The Third Wheel…

I’ve had three different emails in the last week all dealing with someone starting to attach and just be excessively present with a boyfriend/girlfriend couple. In one case the Third Wheel was female and interested in the boyfriend, in two cases the Third Wheel was male and interested in the girlfriend.

To avoid excessive wordiness and confusion, we’ll assume the Third Wheel is male for the rest of the post. But everything applies much the same as to when it’s a female one too.

Generally a persistent Third Wheel male has a keen interest in the girlfriend. His goal is to turn it into a full blown Love Triangle, and then finally completely displace the original boyfriend. The longer the Third Wheel is allowed to stay a Third Wheel, the more traction he gains toward turning it into a Love Triangle. The Third Wheel is very very frequently the boyfriends “best friend”…

…except that the Third Wheel/Best Friend is completely prepared to leverage anything including his entire friendship, to get the girlfriend for himself. So to be completely blunt, when your best friend is starting to make a play for your girl, the friendship has ended.

Because of basic propinquity, the Third Wheel/Best Friend is probably reasonably attractive to the girlfriend, and the Third Wheel has calculated that he’s within Sex Rank striking distance of actually getting the girl. So the longer it goes on, the more her attraction will grow for him. Allowing another guy to hang around your girl endlessly is a weakness display, so that also increases her attraction as well.

At some point the boyfriend is going to get very uncomfortable and pissed off about the whole thing, usually when the girlfriend returns some level of interest to the Third Wheel/Best Friend. Usually it’s going to be some small thing she does, she isn’t going to jump to sex straight away, it’s just going to be something minor like Facebook friending, “popping over to borrow a couple of CD’s”, an unusual phone call, a bunch of texting or so on. But the boyfriend is going to get the absolute pit-of-the-stomach heebie-jeebies about it.

The next thing that happens, is the boyfriend will say something to the girlfriend about the situation and ask what the hell is going on, knock it off, yada yada yada. She will always firmly deny any interest in the Third Wheel/Best Friend, plus do some sort of dramatic routine of apologizing or outrage at being questioned, with a declaration of interest in only the boyfriend.

It is in no way over. All the boyfriend-girlfriend conversation does is act as an announcement from the boyfriend to the girlfriend, that the Third Wheel issue is going to be resolved on way… or the other.

The girlfriend will be paying extreme attention to what the boyfriend does about the Third Wheel over the next short time frame. If the boyfriend essentially gets rid of the Third Wheel,  then the situation resolves by the girlfriend becoming more interested in the boyfriend. But if the Third Wheel is allowed to continue to maintain constant contact, it’s a terrible weakness display. Very likely the girlfriend will signal her interest to the Third Wheel and it’s basically over for the boyfriend from then.

Importantly upping the ante with the girlfriend doesn’t work. You busting out an engagement ring doesn’t work to fix the Third Wheel problem. Oh she can say “yes” and get distracted for a few weeks, but the problem isn’t the male-female relationship, but that the male is weak to another male and allowing access to the female. You getting married with the Third Wheel as your Best Man is very likely not going to play out well at all.

Once he starts making an aggressive push for your girl, you’ve already lost the friendship. It’s just up to you whether or not you lose the girl as well. And trust me it’s going to be unbelievably awful seeing them together and knowing what you could have done.

So practice with me…