Ask Lemmy

1. It is ok to have best friends of either genders.
2. What your boyfriend is describing is very common. Cheating is very common.

I have beautiful and nice female coworkers, my wife have beautiful and nice male clients. We both spend a lot of time with those people. The possibility of getting in love is high. That is we talk about some facts:

1. People do fall in love. Even people in happy relationships fall in love with other people. This is common. (Early stages of falling in love happened to me and to my wife before)
2. Relationships have its ups and downs.
3. The more time you spend with someone (friends, coworkers, neighbors,...) the more likely is to develop feelings for that person. Those feelings might be temporary. Those feeling can only happen in one of the friends.

So it is not hard to see how having a low point in a relationship might lead to growing romantic feelings to our close friends.

My parents were best friends. While neither were in a relationship at the time, my father developed feelings for my mom. Just recently my mom got aware that my father has been hiding his feeling for a year before he made a move. He did not want to destroy the relationship they had. He waited until he was sure the feeling became mutual.

This story describes nothing wrong. Just a way how people grow together and how beautiful relationships are often born.

Because of this reality me and my wife developed few rules:

1. We do not discuss unsolved relationship issues with anyone but ourselves.
2. We spend a lot of time working on our relationship.
3. If we start developing feelings for someone we talk about it. This stops the enchantment and some feelings are already gone. We decide on a strategy for those feelings to not grow further. Usually temporary mental distancing from that person is enough. And certainly we do not share those feelings with a person in question.

Openness, transparency and also having a strategy helps us maintain relationship with no jealousy and total trust.