She Was My Good Friend, Until She Tried To Seduce My Husband

My husband and I met Lorraine* and her sister Chloe* (names changed) through a volunteer arts organization several years ago. They were both physically tiny, perhaps five feet and a hundred pounds, and although they were both in their twenties, physically they looked about fourteen. Their voices were childlike too, high and piping, prone to girlish squeals and nervous, tittering laughter. Indeed, they both seemed so young in manner and appearance that I sometimes forgot that they were adult women with college degrees and jobs. They were terribly enthusiastic once they joined up with our arts group, wanting to be a part of everything and be in every committee.

They were initially so sweet and endearing that we soon became fast friends despite the age difference; my husband and I were both forty-five and had been together for seventeen years at that point. My husband and I were longtime members of the arts group and socially well established among them, which is perhaps why Lorraine and Chloe so ardently sought to befriend us.

But after we had known them for four years or so, Lorraine began acting out at committee meetings, subjecting another two of my female friends to a thousand tiny insults and snotticisms, constantly interrupting people and shouting their ideas down. After she had ruined two consecutive meetings like this, I called the discussion to a halt and told her she had gotten way out of line, and this was unacceptable behavior. She launched into a profane tirade at me, screaming “F*** you, Deb!” Because apparently to her, the way to respond when you’re called out for being rude, is to get even more unbelievably rude.

A moment later, Lorraine and Chloe flounced from the meeting. That evening we noticed they had left the committee’s Facebook group. I was shocked by all of this, which after years of camaraderie and friendship, seemed to come out of nowhere. At any rate, if they were going to act like that, I was done with them. As the saying goes, "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time."

A few weeks later, my husband asked me to take a look at some IM messages he had been receiving, from Lorraine and also Chloe, which was odd -- after they had left our committee, I was surprised that they were still in contact with him at all. I sat down and read all of their messages, which took some time, as Lorraine in particular was messaging him constantly, sometimes daily.

I could scarcely believe what I was seeing — Lorraine was writing the most hateful and untrue things about me, even threatening me:

“I will never forgive your wife, and I've now chronicled all of her abuse, and it is very difficult for me to wish anything but bad things towards her. She's an abuser, and you should keep me away from her or I will tell her until I'm blue in the face. Her behavior is reprehensible and unforgivable, and I can’t stand the online harassment.”

“I'm very afraid of her, it’s weird to see her completely normal online with other people, when I'm panicking about going to social functions, will I need to warn someone, need protection, or should I just not go?”

“I'm looking into the process of restraining orders just in case!”

“I have no forgiveness to offer her. I don't like going to a birthday party that turns into what if she's going? do I have to warn someone?”

“I can't handle Deb, she attacked me first. Did that make her feel better?Deb's going to bully me until I start behaving how she wants!"

“I've never had to deal with having an abuser in my social group. And there is no escaping that Deb will always abuse me moving forward. Actively or not, but denying that it was abuse is irresponsible to me and to her.”

All because I told her that continually interrupting and belittling other committee members was out of line. The idea of needing "protection" from me in social situations was laughable, as anyone who knew me would say I was a very easygoing person indeed.

At the same time, she was fawning on my husband with the most blatant and obvious flattery imaginable, and she had been doing this long before the night she cussed me out and left the meeting.

“I really appreciate you though!”

“I'm your friend and I care for you.”

“I love to have you as a committee leader. I always enjoy how you run a meeting and interact.”

“I always enjoy your planning sessions. You are great, nothing I'd change on your end.”

“I think our friendship meant something to you and me. I don’t know if it meant anything to the rest of them, and that bothers me.”

“I’m sorry, I know this can't be fun for you. I do really appreciate you.”

The correspondence had started two years ago with the occasional entirely professional exchange about committee matters, but she had started to message him more and more often. I found out that she had been nattering away at him several times a week for most of that year, to which he occasionally made some cordial reply. At one point she sent him a picture of herself all trussed up in ropes 50 Shades of Grey-style, and told him she’d been to a Japanese rope bondage workshop — he should come with her sometime! There was another session next Tuesday, could he come? If not that coming Tuesday, could he come the Tuesday after that?

“What do you think?” my husband asked me. “I was hoping if I let her rant for awhile she’d calm down and apologize, but she just seems to be getting more and more worked up. She’s been acting really strange.”


I replied: “My dear, this woman is so obsessed with you that I’m surprised she hasn’t broken in here and boiled a live rabbit on the stove. This is a full-on, rabid schoolgirl crush. The real reason she hates me so much because I’m an obstacle. She wants to be with you, and I’m in her way.”

His jaw dropped. “You don’t really think she’s coming on to me? I’m old, bald, and married, and she’s what, thirteen?”


