Friendship deal breakers

In My Humble Opinion
21

Thanks for the laugh! That’s great!

I had/have a friend who a while back went off the deep end over a girl. It continued for about 18 months and he was doing everything he could to make it hard to be friends with him. It got to the point where I didn’t feel safe around him, even though he hadn’t ‘done’ anything to me. But I was at the point where “What next?” scenarios were running through my head fairly often. I was somehow voted to slap him with a clue-by-four and it seemed to do the trick, but we haven’t been very close since.

-Tcat

22

Betrayal is a good place to start. This is an umbrella term that covers being lied to, stolen from, physically harmed or having your character smeared. People who betray their significant other also compromise their other friendships as well. I find it impossible to assume that someone who is harming or cheating on their loved one will not do the same to their friends. Enormous character flaws of that sort almost always represent the subversion of an important global component in someone’s personality.

People who are willing to damage friendship through intentionally mean-spirited acts are poisonous to be around. Likewise with gossip. I have rarely seen people who love to gossip be more than petty and immature in their friendships.

An inability to reciprocate comes in a close second. While circumstances may sometimes influence another’s opportunity to return a favor, it does not prevent them from recognizing it. People who accept offers of help and assistance without making any substantial effort to provide same are parasites. Every piker that I run into has shown themselves to have other more serious character flaws.

Inconsistency is another trait which should send up big warning flags as well. This is usually a hallmark indicating lack of personal integrity, be it in action or thought. It makes a person unreliable and therefore unable to be trusted. Associating with those you cannot trust is a surefire recipe for disaster and disappointment.

23

I won’t be friends with people who are racist, homophobic, or bigoted in any way.

I won’t be friends with someone who judges me, my beliefs, or my decisions.

God, immaturity drives me nuts! And I can’t be friends with clingy, needy people.

I won’t be friends with someone who is part of a bigoted, fundamentalist Christian cult (you know the kind: Christian Identity or KKK). I’m from Louisiana; these things come up.

24

Any kind of criminal activity would put me off, except maybe recreational drug usage, and that – only if it’s in the distant past.

Repeating serious dishonesty to other people (light stuff like white lies is fine, although if done enough… you get the point).

Yeah, narrow-mindedness (racism, sexism, etc.) – but I’d probably know that about a person before we become friends.

25

Keeping in mind the OP’s condition that a criterion described for abrogation of a friendship should not be based on what someone might have done to you, but rather it describe a personality trait that spikes the deal, I try.

The two leading contenders are 1.) sociopathy - the lack of interest in what one’s endeavors do to other people’s lives, with only the outcome as applied to one’s self being of any importance and 2.) being too stupid to safely be around.

Ignoring the details of what havoc their inherent perfidity wreaked upon my own life, I’ll just say that I have had a few “friends,” mostly from relationships formed during younger years, whom I came to realize had no boundaries when it came to other peoples’ lives.

Although there’d been the occasional problem that had been explained away (the missing $20 bill, where’d my spare tire go?) with people that in my young life seemed ‘close’ (roommates, band members), eventually some of these folk proposed scams to be perpetrated on others we knew.

I’m reminded of the old common wisdom that con-artists have no real friends, because they assume everyone plays the game as they do. And assuming such, these folks, who’d screwed me once or twice already, would propose my participation in a similar drop on someone else we knew.

That became the signal to walk, and I did a lot of flushing of my “friend” inventory in my 20s, and some still a bit later, in my 30s.

An alternative scenario of the same flavor would be the (usually, but not always) woman who wants to recruit people to build an alternate reality that steers a(n apparent) romantic relationship. Those can be Category 1 or Category 2.

The too stupid to safely be around must be gently cut away, while the others must be aggressively forced out of your life.

26

Ooooh. Tough question.

Mistreatment of another person (or people) that is chronic and without purpose or reason would probably be the only real deal-breaker for me. Everybody screws up; I’m not going to divorce my best friend b/c she cheats on her husband, or steals a paperback, or curses out the plumber. (Not that my best friend has done any of these things, but it really wouldn’t matter if she did.) I think it’s the purpose of friendship to stand by yours when they’re good and when they’re bad; otherwise none of us would have any.

My caveat is this, though; you don’t get to pick your family but you certainly get to pick your friends…and while I have a lot of friendly acquaintances it takes me awhile to consider anyone a true friend. So I hope I’d know by then if they were the type of person to continually mistreat other people.

