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.
But soon her behavior started to change, and she became more withdrawn at school. She would get drunk at parties and then throw herself at Tom, seeing if she could “steal” him back. Then she started to do the same thing to other friends’ boyfriends, apparently hell-bent on proving to herself that she, too, could take somebody from someone else. But all these attempts at karmic revenge only resulted in her slowly being frozen out of the friend group. She and I never spoke about what happened.
Both at the time and in the years after, I would justify my own behavior with the belief that I was in love. (As a die-hard romantic, that made it all okay.) My relationship with Tom ticked off certain milestones: At first, it was the length of time we’d been dating; then it was the big firsts—like having sex, meeting the parents, and going on holiday together. If he and I were going the distance, I thought, what difference did it make that he’d dated my friend first? None of the rest of our friends seemed to think it was a big deal, largely following the same logic as me. Tom and Sadie’s encounter had been fleeting, juvenile, and inconsequential. His and mine was earth-shattering, important, and transformative.
Until it wasn’t, of course. We broke up after three and a half years, and I’ve never spoken to him or seen him since.
Ultimately, I will never know if that relationship was really worth losing a friend over. I look back on that time and I feel huge sympathy for Sadie, who did nothing wrong except poorly communicate how she felt about the situation and then act out from a place of hurt. I know that I too was only a teenager, but is that really any excuse?
“Girl code” as a concept has taken on a life of its own in recent years, bandied around on shows like Love Island as a way to condemn someone’s crimes against the sisterhood (it is “sisters before misters,” after all). In its simplest application, it means that women should not flirt with, kiss, or date their friends’ exes. And while some argue that this is just another way to pit women against each other, there’s no denying that hooking up with a friend’s ex can be a very hard thing to come back from.
That’s what is at the heart of this Summer House drama. People already thought Wilson was a little bit of a fuckboy, but they liked and trusted the friendship between Batula and Miller.
Indeed, last week, Miller told Glamour that she felt more betrayed by Batula than by Wilson, and I can understand why. “At the end of the day, a guy’s a guy,” she said. “Whether or not West and I are working on a relationship, you just can’t put anything past a man. But I just never would think that it would come from someone like Amanda, who has been what has felt like in my circle and in my corner for so long.”