ice with me in perpetuity because of the bachelor party, and I would never think of him again if I could help it, but Jake is a critical part of making the online project, which Frank now really enjoys, work.
Should I step into this situation? Should I make Jake understand that he has to live with the consequences of his own decisions? What might reasonable consequences be? I'm feeling very unreasonable right now.
TLDR; My husband's childhood best friend won't come to my husband's milestone birthday party because people we know from online will be there. I'm trying to find a good way to talk to the friend about the situation, if I should talk to the friend at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment