Help! I hooked up with my friend’s brother, should I tell her or take it to the grave?

“Maybe you’ll be laughing about it in a few years’ time.”

Tamara Pallos is the principal practitioner at Couples Counselling Sydney. To learn more about her, head here.

Over the weekend, I was out with a group of friends and ran into my best friend’s little brother. We were both really drunk, and one thing led to another and we ended up having sex. I’ve been feeling really guilty about it, like I’ve gone behind her back and done something truly heinous.

She’s currently travelling overseas, so she doesn’t know and it’s easy enough to avoid, though I don’t know what to do when she gets back. I haven’t spoken to him since but it was definitely one night only. I don’t think it would happen again.

I’m scared she’ll hate me for crossing a line and that it’s going to make things awkward, so maybe I should just take it to the grave. But will she hate me more if she finds out from someone else? – Anon

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Dear Anon,

Plenty of us have been in a position where we’ve had a few too many drinks and done something we later regret. Sometimes, it’s not worth giving a second thought. But it sounds as though this is weighing on you pretty heavily and you feel like you have to make a choice, so let’s unpack it.

I know you’re anxious but if you try to remove yourself from the situation, how likely do you think it really is that your friend will hate you if you tell her what happened? Sometimes our fears can be disproportionate to our reality. Sure, sleeping with a friend’s sibling might be a little awkward and uncomfortable but if she’s a fairly laid-back kind of person, then maybe you’ll be laughing about it in a years’ time.

However, sometimes if we’ve grown up in an environment that involved frequent criticisms or negative judgements about us, our go-to is to anticipate that people will react more strongly than they actually do. Often, the apprehension and overanalysing can be the worst part.

It’s also possible your friend could react negatively based on her own insecurities. For example, she might worry that you would now feel closer to her brother than to her and have split loyalties (and that might be even more a touchy subject if she doesn’t have a particularly close relationship with him).

Or she might be concerned that the friendship dynamics between the three of you could alter in a way she finds uncomfortable. If these insecurities are at play, you could tell your friend the news in a way that reassures her so she doesn’t need to worry about the negative impacts of what happened. People often react badly because of their own anxieties and their reaction is better if you can find a way to soothe their anxieties. If you know her well, you’ll likely know the best way of approaching the topic without causing her too much stress.

On the face of it, a sexual encounter is no-one’s business except the people involved, unless those people are cheating on or betraying someone else, and they’re entitled to keep it private. But in this case, having sex with your friend’s brother has the capacity to affect your friend’s relationship dynamics with two of the people who are most important to her. Because of this, it might be that telling her what happened is the respectful thing to do.

As you said, if you don’t tell your friend she could also find out from someone other than you. Her brother could mention it or someone else in the group of people you were out with that night. This might make the whole situation worse, since your friend could think you’re deliberately hiding things from her. For some people, it’s less about the issue itself but more about the feeling that you’ve gone behind their back and lied to them.

I would suggest reaching out to your friend’s brother to see how he would like to handle the situation. There’s no point deciding to take it to the grave if he accidentally mentions it without thinking.

When it comes down to it, being honest and transparent with the people closest to us is the basis of real closeness. If we can’t tell the truth to the people we love, we have more of an arrangement, rather than an authentic relationship. Being honest means having to tolerate the anxiety that comes when other people sometimes are upset with us. This is an inevitable part of having healthy, mature and deep relationships. In other words, sometimes you need to sit in the discomfort.

That said, different people have different values. Depending on who you ask, you might get a range of answers about whether or not you need to tell your friend. I’d suggest asking yourself: if you were in your friend’s position and she had slept with your sibling, would you want to know about it?

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