Oh, and there’s another one: chronic victims. If a gal pal of mine stayed in an abusive relationship, I would probably have to bail for my own sanity’s sake. Otherwise it would make me crazy, because I cannot and do not understand why women do this, and I don’t think I could bear the fact that I can’t save her from herself. And it would really infuriate me that she allowed anyone to treat her that way, to the point that I’d probably have to break off the friendship.

I’m not saying I’m right to feel that way, but unfortunately that’s the way I’d feel.

27

I can’t be friends with people who take pleasure in other peoples misfortune, or as they say in Germany: Schadenfreude. One of my old friends did this. Like when I told him that my girlfriend’s mother had broken her hip he just snickered and said “sucks to be her.”

Also it seemed like he’s was unable to be genuinely happy on other people’s behalf.

28

Bigotry. I’ve broken off many a friendship after discovering this one. I will usually give them one chance before shunning them completely, I’ll say “Please don’t behave that way when I’m around, it’s offensive.” Not once, however, has this actually worked.

29

I couldn’t be friends with most people who live, for want of a better term, a “crisis lifestyle.” Their life is a roller coaster ride of one major problem after another, always somehow created by them. Frankly, it just takes too much out of me to keep them in my life.

I’m not talking about friends who are going through a temporary period of craziness. God knows, I’ve done that myself. The difference between the two, I guess, would be the total denial of personal responsibility and the demands that I somehow fix the situation “just this one last time.”

30

I play in a band and our bassist was a piece of shit. Right when we met him, he was telling us that he started sleeping with his friend’s wife. So I didn’t trust him before we ever even got a chance to become friends. Turned out this guy was nonstop problems and we ended up kicking him out.

We didn’t care that much at first about his lack of integrity because we were desparate to get a band going. In retrospect, we should have never even wasted time on this guy. From this experience, I have learned to hold people that I voluntarily associate with to higher standards (if you consider “don’t cheat” a high standard). And myself, for that matter. Breaking up with a significant other is hard enough. But getting cheated on is the absolute worst. Especially if you are married, I imagine.

31

Ditto the crisis lifestyle thing…my wife and I used to have a friend who constantly had some dramatic horror going on in her life, all from her own poor judgement. It was like she was seeking it out. Every time she drank heavily something bad happened, yet she kept doing it. Last I heard she got busted for a DUI, and tried to tell the judge that it was because she was afraid she was going to get raped by a group of obnoxious guys after the bar closed. Is it true? Probably. Does it excuse her driving drunk? Of course not.

Then there was my former best friend from high school. I went to college and he just went into business for himself. He failed over and over, but I always respected his tenacity to keep trying again. At one point he had a Web design business and a specialty store focused on his hobby of high end radio controlled toys (cars, boats, helicopters, etc.) here in San Diego. We had talked about doing a road trip around Nevada and had even paid for certain accomodation in advance, but as the trip approached, he was acting weird about it, implying he hoped I hadn’t put a lot of money down just in case he couldn’t go last minute. Then, magically, his store was “robbed” and he couldn’t go on the trip because of various insurance and police issues.

I called bullshit on the whole thing because it clearly stunk of insurance fraud, and it KILLED me to have to accuse my former best friend of this. But the fact that his story wasn’t consistent and certain key things that would have made his life very inconvenient weren’t stolen, and the fact that certain other things were conveniently not in the store at the time, made it very clear to me it was an inside job.

32

I would say … PICKING A USER NAME TOO SIMILAR TO MINE!!!

:smiley:

33

Wow, this is actually a deep question. I’m reading all the responses and the best I can come up with is some lopsided version of integrity, but only as it applies to my relationship with the friend.

I have close friends who cheat on their spouses, as long as the aren’t regaling me with the gory details I don’t see how that relates to our friendship. In my experience, people cheat for many different reasons, but you can be an unfaithful spouse and still a really dependable and true friend.

Same thing with drug use or heavy drinking. I’m not into that, but my friends that are respect that and I respect that they choose to partake. Unless it was some teenaged peer pressure situation where they harped on me to join them, it wouldn’t bother me.

