I would not drop them if the communication I had with them was two-way and wasn’t totally emotionally distressing. If I still feel some connection with that person and that connection elicits good feelings, then I’m still benefiting from the relationship.
But if they never communicated with me? They never answered my letters and never called me and refused to put me down on the visitation list (or whatever they call it)? And this radio silence has been going on for years? Unless I suspected they had a good reason for their lack of correspondence, I would eventually stop reaching out to them. I might still think about them, but I’m not going to exhaust myself keeping up a connection. However, that doesn’t mean I’d shut the door on them if they came looking for me after they were released.
I share Macca’s philosophy towards friendship. For me, if we aren’t in regular communication, then the friendship is non-existent. It becomes activated upon re-establishment of meaningful communication. So if I’m repeatedly reaching out to you and I’m not getting meaningful communication back, then I’m eventually going to stop reaching out. And for me, this equates to stepping back from the relationship.
There are levels of friendship, like anything else in life. A friend you see a few times a year can be as valuable or even moreso, than one you see everyday.
I am not very keen on everyone who feels a need to analyze everything to death. Even a one sided relationship that is giving you some joy isn’t as one sided as you think it is.
If someone dumps you because you are in ill health, well perhaps it’s better for the dumpee, that they found out.
There’s an old saying, “What’s the difference between a friend and an enemy.” “With an enemy you know where you stand.”
I don’t know that I would call you shitty but you certainly wouldn’t be me. I have a friend I originally met through motorcycles; he crashed, was crippled, and can’t even talk about or look at a bike now. We’re still friends as far as I’m concerned. Yeah - I have to avoid certain subjects and make sure to use the car when I visit. Do I get anything out of it? Yes; the pride of knowing I have stood by him the last 20 years when many other drifted away. Nothing against them; some of them are friends as well. But I’m just wired different. In today’s terms: I’m OK if you want to un-friend me but I’m not one to un-friend you.
Is that the only thing you get out of the relationship?
Would you tell your friend this feeling of virtuousity is the primary thing you get out of the relationship?
Because if I were in your friend’s shoes, I wouldn’t want to hear this. I would want my friends to hang out with me because they like spending time with me. It would hurt my feelings to know they were coming by just because their own self-pride.
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I’m more with kopek’s point of view. I also agree that the definition of friend, or lack thereof, makes it a bit more difficult to compare views on an apples-to-apples basis. I have many acquaintances, but very few friends. To me, a friend is someone that I would take a bullet for. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration, one never really knows how they would react in that type situation, but my “friend” bar is very high. I can’t describe how exactly a person makes the transition from acquaintance to friend, but it’s pretty much an organic process - it just happens. Once you are at that level with me, though, there is no situation that I can think of - short of actively harming me or my family - where I would abandon that friendship.
A friendship should be mutually beneficial, but that doesn’t mean that the benefits go both ways all the time. Sometimes, you’re the one helping your friend, and sometimes, your friend is the one helping you. A serious injury or the like might mean a very long stretch where you’re the one helping your friend, but that doesn’t erase all the times in the past (and hopefully, in the future) where your friend will help you.
Which is not to say that relationships where the help only goes one way aren’t also valuable. They are. But those relationships are something other than friendship.
I can definitely see how someone can be in a true friendship where they are always in the “helper” role. That happens a lot when the two parties have different financial circumstances and levels of maturity.
But if the “helper” is only helping out of a sense of social propriety (Only a shitty person wouldn’t help, so I gotta help so I won’t be a shitty person) rather than genuine care and love, then I don’t see how this is a true friendship.
It seems to me that if a person is committed enough to stay with a person through thick and thin, they are getting something positive out of the relationship. Even if it is just a sense of pride and self-satisfaction.
But if a person fades out on someone who is emotionally out of pocket for a long stretch of time, that doesn’t mean the person is shitty or that they were never a real friend. To me, it just means that there is not enough fuel there to keep that particular relationship going. Whether that fuel be love, good feelings, hope, or whatever.
What the OP is saying is true for many if not most people. Stories about losing friends following serious life events would be a lot rarer, if that wasn’t the case. I’m not saying there isn’t something sad about this phenomenon, but it happens too often to chalk up to only sociopathic types.
