Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : Okay, so this is very long and I completely understand not wanting to read the whole thing. The only reason I'm making this post is because the situation is so complicated. I've also seen many posts on this subreddit where it seems like people are deliberately skewing the story in their favor, and while I'm obviously biased, I'm going to try and explain the entire situation. 

I became friends with John a few years ago, after meeting from a mutual friend. We hit it off and clicked pretty well, with a shared interest in comics, board games, and outdoorsy adventure stuff. As the friendship progressed, he became the main person I could tell my shit to. And there was a fair amount of shit - I've dealt with various amounts of anxiety and depression my whole life. I've always felt uncomfortable or anxious around others, even John, and whenever these feelings of anxiety got bad, I'd get more depressed. It was a pretty vicious cycle.

The main downside to this was I've never been able to interact with girls very well. Now, I like to think I'm not the stereotypical anxious male that can't speak to girls. I've had plenty of female friends, but they just rarely developed romantically. Him on the other hand, is a different story.

He's had this girlfriend for a few years, we'll call her Sarah. I didn't start getting to know her until earlier this year, but I'll get to that in a bit. After them dating for about a year and a half, he pressured her into an open relationship. Being in a relationship made him feel constrained, and he started hooking up with lots of girls, even having sex with a few of them. She was never really okay with this, and he knew how sad all this made her, but she always said it was okay because she had a pretty big reliance on him at this point. (She lives about an hour away from us in the middle of nowhere, and the only friends available to her aren’t the best, putting it nicely.) I started to become the person she could talk to about all this - regularly at parties me and her would end up alone together while he would be off hooking up with some girl. (I've asked her recently if she was ever okay with, or ever wanted this open relationship and she said no - he told her he'd break up with her if she wasn't okay with it. He'd always told me she wanted it as much as he did.)

A few months ago, I was really into this girl me and John had just become friends with. I got on really well with her, and thought she liked me too. I was wrong on that one, because as it turns out she liked John. Me and him talked about my feelings for her, but he ended up kissing her anyway. A lot. He didn't even really like her, she was just there and wanted to kiss him, so he did. He told me the next day and even though I was obviously annoyed, I forgave him, and we moved on.

John broke up with Sarah a few months ago. Me and him both started college this year (different colleges), and I think this combined with him finally realizing how sad he made her a lot cause him to end it. She was sad but got over it okay. Me and Sarah started talking a lot more after the break up. He stayed friends with her, and continuously asked her to be "fuck buddies" with him, and even got upset when she said no. He's currently seeing two girls, neither seriously, and this has been making Sarah pretty sad. Despite how sad he made her, they'd been best friends and in a relationship for three years, after all. Everything came to a head a few weeks ago at his Halloween party - me and her were both feeling like shit, and we both drank a lot. But this isn't when we kissed. We just sat on a couch away from the party, hugged a little and spent some time talking to each other. We were closer than friends, but nothing else happened that night. He saw us sitting close anyway, but he seemed okay about it. We talked, and everything seemed normal.

She talked to him a few nights later, and he asked her if we kissed. She of course said no, and when she told me this, I told her that I had been thinking about kissing her. And she told me she'd been thinking about it too. This was a pretty big deal for me. As stressful and confusing as this situation was, I was slightly happy that someone felt the same for me as I was feeling for them. We talked for a while that night, sorting out our feelings and we came to the same conclusion – being close to each other was good and made us both feel comfortable and happy. We had a connection.

We met up again a few days later, just to go for a walk and talk during one of my college lunch breaks, and we stood under a tree while it rained and hugged. Again, nothing more happened. We both just wanted to feel comfortable. However, I felt terrible after this. I felt like I was completely betraying my best friend. I told her that night that we couldn't do anything anymore, that we had to stop. She was very sad after I said this. She didn't reply to me for hours, finally saying that it’s terrible the one thing that makes us both happy we can't do. Yeah. I agreed.

Another few days later, and we've still been messaging nearly all the time. We missed each other. She tells me she's been talking to John a lot more recently, and he brought up the idea of her and I going out. We still hadn't told him anything at this point, so he brought this up on his own. She said she'd really like it, and he told her he'd be okay with it, even if though it would make him really sad. Apparently (I  only found this out after me and her kissed) he flipped back and forth on this opinion a lot.

Two nights ago, I was particularly stressed and overwhelmed, and I switched my phone completely off and slept in way too late the next day. A few minutes after I woke up the next afternoon, there's a knock on my door and she shows up. We had plans to meet up with John and a group of our friends later that day, but she decided to come to me early. I'd literally just woken up minutes ago so after we talked for a bit I had a shower. After this we hugged and cuddled some more and this led to kissing. I don't want to be misinterpreted here - I'm not claiming "one thing led to another and it just happened". It didn't. We both willingly made the decision to do this, both of us thinking while John wouldn't exactly be happy about it, it would be okay. It'd make things hard, for sure, but we decided to prioritize our own happiness. We spent a lot of time together that day, and while it didn't ever go further than kissing, we did lose some items of clothing along the way. We were close. It was intimate.

We saw him later that day along with the big group of friends and I felt guilty - but also happy. I was with someone who cared about me as much as I cared about them. I was in a pretty good mood. I was going to tell him that night but Sarah asked me to wait. She told me we needed to decide what to say and we shouldn't do it that night cause it'll be a shit end to an great day. Terrible logic, I know, but I went with it. I told her the next morning how important it was for me to be the one to tell him - I felt like I needed to because I owed it to him. Like he'd do the same for me. She said she understood but proceeded to tell him herself. Alright, whatever. I thought it would be a manageable situation.

Boy, was I wrong.

He immediately blocked me on all social medias, so I sent him a text trying to explain, saying I was sorry and most of all saying we should talk about the whole situation. I didn't get a response. She did, however. He said all sorts of things to her, including "I'm never speaking to either of you again" and "I've lost both you" and "You've ruined everything". Neither of us heard from him for a few days after that, and he still hasn't talked to me. To be clear, I'm not trying to hide from what we did. We’re both taking responsibility for it. We shouldn't have done what we did, at least not without talking to him first. I understand that, and we made a mistake. But I also feel like he's handling this really badly, considering the amount of things he has done to us and we have forgiven and talked to him about. 

Just after I finished typing all this, she messaged me saying she spoke to him last night. He said a lot of mean things to her, made her feel really guilty, and eventually gave her an ultimatum - he'll consider being friends with us again if me and her never see each other again in any way if he's not there. I had a few comments to say about this, but generally they were as follows:

He should also talk to me about this. He's blocked me everywhere and my texts went unanswered so I feel like it's now on him to talk to me. He should communicate with me as well as her. I told her I'm not even going to consider being friends with him again until he contacts me. I'm not trying again.

He simply can't ban two people from seeing each other. Yes, he can decide not to be friends with us and that's his choice, but this seems very Emily from *Friends* to me. It feels like a cheap sitcom plot and honestly it seems childish.

And finally, I told her that I was angry at him now too. Up until now, I was just feeling bad about what we did and was worried I'd lost my best friend because of a stupid mistake. But now, with the way he's handled this and the things I've found out about the way he treated his relationship with her, I'm angry at him. I forgot to mention earlier, but when she brought up the fact he said he was okay with a potential relationship between me and her, he told her it makes it so much worse what we did because we knew it would make us sad. I thought this was a really stupid way to think about the whole situation, but I digress. Me and her are both still talking to each other, and still have a strong connection and feelings for each other.

So that's everything. Thanks to anyone who reads the whole thing. AITA,