My best friend is deeply religious, we’ve had many long discussions about personal beliefs and why we feel the way we do, but we always stop way short of trying to convert one another. I don’t agree with everything she believes, but it’s not hurting me that she believes it, she’s not walking around making judgemental marks on a chalkboard when I do things that she wouldn’t do, it isn’t an issue.

I don’t think I’ve ever known about any work-related fraud that a friend committed, I don’t imagine that would be a big deal for me either.

The standards of racism, bigotry and homophobia, yeah those are deal breakers. Ditto on the crisis-lifestyle needy folks, that’s too tiresome to deal with.

I’m somewhat puzzled by the answers that concern infidelity. Chronic drug or alcohol abuse I understand, but how is it my concern if a friend cheats on their spouse? It’s not likely to rub off on me somehow, it’s not as if they’re going to pressure me into being unhappy in my own relationship so I can join them, or cheat on me by having another friend, right? I’d think it more likely that if it was a close friend, I’d probably have known about the troubles in the marriage before the cheating ever happened and be in a more sympathetic position.

34

Major deal-breaker for me: People who are unkind to animals. Not just because I like critters, but because in my experience, people who are unable to feel sympathy for beasties also seem to be unable to really care for or empathize with other humans too. Like there is a fundamental respect for living things that is missing, or an inability to feel compassion.

Kind of like the way they tell you that the way a man treats his mother is a great gauge of how he’ll treat other women. If a person is capable of being cruel to an animal, they are capable of, well… cruelty!

In my experiences, people who are nasty to animals (or irresponsible pet owners) end up being pretty nasty to other people too (or irresponsible parents) because they are apathetic when it comes to the feelings of other beings around them.

Another deal-breaker: Dangerous stupidity. You know the kind of people who giggle about how much fun they had when they were driving drunk? That kind of blatantly stupid attitutude towards personal safety – especially when your dangerous little adventures can kill innocent bystanders.

I can respect someone I don’t like. But I can’t like someone I don’t respect.

35

Interesting subject. Zenster and Ringo in particular hit the nail on the head as far as some of the people I know are concerned. At this moment I’ve pretty much decided that I have to let a friend of the past couple of years go for just those reasons, but I guess to go into greater detail would be more appropriate for another thread.

36

Any kind of bigotry would be a deal-breaker for me. I fortunately can’t recall actually ever having to make that choice.

The only time I’ve really “broken up” with a friend (although I didn’t do it dramatically, I just pretty much stopped returning her calls) was because she was…well, stupid. We met when we were in seventh grade, and several years later, I realized that she was still in seventh grade, emotionally and mentally. I’ve drifted apart from friends before without meaning to. This was the only time I’ve consciously decided I didn’t want to be friends anymore.

37

Oo! That’s a good one! Actually, put me in the “crisis lifestyle = deal breaker” camp. I too will loyally stand by someone who is going through a bout of bad luck, but chronic “crisis lifestyle” folks sap too much energy – especially when most of the crises are of their own making.

Example/
Friend must have car to commute to work. Driving with expired, out-of-provice plates and no insurance. :rolleyes: For several weeks, black smoke is coming out of the exhaust. Oh, no! Something is wrong with the car! Crisis ensues! Does she take it to a garage? Nope. Eventually, I get a desperate phone call from the side of the road. Her engine is now destroyed, she is stranded on a rural backroad and is afraid that if a man stops to “help” she’ll be raped. How could this happen to her???

Car gets towed to garage – extremely expensive to fix now that all the cylinder heads have to be replaced. Gets an exhorbitant bill, more than she can swing all at once. Crisis ensues. Does she call them to try to arrange a payment schedule for installments? Nope. Ignores the bill and hopes it will just go away. The garage send a “pay us or this goes to collections” notice. Crisis ensues. How could they do this to her??? How unfair!! She decides “Fine! If they’re going to be nasty, then I’m not going to pay it!”

Reads her mail only once every other month because she is afraid of “bad news,” so she let’s it pile up. Finally opens mail to find a court summons to collect on the garage bill. Crisis ensues. She doesn’t actually read the info on the summons, therefore misses the court appearance and a judgement is entered against her in absentia. Her wages will now be garnished. Crisis ensues. Now she tries to contact the court, too late. Judgement is final. Crisis ensues. How could they do this to her???

This is someone for whom there is always some major crisis. Most of her problems could be solved if she dealt with the issues promptly when they were minor. None of this crap had to happen. Her entire life goes this way.

