Man discovers his fiancée was FWB with his former bully and he's still in her life. UPDATED

"My (26m) fiance (26f) spending time with her major client who used to bully me in high school and I just found out they have a romantic history."

My (26m) wife (Becca, 26f), her best friend (Daria, 26f) and I all went to high school together but I ran in a very different social circle. They played sports and were decently well-known/popular. I was really into art and computers, chubby with an awkward haircut. We all went to a really large high school so it was more that I knew of them rather than actually knowing them.

Becca and Daria have been best friends since they were really young. They both moved into the same neighborhood in preschool and their parents are very close. In high school, there was a guy (Chris, 26m) who would regularly bully me. There was a name that Chris and his friends called me based a thing that happened my sophomore year.

It was essentially a trap that Chris and friends had set up so that I would be embarrassed and they could pretend I had done it to myself. I feel like I’m already doing a bad job hiding my identity so let’s just say that the name was “Stinky”. I hated it. They called me this all the time and made me the butt of many of their jokes. Chris was very popular and was friends with Becca and Daria in high school.

Chris was good looking, wealthy and he knew it. He walked around like he was untouchable. Insert all of the wealthy, athletic, good looking stereotypes that you want here, they pretty much all rang true for him. I hated him and hated any time that I had to be around him.

I know that a lot of people face some really horrible bullying and it could've been worse but I did feel like I was relentlessly harassed. I was very thankful and excited to get out of my hometown and away from those people when I went to college.

I don’t know if it was growing up and growing into myself, the ability to reset my identity, or just getting away from bullies but I really found myself in college. I’m still a bit nerdy and artistic but I grew into my body. I started making friends and realized that I had something to offer the world. I rapidly became a lot more confident and comfortable socially.

Becca and I ended up going to the same college a few hours away but she didn’t have a car. I offered her a ride home for Thanksgiving break and it became a habit of riding together for breaks and chatting about life and school. We started to become friends and our friend groups started to combine. In sophomore year, our talks became deeper and more personal.

I realized I was into her on the way home for Christmas and asked her on a date over break. We’ve now been together almost 7 years, engaged for the last year. We have a strong relationship, communicate well, go on regular dates and trips, and have supported each other through numerous up’s and downs.

We have had our fights over the years and even did some counseling together for about a year (I was bringing my parents’ passive aggressive style of fighting into our relationship and she was assuming I was criticizing her all the time because her mom’s shitty behavior). We’ve found those times to be challenging but helpful in the long run.

I love this woman and am excited to get married and spend our lives together. Becca and Daria reconnected after college and now own a business together that plans events and helps connect people and businesses to local food, drinks and experiences.

Their business really took off a few years ago and they’ve been slowly but steadily growing. They have started to enter into a number of exclusive contracts with event spaces and restaurants/breweries. In a market where things can turn quickly, these deals are super important to them as they provide a lot of security for their company.

Becca came home about 2 months ago really excited about a new brewery exploring an exclusive deal. About a week later, the brewery signed and there was a dinner to celebrate, Becca asked if I want to come and meet the team from the brewery. She told me that I might have met the owner before but I guess I didn’t think to ask who it was because I didn’t know who it was going into the dinner.

If you’re still with me, you can probably guess who the brewery owner is. I was sitting at the table with Becca waiting for the rest of the group to arrive when Chris came through the door walked up to the table, greeted Becca and then turned to me and said “hi Stinky.” I was immediately confused and angry. She knew that I knew Chris and she knew that he had harassed me throughout high school.

She didn’t mention at any point prior that he was the owner of the brewery and that she was working closely with him. I got through dinner but on the way home, when I asked why she didn’t tell me, she blew it off as though it was water under the bridge, that I had changed and I should understand that Chris had changed too. I was still upset but tried to let bygones be bygones.

Over the next couple of weeks, it was clear that Daria and Chris were becoming romantically involved with each other. Becca and I usually spend 2/3 nights a week with Daria whether going out or simply watching tv at our house or her’s. We often joke that we’re a thruple but to be clear, that is not the case and what we have is strictly platonic.

