Love is a battlefield

All is not fair in love and war.

There are so many rules in the book of love. If you ask someone out for the first date, you pay for dinner, while your date is obligated to make a half-hearted offer to split the bill. After asking for someone's phone number, you must wait three days (but only three days) before actually calling them. Don't expect anything to come from a random makeout session except a really awkward conversation when you inevitably run into them later in the week - when you're both sober and all too aware of your previous embarrassing encounter.

And the penultimate rule: thou shall not covet a friend's crush.

It's universal and oh so important that there have been both male and female rewordings. Chicks before dicks. Bros before ho's.

Yet, it happens. Two guys will like the same girl. Two girls will like the same guy. Sometimes it ends happily with one person deciding that the crush doesn't mean all that much to them and conceding The Contest. Guys usually fight it out, and then one guy gets the girl, and the other keeps his pride (because clearly, another unwritten rule here is that the guy who gets the girl MUST lose the fight) and then after a couple of months, things return to normal.

But oftentimes, that crush ends up breaking the friendship. That crush leads to resentment and bitterness between the two once-friends. And just like that, Sam, it's the end of a beautiful friendship.

I've been in all different permutations of this situation.

I've been the jilted one. Bitter that he would chose Her over Me. I mean, honestly! What does She have that I don't? And then, how do you reconcile the hurt you must feel?

I've been the one to "give up" the crush. Bitter that just because she was the first to announce to the world that she liked him, that she should get "first dibs." And really, when do the dibs end? If he inevitably doesn't like her, shouldn't the rest of us get a chance? How come he is still considered untouchable? And how is that possibly fair?

So getting to the point of this post: You are friends with your friends for very specific reasons. You guys have the same interests. Maybe a similar traumatic childhood. Maybe it's just alcohol. Regardless, something drew you guys to each other and made you friends. It's bound to happen that, with time, you'd end up being attracted to the same person.

We come up with all these unwritten rules. But which rules were made to be broken?

And what do you do with the inevitable fallout?