I’m really not one to spill on a public message board, but I’ve got to tell someone, and the one I could tell is the one I can’t tell. But rather than making this a “give me advice” thread, let’s offer it up to anyone who wants to talk about something going on in a friendship or relationship, and you can skip my prolonged blubbering below. This isn’t a rant, just me spilling my guts, hence its placement in MPSIMS…
So, we started really talking to each other months ago, around the time I broke up with my then-fiancee. Yes, I was interested in her romantically for a while, and she led me on a bit, but it became clear (when she said so) that that wasn’t going anywhere. So I backed off from that; I really just wanted a friend, a real friend.
And she was one. We spent lots of time together, went on walks, watched movies, etc. Yes, things were rough at times; she can have a very dismissing attitude, and I don’t take kindly to being brushed off. But fundamentally she was the person I could talk to, with intelligent interaction, about almost anything.
And I care about her more deeply than anyone else I know; I want to be there when she’s sad or upset, but something always gets in the way. And she can go off on the slightest thing; I can get yelled at when I so much as disagree with her on something, or even when I’m trying to tell her she’s wrong about some homework problem or such (we’re physics grad students). But why do I put up with it? Because the times we spend together not fighting (the vast majority of it) are wonderful.
Getting the impression that I still have a bit of a crush on her? Perhaps…but I’m realistic enough to know that nothing romantic is likely to ever happen, and I got over being upset about that a while ago.
But things have gone so wrong lately. A huge and prolonged series of misunderstandings made her say she wasn’t going to talk to me any more; I showed her where she had been wrong (and, to be honest, she’s pretty stressed right now and flies off the handle pretty easily, and I think she knows it), and we mostly patched things up. I had really and truly failed her, not been there for her, but it seemed we both knew the mistake and could live with it. But then there were other incidents–her calling me when I was upset, and me accidentally giving the impression that it was about her; a couple of broken meetings; and finally a passing joke/comment by me that made her mad enough to immediately leave, and the resulting argument in which she again said she wasn’t talking to me any more–she has enough stress in her life right now without me (the person she at that very time said was her only friend here)–until a half hour later when we ran into each other again and talked for a couple of hours.
Before we’ve gone back to “normal” after these things, but not this time. We haven’t had a conversation this week that hasn’t had an edge to it. And then tonight, I dared to disagree with her on a issue of (somewhat) politics (no need to go into it, but let’s say it has to do with her perception–as a foreigner–of our unfortunate president, and the fact that I dared to be the one person she knows to say I actually voted for him over what I considered at the time a more unfortunate opponent). She yelled, then acted coldly, and then we went our separate ways. And then I called her tonight, and made the mistake of mentioning that I could verify that something she had said (goes back to that whole “smartest/dumbest president” hoax, which she had heard a version of from a friend) wasn’t true. And that started us talking about that again, for more than half an hour.
What does she think of me now? All I did was to make it clear that I don’t consider political issues to be clear-cut, black-and-white. But now it seems like she genuinely thinks less of me for going against what every other American friend and acquaintance of hers told her.
We were going to go on a quick trip this weekend (or, at least, had talked about it between recent arguments). That certainly won’t happen. She’s been wanting to go to a Rolling Stones concert, and I found out a couple days ago about a newly scheduled one in January we could have gone to–tickets go on sale tomorrow, but now she doesn’t “have the money”. (Bullshit–I know she would pay to go. I do actually wish, though, that she would go with someone else, rather than not going at all.) And so on. It’s ending.
And will this really be it? Things seem so bad that it feels like it could well be. And I don’t want this to be it. I value her friendship more than anything else I have right now, and to lose that–or worse, to go back to a passing hi-in-the-halls / wave-at-parties sort of thing–is an unbearable thought to me. I lost my best friend five months ago, and now I’m going to lose another one. And there’s nothing I can do about it now, and nothing I can do at all besides cry and go back to my cooped-up antisocial existence that she had helped to lift me out of. I hate, hate, hate drinking by myself, but I’m having to fight the urge to start that and forget about what else is going on tonight (I think I’m winning the fight, though, at least in small part because I have a meeting with my advisor in the morning).
So that’s my self-pity for the evening (or at least all I’ll take up bandwidth with). Anyone else?