Over the last month or so, Chris started showing up to nights out and even came over one night to Daria’s house when we were hanging it and watching tv. I’ve tried to be open to a new Chris but he seems like he’s the same overly-macho, trying-to-hard-to-be-alpha jerk he was all those years ago.

I tried to bring up to Becca that the casual relationship between Daria and Chris is probably not good for their business, while Becca agreed, she felt like she couldn’t tell her friend to not date or sleep with someone. Last week, Becca invited me along to an industry event, I get there to unfortunately find Chris is there as well. I try to be friendly and nice, we get a table for the 4 of us and have some drinks and food.

At one point, the girls leave to network with a couple of potential clients. Out of no where, Chris starts talking about how this event might be a good place for him and Daria to find a woman to have a threesome with. Caught completely off guard, I ask him what he’s talking about and he says that him and Daria want to have another three-way and that I should know all about that.

I was super confused and asked what he was talking about and he proceeds to tell me that him, Daria and Becca had a couple of three way hookups in high school and that he figured that I was doing the same thing with the 2 women as well. I felt blindsided and didn’t know what to say.

When we got home, Becca already knew I was upset about something and asked me what was wrong. I told her about what Chris had said and she tried to deny it at first but then told me that it was partially true. What Becca told me was that Daria and Chris were FWBs for a bit at the end of senior year/right before college.

Chris and Daria spent a few weeks talking with her about hooking up with them but she was on the fence. At a party when everyone was tipsy it was brought up again and she went to a bedroom with them (note for mods: they were all 18 at the time) They all did a lot of kissing and touching but Becca backed out of sleeping together.

On Thanksgiving break of freshman year, the 3 talked about doing it again but ended up not being able to find a free time for all of them. Daria then got a boyfriend and it was never brought up again. All of this was news to me. In addition to not really coming into myself until college, I was a late bloomer in terms of relationships. Becca was my first everything.

I knew and wasn’t upset that she slept with someone before us but we had never really gone into the when or who of that. Becca keeps saying that I never asked and she never lied about all this but, especially with doing business with Chris, it feels like lying by omission to me. I’m struggling with all this. Chris did his best to make my life awful in high school and now is back.

Almost every time I spent time with him, he seems to be belittling me, making fun of me, he even told Becca in front of me that she could do better than me and was dating down (she told me later that it was just a joke and stop being so sensitive). It seems like this threesome thing is just 1 more thing he can hold over me.

He’s a snake and always seems to say the worst stuff to me when Becca and Daria are just out of earshot. We’ve been arguing about this situation for about a week now. I asked Becca to cut all contact with him last night.

She told me I was bring unreasonable. He’s with her best friend and they all do business together. I asked if it was that Daria and her need his brewery’s contract. She keeps asking me why I can’t move on and accept that Chris is a different person

Three months after her original post, she shared this update:

TLDR: my fiancés’ (Becca) business has starting doing business with a guy (Chris) who bullied me in high school. As we have been spending more time with him, he has started to bully me again. At the same time, I found out he has a romantic history with my fiancé and her best friend (Daria). I don’t want her to do business with him anymore and don’t know where to go from here.

In that post, I wrote that I wasn’t looking to break up with my fiancé, rather, I was looking how to fix things. Almost all the comments were about how I needed to break up with this girl, call her out on her manipulative B.S., etc. I was really pissed with the majority of advice I got and figured that Reddit didn’t know what they were talking about. I guess those would be famous last words.

In the week after I made my initial post, Becca and I seemed to have a daily fight about her and Chris. I came home from work one day after having a long fight the night before to find Becca not in our house. This wasn’t surprising in the moment since she works a really irregular schedule but then I noticed that a bunch of her things were missing.

I tried to text her making sure she was ok and got a long text in response about how she was going to stay with her sister and how she needed some space, for me not to contact her for a few days. I was confused, frustrated and upset but figured that if all she needed was some space, hopefully that would be what could get our relationship back on track.

