I had a friend in high school — nice girl, smart, worried a lot.

She dated this guy (WhatsHisFace) sophomore year who, funny story, hung out with another guy (GirlName) who’d harassed me freshman year.  The funny part comes in where we four had PE at the same time and GirlName came up to me while I was reading an English assignment and said “We used to joke around with you, yeah?” all nervous-like.  You could see the sweat pouring off him as he tried to play it off as a joke that we could both laugh at.

I looked at him.  I held his gaze without smiling.  I looked back at my book and started reading again.

He walked away.

The unfunny part came later, after my friend and WhatsHisFace broke up and she learned he was telling his friends that they’d slept together when they hadn’t.

I talked her into asking him to stop.  She did, he didn’t.  I still don’t know how good that advice was, but it cemented him as a jerk.

I remembered this situation the other day and came to a careful realization: I never questioned if my friend slept with him or not.  She said she didn’t, I believed her.  I still do.

But if she had, she’d still be respectable to me.

It went like this:

I imagined going up to WhatsHisFace and trying to defend my friend’s honor.  In my mind, because he’s a jerk, he called her a slut.  I did not like this or agree with it, but I didn’t have an immediate rebuttal because I’m sort of a moral stickler.  (My friends know this.  It made another friend afraid to tell me she’d had sex, which ended with us hugging and crying and me fumbling around for reassurances about how it didn’t matter to our friendship.)

The more I thought about how to answer his “slut” accusation, the more I thought I couldn’t if he insisted on smearing her reputation.  Then, and this is where the epiphany came in, I knew there was a rebuttal because, suddenly, his lie didn’t even matter.

Mental Me drew herself up to her fullest height (taller than most of those boys, thankyouverymuch) and said this:

“I believe my friend when she says she didn’t sleep with you.  But it wouldn’t matter to me if she did.  If she slept with you, it would be because she wanted to express her feelings.  That doesn’t fit the definition of slut in the least.  But you?  Even if you’re telling the truth, which I don’t believe, it still makes you scum.  Your friends heckle girls in the hall and you trample their feelings.  My reputation is pristine, irreproachable, so I want you to believe me when I tell you: even if my friend slept with you, she’s still better than you.  She’s still a respectable girl.  And you’re still scum.”

What inspired this wee tirade?  I thought about how I’d feel if she had slept with him.  And I realized that my wanting to defend her wasn’t just about he said/she said or because she was my friend.  It was because I’d still respect her, and the word “slut” just did not apply to that situation.  Sleeping with someone because you care about them is, well, normal.

I think about this sort of thing a lot, trying to balance my strict moral beliefs with my intense desire to make everyone happy and comfortable.  I know that the Bible says Thou Shalt Not Do This and That, but it also says to love and respect people, and I could never see how condemning my friends for having sex (which isn’t even immoral to them) could be a loving or respectful way of handling the situation.

I mean, isn’t it more loving to stay friends even though you don’t like what someone is doing?  Jesus hung out with adulteresses and tax collectors and prostitutes.  And you don’t see him calling anybody a slut.  Albeit, he also converted them.  ^_^;  But he couldn’t have done that if he’d gone around insulting them and treating them like trash.

He treated people like people, and that’s what I strive to do.  I want my friends to feel safe with me, not afraid.  Sometimes the right thing to do can be confusing, or can take a long time to figure out.  But I want my friends to know, at the very least, that I won’t turn them away for doing something I wouldn’t.

Note: My reputation was pristine for a very simple reason — boys I liked didn’t like me back.  So I didn’t date until college, where I went out with one guy and then married him because he’s AWESOME.