The amount of emotional labor it takes to maintain a relationship with someone who is not paying into the “love bank” shouldn’t be downplayed or ignored, especially if the person taking on this labor has other relationships and issues they have deal with and/or is not particularly gregarious to begin with.
I’m still curious about what ‘dumps you’ means in this context - how much time and energy are you expecting the friend to spend on the person in ill health? There’s a pretty broad gap between ‘you are no longer able to physically hang out with us so I’m ignoring your texts and cutting contact’ to ‘I am spending all of my free time and energy taking care of you’, and I’m not really sure exactly where people are drawing the line here.
Years ago a good friend was going through a rough patch and another friend, with whom he was spending a large amount of time, told him “I only want to be around good things” and walked out on him, only to come around later to hang out and act like nothing had happened.
Took a bit, but it killed their friendship and I don’t blame my friend for it. You have a bad moment in life and the other person says they don’t want to be around you while you’re having a bad time? That’s not an actual friend.
The whole ‘mutually beneficial’ thing potentially ignores the whole “do you actually care about this person or are you just using them for company?” issue.
After all, if you’re calling someone a friend but you don’t care about them enough to call or visit once in a while when they’re sick or disabled, then you’re not really a friend, are you?
I think that’s fair. Friends are not “for better or for worse” but you still try and do right by each other. I like the example of the circle of friends who, No–are not going to sacrifice their lives to be the injured friend’s lifelong servants, but will do their best to assist the friend in stabilizing and reinventing his life. The difference between helping and coddling, I guess. Thanks for getting me to clear that up.
Someone who only wants to be there for the good stuff is not a real friend, I agree.
But must a friend endure the bad stuff indefinitely, unconditionally to still be considered “real”?
If a friend’s illness is so awful that the qualities that make them them are gone (like their sense of humor) and they have been gone for a long time, must someone continue visiting and reaching out to them forever to avoid the “shitty friend” label? Or is there a point at which it becomes morally OK for a person to do a fade-out.
Despite the earlier hypothetical I gave, I have been thinking about a severe mental illness this whole time. A severe mental illness can take over a person’s personality, totally masking the qualities of that person that drew you to them in the first place. I think I could hang in there for the long haul with a friend who was still fundamentally the same person I have always known them to be, barring physical changes. But I don’t know if I have the fortitude to withstand any and all mental changes in a friend.
While enduring mental illness requires fortitude, it’s an insidious enough condition that what one really needs is the ability to see it for what it is. My first marriage was good for 6-8 years and then gradually turned to shit as bipolar disorder got the better of me. Wife and I had been friends since childhood and we knew each other better than anyone. But even then, she wasn’t able to see that my increasingly bad temper and general thoughtlessness were signs of a problem. She just figured I was becoming a lazy asshole. Things went downhill and eventually the marriage got killed. Today we can both look at it and see what happened, and that a better answer (for her as the sane friend and spouse) would have been to be more persistent with me about getting some help. My point is, that was a marriage-level relationship predated by another 10 years of friendship & childhood and the obvious (and wrong) answer for both of us was “He/She has turned into the devil”. There is NO WAY I would expect any of my friends to clue into what the problem was. Some ditched, some stuck with me and managed the circumstances to mitigate my disruptive behaviors.
Every human has finite emotional and mental resources. If a “friend” has become nothing but a longterm drain, sucking away someone’s joy and energy, without good cause, then it is perfectly reasonable to set boundaries and ditch the person.
I’ve experienced this situation almost exactly. I had a basketball friend, we mostly just played basketball together and became pretty good friends. We have kids in the same class, he lives nearby, but we really only saw each other at basketball. This past winter he was in a car accident and messed up his arm pretty bad. He doesn’t want to risk playing basketball anymore. However, he’s asked me to hang at the bar with him and watch UFC events about one Saturday a month. I could give two shits about UFC, never really followed it, don’t know almost any of the fighters. But I go so I can hang with my friend.
It didn’t. But I was trying to answer the OP in short form without going into 157 different things that make up my brain some days. I do have a bad habit of starting drifts now and then; but I’m working on it.
I think most friendships are like that. They tend to be loose networks of people you do stuff with because they happen to be the people you are doing it with. Like when people ask “how do I make more friend”, the simplest answer is "join an activity that meets regularly with the same people every week for an extended period of time.
It’s a lot more rare IMHO to have friends with whom you do everything together for life, like you see on TV.