The next night, Daria texted me asking if she could come over to talk. When she got there, she told me she had been a bad friend to me. Basically, there were a number of things she felt like she should tell me but didn’t know where to draw the line between her friendship with me and her friendship with Becca. We talked for a few hours and multiple things came out:

- A few months before, Becca told Daria but she was doubting our relationship. Becca told her that she felt like we had gotten together so young that she was missing out on experiences by being with me. (Note: Becca never said anything about this to me.

When I was thinking later about what Daria had told me this night, I remembered that months prior, Becca had this really weird week where she was really distant and kept asking me questions about what it was about her that made me want to get married. She told me later that she had just been in a weird headspace and I kind of forgot about those conversations.)

- When Becca and Daria first met with Chris, Becca was really flirty with him. In their industry/work connections, it’s not uncommon for people to do things like be a bit flirty, a little touchy with each other. This was always something I found weird/uncomfortable but knew it to be a culture of the industry. But in this case, Daria said it went enough with Chris that she noticed it as strange.

- Once Daria told Becca that she had started hooking up with Chris, Becca would regularly ask for details so much so that Daria told me she started lying to Becca, saying that their hookups were happening less frequently than they actually were so that she wouldn’t be hounded for details.

- A week or so before Becca and I fought about her connection with Chris, Becca was hounding Daria for details on the latest hookup and casually dropped that they should have a threesome with Chris.

Daria said that she was super uncomfortable and immediately brought up Becca and my relationship. Becca said that she was just joking but made the same “joke” three or four other times until Daria said directly to her that it made her uncomfortable and that she needed to stop.

Then she got to the biggest thing: on the night that Becca left, she showed up drunk at Chris’ place. He let her in and then she tried to sleep with him. I guess Daria was in the bedroom or something because after a bit Daria came out to see Becca trying to grab at Chris so they worked together to kick her out.

Angry, sad and confused, I packed my shit and left and left our place. I didn’t want to be there in case she came back so I stayed with a friend for a bit. I didn’t try to reach out to Becca and didn’t hear from her either.

About 2 weeks after Daria came to talk, my mom passed away. She had had a stroke years ago and had been declining for a long time. Her passing wasn’t unexpected but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t super hard. It was always just me and mom growing up. I was struggling a lot and felt so alone. I almost called Becca a number of times.

The day of the funeral Becca showed up. At first I was happy to see her. She was by my side much of the day. I was thankful she was there. Things felt normal with her there, I felt secure. It felt like we were together again, a team again.

Then, when people people were coming up to me after the burial, Becca said to one of my old neighbors about how sad we were, how hard it’s been on us and how we’ve need to rely on each other. It was as though there was fog in my head that instantly lifted. I started flipping out on her.

In hindsight, I feel bad about the scene that I caused at my own mom’s funeral. But I couldn’t believe she was pretending that we were together, that she had been supporting me and that she hadn’t tried to hook up with another guy a couple of weeks before. I was really happy that my cousin stepped in and told her to leave.

I blocked her on everything. Since my fiance and mom were the only things keeping me in that area, a little over a week after the funeral, I packed up and moved to the East Coast where my cousin lives. I’ve been here for a little under 2 months. I wish I could say that I’m in a job making a lot more money or that I have a hot new girlfriend but it’s been a bit of a struggle to settle in.

I’m in my same job, working remote but do need to travel to my home city every few weeks. I feel anxious there, worried that I will run into Chris or Becca. My cousin has tried to be welcoming and I’m thankful he’s given me a landing pad as I’ve looked by my own place here but him and his friends are older and they mostly are focused on family life/kids so it’s been hard to make friends.

I’ve signed up for a volleyball beer league though this fall so hopefully there’s some good people there. I want to thank this community for giving me hard truth. I’ve had plenty of DMs checking in on me which I’m mostly thankful for. This last season has been probably the hardest and darkest of my life but I feel decently hopeful for what’s ahead.

TL/DR: She wanted to sleep with him but was fine pretending to be there for me when my mom passed. I dropped her and moved away.