It’s the reality-TV relationship scandal that shows no signs of going away. Three weeks have passed since it was confirmed that Summer House co-stars Amanda Batula and West Wilson were dating, yet there is still a continuous churn of headlines about the couple.
The cause of the drama is relatively straightforward: Batula is close friends with Wilson’s ex, Ciara Miller, another member of the Summer House cast. Things have been further complicated by the fact that Miller was treated poorly by Wilson and opened up about this to Batula. Beyond the simple fact of Batula breaking girl code, there are the racial dynamics at play: as a Black woman, Miller was subject to racist abuse after dating Wilson, who is white.
While I have no experience to draw on in relation to the latter, I know well the complicated, often confusing feelings that arise when two friends date the same guy. That’s because my first serious boyfriend—the one I said “I love you” to first, lost my virginity to, and who first broke my heart—had dated my (former) best friend before me.
Sadie (not her real name) and I had been close since our first year of secondary school, when we bonded over a shared love of Dawson’s Creek and McDonald’s chicken nuggets. We sat next to each other in every class, called each other every night, and spent every Saturday afternoon wandering around the local town center before renting a teen rom-com at Blockbuster and watching it in her bedroom.
As pupils at an all-girls school, we were fairly starved of male attention, so it was only when we started to go to an indie club night that was famously lax on ID checks that we began to mix with our peers of the opposite sex. It was here that we first met Tom (not his real name, either). He was tall, blond, and confident, a year older than us and the owner of a Citroën Saxo, as well as a 20-pack of Marlboros. He was almost immediately smitten with Sadie, who has a Liv Tyler-esque elfin beauty: all freckles, blue eyes, and pale skin. They went on a few dates to the cinema, snogged in the corner of the nightclub, and chatted late into the night over MSN Messenger. Then, after about six weeks, Tom and Sadie were over—the fling ending as quickly as it had begun.
I still spoke to Tom at our favorite club night, enjoying a bantering back-and-forth as we had before—and soon I noticed that he was paying me a little more attention. He’d compliment my dress or my hair, or ask me if I wanted a drink at the bar or to share a taxi home. Sadie and I had never been competitive over a boy before because, well, we didn’t know any boys. But one night, with my reserve weakened by cheap Sambuca shots, Tom and I ended up kissing. Sadie saw it happen and promptly left—not in tears, exactly, but just… shock.
I was terrified of her reaction, knowing full well that it was a truly horrible thing to have done. But on the following Monday at school, she shrugged it off. “I ended things with him,” she said.
Interpreting this, at surface value, as permission, I proceeded to fall head over heels. It was the kind of intoxicating first love in which you are talking about baby names one minute and screaming at each other for an imagined indiscretion the next. He was all I could think about—and talk about. Unsurprisingly, this created tension with Sadie, who at first simply rolled her eyes and pretended not to care, her ego clearly badly bruised by this development.