If she was just a responsible grown up, she wouldn’t need to run around yelling “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

38

How directly relevant to an experience a couple of months ago!

I’ve had a best friend for around a dozen years, lets call him “Mike”. Back in March, we were out for some pints with a friend of his who just happens to be a hot little package. I’d wanted a shot with her for a while and had asked him to set up a little group thingy so I could have the opportunity to hang out with her and work my magic. He never really helped me out, but I never bitched about it.

See, “Mike” has always been a pretty selfish guy. We all know that and none of us held it against him. That’s the way he is and while it would cause some very minor problems from time to time, it was never big enough to get in the way of the friendship. However, the reason that he was not setting up a “meeting” between this gal and myself soon became apparent.

This night, we managed to get pretty darn tootin tipsy. After we’d shed everyone else, the three of us went over to her place for a couple more drinks. Mike and I hung out there for a while, and eventually it was time to call it a night.

We went outside to fetch a cab and Mike said to me, “you know, Morkfromork, sometimes people just want to be alone.” I said, “excuse me?” “Well maybe she and I just wanted to be alone,” sayeth he. “What about your girlfriend,” replyeth I. We just kind of looked at each other and I said, “how dare you lecture me. I will not stand here and be castigated because you intended to cheat on your girlfriend.” I was going to start walking, but just then the cab came. We both got it and were silent.

The trip brought us by my place first, and I got out, as did he. He apologized for being a jerk, and I simply told him that I had nothign to say to him right now. He called me later that day and then the day after. Realizing that I was about to toss a very good, decade-long friendship out the window, I felt I owed him more than simply not returning calls. I sent him and e-mail telling him that I was disappointed in his behaviour and felt that I had nothing to offer him beyond this little 3 or 4 paragraph rant that I sent. He e-mailed me back and said he’ll do anything to fix the friendship as this was his most valued and didn’t want to let it fall to ruins because of his mistake. He gave a couple of bad excuses as to why he did what he did. I e-mailed him back and told him that, since I was going out of town for a few months, I don’t really want to talk to him right now. Maybe when I get back. I also said that what he did requires no apology to me, as I didn’t really take his admonition personally. I simply didn’t support his actions and intentions.

Well, I’m back. I’ve been back for a few weeks but haven’t called him. I felt that what he did was utter reprehensible and that I deserve better friends than those who would be selfish about other girls that he wants to sleep with, even though he is in an admittedly long-term relationship, supposedly leading to marriage; not only because he is selfish, but most especially because of the intentions.

So, I guess my reason for dumping friends is when they do things that I think irreparably harm their character in my eyes. I can never look at him with respect again, and thus prefer not to look at him.

As an aside, should I forgive and see if I can repair the relationship?

39

Drug use is a deal breaker for me in most cases. The exception to this would probably be a friend who occasionally smokes marijuana if they don’t do it around me, bring drugs into my home, vehicle, or place of business, and basically aren’t high around me.

Drunk driving is another deal breaker for me – to me it is one of the most selfish acts a human being can commit.

40

I’d agree with those who have talked about cheating on SO’s etc though it always depends. Someone who’s with a girl or boy who obviously isnt suited to him/makes them unhappy whatever and is cheating on them, I can tolerate. Someone who cheats on someone they genuinely like, something’s wrong. Its especially hard if you are friends with both the male and female in a couple because you wonder where your loyalties lie, especially if the male was yoru friend first but you have become close to the female.

Drug and alcohol use can be a problem but not by simple virtue of the habit or practice itself. If someone drinks a lot, fine as long as they dont let it become a problem. Same goes for soft drug use, marijuana, pills, speed, trips etc anything harder and you tend to worry. We have a mate at uni we call “mr crack” because he does any drugs on offer. Lovely guy, buddhist and really positive friendly chap but you still worry because of the nature of the substances involved. On the flip side, people who dont tolerate my personal habits will not be my friends. If people have an issue with my lifestyle I try and reconcile it with them by careful compromise and intelligent debate but in some cases this has failed to work and I’ve had to say goodbye because I wont accept bigtry against my chemicals as opposed to yours.

More than anything I have to like and trust you in whatever situation may occur, that whatever happens I know we’re mates and we’ll try and do the right thing by each other. If you damage that or circumstance does then it has to question things.