“Yes, my love, she’s coming on to you. Really read what she wrote, it’s unmistakable. The reason she's afraid of me is probably because she knows I'd have the right to be angry if I found out what she was trying to do to us.”

"Wait, she said she was afraid of you? When?"

I thought I could even pinpoint the exact moment when her infatuation with him had probably begun. Several months earlier, she was complaining to him about how a man she had liked hadn’t returned her interest, and my husband had replied with reassurances that she was a “beautiful, kind, and generous person that any guy would be lucky to be with.”

When I pointed that sentence out to him, he told me he was just being supportive, trying to make her feel better, and he’d tell any lovelorn friend the same thing. But Lorraine had clearly seen another meaning in those words, because from then on, she began contacting him even more frequently, confiding increasingly intimate details about her life: her unrequited crushes, and her heartbreak over her parents’ divorce some twenty years earlier. Her mom was always giving her a hard time and she missed her dad, her co-workers were difficult, and so on.

I asked him why he hadn’t told me about all this sooner, and he admitted he’d stopped paying much attention to the “novels” she wrote to him, skimming over most of the personal stuff and only answering when she wrote to him about committee business or seemed particularly upset. He’d missed the parts about the restraining order, her work conflicts, and her parents’ divorce entirely, and could only vaguely recall the first of her unrequited crushes, when there had been three, and she described them all in detail. He remembered the bondage picture, but thought it was just a joke, little Lorraine thinks she's Anastasia Steele, how silly.

While my husband was taken aback by my conclusions, he wasn’t too worried, and told me that if she really was attracted to him, he didn’t reciprocate in the slightest. But I was horrified by what I had read — these women had led me to believe that they were my good friends, and I don’t trust easily. We had worked with them on various committees for years, during which time they had seemed so sweet and normal. They had been guests in our home any number of times. And now here they were telling my husband that I was “a bully” and “an abuser” behind my back. As for Lorraine's claim that I was “harassing” her online, the the truth was that I had abandoned them both entirely after Lorraine’s outburst at the meeting, deleting them from my contacts list and blocking them on all social media. I was actually avoiding both of them like the plague.

When I read Chloe's IMs, I saw that she was in on this divide-and-conquer attack on our marriage as well; in her most recent messages, she was pressuring my husband to start a relationship with Lorraine and disregard any objections I might have to that:

“If you want to thank Lorraine for her contributions to the committee, do it yourself directly. It is clear you have some sort of emotion that triggers you. You have her number, you can tell her how you feel.”

“I'm not going to tell you how to feel about the precarious situation we all somehow find ourselves in. I would suggest digging deeper about why you feel this way, and addressing those deeper feelings. You and Lorraine cannot help facing what you have going on.”

“And if Deb for some reason has said anything causing you to restrict your communications, I understand you are in a tough spot. You are in between an ogre and a hard place.”

“This isn’t the end of your story with Lorraine. It is a chapter. You have the rest of the book to decide how it ends.”

“This is not a book best left unfinished. A word of warning in that regard.”

So this was just ‘a chapter’ in their story with him — did that mean that she was anticipating a lot of time with him in the future... ? I also found her tone to be rather menacing: ‘A word of warning in that regard’ — what on earth did that mean?

My husband kept assuring me that he loved me and only me, and he was so glad he married me. “Honey, I do not have any feelings for this woman, never did. She’s young enough to be my daughter — to me she looks about twelve. They’re both like 4-foot-11 and probably ninety pounds soaking wet. Who cares about her little warning, what can they possibly do to us?”

"She's twenty years younger, and she's throwing herself at you, wedding ring be damned. I'm just going to be upset by that. And her batshit crazy sister is encouraging her.”

"You have nothing to worry about! I love you!"

"It's not that I think she's going to get anywhere with you, it's that she's trying to!"

He swore to me, on everything he held sacred, that he was not interested in Lorraine, and had never laid a hand on her. But my suspicions about her still persisted, especially after I read Chloe’s bizarre rant. I didn’t think for one second that I was imagining Lorraine’s untoward intentions towards the man that I love, my life partner, the person around whom I have built my entire life. I cut together a Word document with all the most overwrought parts of Lorraine and Chloe’s IM messages and showed them to my psychiatrist, who had been treating my anxiety disorder for several years.

Dr. Y only needed to glance over a few pages — “Ooh, dramatic, aren’t they?” — before she made an unofficial proxy diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, likely co-morbid with covert narcissism, all probably caused by unstable patterns of attachment within their own family. She thought that both sisters were enmeshed in a “fantastical space” where reality was what they wanted it to be, and apparently they wanted to believe that my husband was secretly in love with Lorraine.

