How To Cope With My Friends' Relationship?

First, I want to apologize in advance. This is probably going to be a long post. But I could really use some advice on this.

One of my good friends (female) is in a relationship with a girl. For clarity's sake, I will refer to her as M. Her girlfriend, who I'll call P, was my best friend before they started dating. As the title implies, the core issue here is that I'm jealous of their relationship, but I feel like the title of the thread is putting things mildly. This has been going on for over six months now, so the timeline of everything might be a little off, but the events are all accurate and I'll try to put them in the right place as best I can.

So, last fall, I was hanging out with P a lot, as I always did. We were inseparable. M was already friends with us, but started joining us on our adventures. All of a sudden, M and P started hanging out a lot. It hurt to see them hanging out together. They suddenly had all of these inside jokes, and it was like I didn't even really have a place in either of their lives anymore.

One day, M texts me. She tells me that her sister had asked her if she had feelings for one of her friends, and she told me that realized she did. I knew right away that it was P, and I was a little pissed off. I still played along, asking if it was P, which she confirmed. I let her gush about P for a little bit, and then we left things at that, and it didn't get brought up again for a little bit.

M and I are both writers. A couple of weeks later, we were preparing for a poetry reading event at our college. M was previously in a toxic relationship with a girl, and had a poem she had written about that girl prepared. She had also written a poem about how much she loved P, and read it for me. I remember being super pissed off about the poem, and strongly suggesting she read the one about the toxic relationship and not the one about P. She took my advice, and I felt better.

A few weeks later, we had our sorority formal. I had decided on wearing a suit. M and I posed for several goofy pictures, and I took some pictures with P and other friends. M and P spent a lot of time together, and I mostly sat in the corner alone. I tried not to let it get the best of me, but it was hard. After the dance M and I had plans to go to a party. Fast forward to after the dance, and suddenly M has a headache, and needs to go all the way to P's dorm to get Tylenol, and this somehow means that our plans were cancelled. I felt so incredibly betrayed and lonely, and I ended up just leaving, and not even asking for a ride down to the party. I ran/walked the entire way there. Once I got to the party, I started slamming drinks, and ended up getting drunk quickly. Someone gave me a ride home, and a friend helped me to bed. That was that.

A couple of weeks later, M is going on and on about how she can't take it anymore, and how she has to know how P feels. She starts flirting, texting me updates as this is going on. I keep choking down the bad feelings and encourage her. She was telling other friends at this point, and they all wanted her and P to get together, and I didn't feel comfortable talking to another friend about how I was feeling.

Then, one night, I made a bit of a mistake. I went to a party with some other friends. M was originally going to come, but once again decided not to so that she could hang out with P. But I wasn't that upset because I was still going with all of my other friends and there was going to be alcohol. Long story short, I ended up not just drunk, but crossfaded, and was messaging another friend of mine who wasn't at the party. Of course, it was mostly gibberish, but my friend asked who was all there. I said something along the lines of "M isn't here, she's with my crush" but then quickly realized my mistake and corrected myself "No. She's with her crush." I ended up chilling out. Another person at the party realized that I was a little too far gone, and asked M to come pick me up. Both M and P ended up walking down to the party and walking me home. They got me to bed, and then they left and I tried to sleep it off.

A few days later, I was over at M's and M was talking about how the text messages I had sent her made no sense. This was yet another mistake, but I ended up showing her the messages I'd sent the other friend, since they were absolute gibberish. She found them funny. I left her dorm after that. About an hour later, I got a text from M. She said something like "Hey Eli, awkward question for you." And I was like...okay, shoot. She then said "There was a message you sent to [friend] and I don't know if it was like a typo or something but I don't think you meant for me to read it." And I asked her what she was talking about and she flat-out asked me if I liked P. I said I didn't but she kept going on and saying that if she was getting in the middle of something that she'd stop, and I kept trying to assure her that she wasn't but I kept saying all of the wrong things and she was not convinced. At one point I even said something to the extent of "Even if I did, it's not like I'd even have a chance with her." Really bad on my part. Finally, I managed to convince her that I didn't like P, and that was that. Admittedly, I was tempted to say that she was in the middle of something, but I couldn't do that in good faith.

