Posting here because my boyfriend always says these are dumb. So I’ve (22F) been with my boyfriend (24M) for three years. My younger sister (20F) has always been a little too friendly with him, and I’ve had my suspicions that she liked him. She would find ways to be around when we hung out, laugh at all his jokes, and even joke about how he was “her type.” I brought it up to my boyfriend once, and he laughed it off, saying she was just being friendly.
What my family didn’t know, and what I hadn’t told anyone yet, was that my relationship with my boyfriend had been struggling for months. We’d actually had a quiet, tearful conversation a few weeks prior where we mutually agreed things weren’t working anymore and we were going to break up soon, maybe even try seeing other people eventually, although we hadn’t set a date or told our families yet because he’s so enmeshed with mine and we wanted to figure things out gently.
Despite that, last weekend, I found out just how “friendly” she was. I walked in on them making out in his car when he was supposed to be picking me up. They both froze, and I just turned around and left. My sister ran after me, crying, saying it was a mistake and that she “couldn’t help her feelings.” My ex-boyfriend (because that’s what I instantly considered him) tried to text me, but I blocked him immediately.
Instead of keeping this a secret – both the betrayal and the fact that my relationship was ending – I decided to tell my family. I showed up at a family gathering the next day and calmly told everyone “what had happened” in its full, messy complexity. My parents were horrified, my mom started crying, and my dad told my sister to get out of the house. She started screaming at me, saying I “ruined her life” and that it wasn’t my place to tell our family about… well, any of it.
Now, I have family members saying I should’ve handled it privately and not embarrassed her and him like that, or exposed the details of my own struggling relationship in such a dramatic way. I still don’t think I did anything wrong by refusing to cover for them, regardless of the state of my relationship with him – they were still being secretive and disrespectful. But exposing everything so publicly caused an explosion I wasn’t fully prepared for.
AITA for exposing my sister and ex-boyfriend at a family gathering after catching them making out, knowing that my relationship with him was already quietly ending, which adds another layer of complexity and drama to the public revelation?