What To Do When Your Friend Won’t Stop Flirting With Your Partner

How to stop an third wheel from becoming a homewrecker.

What To Do When Your Friend Won’t Stop Flirting With Your Partner

All’s fair in love and lust. Unless it’s a friend. That stings. On that note, we have help: a hilarious, ego-crushing way to stop your friend from flirting with your partner, courtesy of a trending Reddit thread.


A disclaimer: human interaction is a beautiful, sticky, frustrating spectrum. So if you’re pissed with your friend’s interactions with your partner, it’s not necessarily them that’s the problem; you could just be an insecure wreck. Each situation is different.

The case put to us on this trending Reddit thread, however, seems pretty clear cut: “It’s always been obvious that my friend (26F, friends for 4 years) like attention from different men, she’s single and has fun. And for the past year I have noticed her flirting with my husband (28M, together for 7 years) here and there.”

“She always lights up when she sees him and loves chatting with him one on one,” the user continues. “She frequently texts him about funny memes and songs (she never texts me), she always asks me if the 3 of us can all hang out. She’s casually initiated meeting up with him at a bar one night that I couldn’t go to bc worked late and had to work early the next day.”

“The other day my husband picked me up from a day out with her and some other girls. As I said, ‘My husband is here to pick me up,’ and I was leaving the restaurant this one friend said, ‘OH I’m going to go say hi to him’, proceeded to RUN to his car. I was thinking…wtf.. is she doing. And proceeded to chat with him so eagerly. I’ve expressed my concern to my husband and he says he sees it too.”

“But I don’t know how to confront my friend…and I’m getting irritated. What should I do?”

Cue: the smartest response we’ve ever heard to this scenario: don’t make yourself look jealous by telling your friend to stop. Instead, team up with your partner.

“Don’t be afraid to exchange knowing, amused glances with your husband if she’s pulling this crap in front of you. Make it obvious the two of you are laughing at her expense,” one user-savant said.

Other users concurred: “My husband and I actually did this with his annoying, attention-seeking co-worker tried to flirt with him in front of me. It works!”

Image: Pexels

This advice sat, in our eyes, miles ahead of recommendations like, “If you really don’t want to deal directly with your friend, and want to keep that relationship status quo, ask your husband to stop responding to her. No response to texts, quickly end conversations in person, no hanging out in a 3some any more.”

This is good advice, but we still prefer the coordinated shut down.

If you would like to be more conventional in your flirt-attack, you can shut your friend down with the following guidance, from the same Reddit thread.

“Don’t confront her. That won’t help. She’ll gaslight and say that you’re jealous and crazy and try to use this to paint you in a bad light to your husband. Do talk to your husband. Point out her odd behavior. If he’s enjoying the attention, this might not work as expected and you’ll probably have to set some ground rules and possibly an ultimatum.”

“He needs to shut her down. She needs to get rejection straight from him. It’ll not only take her down a peg, but it will also prevent a situation where you are the one who has a problem with it and look jealous and pathetic.”

The same user then took it upon themselves to give the author of the thread’s husband some advice: “If he finds himself alone with the friend again, either by accident or because she shoved her way in, just keep saying wonderful things about OP (the author of the thread). How great her body is, how pretty she is, how smart she is, how funny she is, blah blah blah.”

“To the friend, who is looking for an ego boost and attention, this will be like a bucket of water to the Wicket Witch of the West. She won’t be able to tolerate hearing such great things about another woman, especially not her friend.”