Finally, it happened a few weeks later. Of course P miraculously reciprocates her feelings. I found out through two twitter posts from M saying about how she was "lucky to be in love with her best friend". She finally told me in person a few days later, and I expressed support, but again, was choking down everything that I was feeling. I thought about talking to my therapist about it, but there were more pressing matters, and my other friends were all so happy for them, so I never said anything. Instead, I've let it build over a few months, watching them post their gross selfies all over the place, watching them post about their date nights, and just feeling really tumultuously sick on the inside.

A few weeks ago, I had a friend over, and we were drinking. Finally, I opened up a little about this stuff. My friend told me that M was convinced that I either had on her or P, and that they were secretly hurting me. I was honest, and I said that I didn't think that I had a crush on either of them, but I wasn't exactly happy about the relationship. I explained that I was jealous, which is what I think is going on here. I'm not an attractive person. I'm overweight, and I have an incredibly large chest that I find extremely unattractive and troubling. As a result, most clothes look awkward on me, and I'm just overall not a loveable person. I have the severe misfortune of falling for unavailable girls, and that doesn't help my already-in-the-toilet romantic prospects. It felt good to get off my chest, and my friend was shockingly understanding of my feelings, but she said that we couldn't bring it up again since she'd told me the stuff about M in confidence.

I'm still finding myself caught up in a crossroads. Especially because M had the bad relationship right before starting to date P. They're still two of my closest friends, but I just really don't like them together. And I don't know why. It's been getting easier to more or less ignore everything. Instagram has a mute feature now, so I've been able to mute M (M is the one who does all of the social media stuff) so I don't have to see all of their selfies, and occasionally I'll get snapchats of their dates, which for the most part, I'll open but not react to. Sometimes I'll reply with something general, like a "Nice", "Cool", or even a "Looks like you're having fun", but not much more than that. But I don't think that I'll be able to continue with that much longer. In a couple of weeks, I'm going on a trip with M, P, and another one of my friends. Then, at the end of next month, I'll be moving into a dorm with them. I'm afraid that us living together will force us to have a conversation about all of this.

I just feel like a monster! I should be supporting my friends' relationship. And I still like them as people, and as friends, but there's just something about the two of them together I hate. And it's not like I can really go to them and be like "I still like you guys as friends, but I don't want any part of your romantic relationship." And I don't know how to cope with it. Is there a way I can magically make myself okay with everything? What do I do?

If you've made it this far, thanks in advance. I tried to cut out as much as I could, but it still ended up being a lot. I'm sorry I'm such a piece of garbage.

 

Thanks for the replies, guys!

You're right. Looking back on it now, I'm not really sure why I thought that living with them would be a good idea. We're going to be living in sort of an apartment style type housing on campus? I'm supposed to room with P, and M is going to be rooming with our other friend. So it's kind of both...?

On the bright side, I'm not usually in my dorm that much anyways. I leave early in the morning for class, and I usually just stay in the main part of campus go to classes and study until late at night, and then I go home. They'll probably be getting ready for bed or already in bed by the time I arrive home, so I might be okay. If I pull out now, though, it'll really look suspicious and will undoubtedly cause a lot of hurt feelings, so I should probably wait and see how things play out. My university does allow room changes, so if worse comes to worse, I am able to leave.

Thanks for sticking it out until the end! It means a lot.

You raise a good point. Never during this whole thing did I ever really consider my feelings for P, but that's not an easy question to ask myself, and nor is it an easy one to answer. If I'm being completely honest, I'm not sure how I'd even begin to have that conversation with myself. But it definitely needs to happen. I'm seeing P in a couple of weeks, so maybe after that, when things are fresh in my mind, I can meditate on that. But if I'm being honest, I hope it's the later, and that I'm just feeling lonely, because that's so much easier to try and fix lol