Dr. Y thought it was telling that their parents had divorced when they were young children, and that their mother had been the custodial parent, as in, the one who actually had to discipline them. Dr. Y theorized that they had grown up playing their acrimonious parents off of each other so often that it became second nature, and it was also likely that both parents had weaponized their children in their own conflicts. So Lorraine could be projecting her adoration for her own ultra-indulgent, but absent, father onto my husband, and her resentment toward older female authority figures onto me.

In short, they both had big-time Daddy issues.

Dr. Y speculated that Lorraine was making me out to be an evil monster to avoid feeling guilty about trying to break up a longtime friend’s marriage. Instead, it was much easier for her to imagine that she was bravely rescuing my poor husband from his “abusive” wife. Dr. Y also told me that Lorraine’s malicious baiting at the committee meetings was reactive abuse, in which the aggressor uses a campaign of constant provocation to get a rise out of their target, after which the abuser takes on the role of the persecuted victim. Lorraine hadn’t dared to antagonize me directly in front of my husband, that would be too obvious — but she knew that attacking my two friends would make me come to the rescue and defend them.

This was more manipulation than I would have ever thought either one of them to be capable of, but my doctor’s theory fit perfectly with much of what Lorraine had written to my husband:

“I hate that I was so nice to people that can't even be kind to me.”

“It's dumb that a friend did this to me. It's dumb other "friends" are make believing nothing happened. I'm totally unsafe in a group of my friends.”

“This always happens. I'm nice to people, they treat me bad. I regret ever being nice in the first place when they all took her side over me.”

"When do I get to stop being a victim!"

“Anyone can claim to be a victim,” Dr. Y told me, “They might even honestly believe that they’ve been victimized by you, but that doesn’t mean that they objectively were. Provided that you’re reasonably civil about it, it’s not abusive to stand up for yourself, or for others.” Patients struggling with borderline personality disorders actually made up a certain percentage of her psychiatry practice, she said, and obsessing over unattainable love interests… well, that was definitely something they did.

I told my husband about Dr. Y’s analysis that night, and he thought it sounded plausible, but he still insisted I had nothing to worry about. They were just harmless, derpy little Lorraine and Chloe, how could they possibly be a threat to anyone? Was I really sure they were trying to play homewrecker here? That’s a pretty serious accusation, Deb. I concede absolutely that she’s being an attention whore, but a homewrecker? Really?


I was indeed sure, as all my gut instincts were telling me. But it wasn’t until we ran into Lorraine at our arts organization’s annual New Year’s Eve ball that he finally realized the full extent of her infatuation with him. Lorraine was hovering near the front entrance when we arrived, all dolled up, and clearly waiting for someone. She lit up with a brilliant smile when she saw my husband, and began waving to him and calling his name, acting as though she was his date and I didn’t exist. He glanced at her uncomfortably and walked past without a word, holding my hand.

She then followed us half the length of the immense ballroom, and continued calling to him until we were out of earshot. She then spent much of that evening following him around making unsubtle attempts to flirt with him right in front of me and over a hundred other people, gushing over him interspersed with that nervous, affected laughter. If we sat down, she took the seat on the other side of him and did everything short of pushing me aside and climbing into his lap. The whole performance infuriated me and embarrassed him so much that we left early.

The next day, my husband sent her one final text:

“Hi Lorraine. The whole reason we’ve still been in touch is because I had hoped to see you reconcile with my wife. You don’t seem amenable to that. If you can’t get along with my wife, then it’s for the best if you and Chloe don’t associate with us from now on.”

And from my gentle, affable husband, that’s about as strong of a brush-off as it gets. Within hours, Lorraine began sending him the same IM message, over and over again:


“Are you still my friend?”


“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”


“Are you still my friend?”


“Are you still my friend?”


“Are you still my friend?”


“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”

“Are you still my friend?”


By the third day of this, even his patience was at an end, and he blocked both Lorraine and Chloe on his phone, and on all social media, finally agreeing that they seemed shamelessly bent on wreaking havoc, and he wanted them out of his life for good.

New Year’s was the last we’ve seen of either of them, since our arts organization has been inactive since March of 2020 due to the pandemic. We don’t have any idea what they’re doing now. Dr. Y has since told me that the majority of female stalkers suffer from borderline personality disorder, and that Chloe’s enmeshed, codependent reinforcement of Lorraine’s delusions about my husband’s feelings for her could intensify, and prolong, her crush on him. For now, we can only hope that her infatuation will fade due to the lack of any contact with him, or that perhaps she’ll find a new object for her… affections.

Or perhaps she might even find a fulfilling relationship with a man who is actually interested and available, and put her obsessive bunny-boiler tendencies behind her as she matures. We can only hope.

But whenever my indignation over what they tried to do to us becomes intrusive, I comfort myself by humming a favorite song:



“No chains to unlock

He’s free to do what he wants

He’s into what he’s got (and that’s me)

He loves me—

He loves you NOT.”