Help, my friend dumped me for her new boyfriend!

March 09, 2001

Victims disclose their feelings of rejection and jealousy and their coming to terms with the widespread phenomenon.

By Yap Geok Hui

You know the phenomenon is staring you in the face when a close friend says, not for the first time, that she has to cancel that long-awaited dinner/shopping appointment with you because her boyfriend has just returned from an overseas trip.

Or when she rushes through dinner, skips desert, and excuses herself apologetically in a secondary-school gathering because she has to meet HIM.

And time after time, you watch wistfully as she floats off, her thoughts already in a dreamland that has no room for you.

This phenomenon is universal and timeless. According to Buddhist doctrine, love is like a river from which one can hardly extricate oneself once one has fallen into it.

At some point in our lifetime, we are bound to come across it. A Chinese idiom sums it up nicely: jian se wang you (One forgets friends when it comes to the opposite sex).

Bitten By The Love Bug

"My girlfriend always says she's busy when I call her," says Jenny, a loan credit officer. The reason: the all-important guy in her life right now.

"It's happened so often that I stop asking her out now," she sighs in exasperation.

Patricia, tells of a friend, Yuling who is so lovey-dovey with her recent sweetheart that she will not even go shopping with her female chums without her boyfriend in tow.

"It does rather seem that she is vaunting her beau," she adds. Blame it on an infection of the love bug.

Then there are Huiying and Tracy, who see their boyfriends almost daily yet insist on bringing them everywhere as if they were Siamese twins.

When I asked Tracy if she wanted to catch a movie, she replied that she would ask her boyfriend (a mutual friend) if he was interested.

Hey, wait a minute. I thought I asked only her. That's how the expression "we are an item" came about, I guess.

You think the love-bug phenomenon applies only to women? Think again. Men are not immune, either.

Says Megan, who's close friends with a guy, "He refused to watch a movie with me without his girlfriend. It's like he must watch every film with his girlfriend. His reason was that he did not want to leave her out of things but it's just a movie. Can't he have told her that he watched it already?"

>> Is there an antidote?

>> How to deal with it?

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