How did you lose a friend over something petty?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think your words, Chimera, sum up my thoughts on this topic. Sure, I’ve had folks I thought were friends of mine flounce off or turn absolutely nasty without cause or warning. But looking back on the stupidity of it all, I realise they weren’t really friends of mine. At least, not the long-lasting sort. I don’t need to pretend they ever were friends of mine.

I’ve had red-hot raging disagreements before now with good friends of mine - but they’re still my friends, and still in contact. The ones who bail over the petty stuff: they’re in the past.

22

Maybe you should have sent tickets to Carmen…

23

A few years ago, a long-time friend and former housemate was trying to fix me up with some guy she’d met, and I wasn’t interested in being matched up with anybody. After a few feints at putting her off (We’d have these go-rounds where she’d say, “But you have so much in common. He likes – too,” and I’d say “I’m really not into – so much anymore” whether I was or not), I had to make it clear that I didn’t want to be introduced to this guy as potential dating/marriage/whatever material. I wasn’t rude about it, just Not interested, thanks.

I have not heard a word from her since.

24

Mark had been my best friend since Grade 5. We could go years without contact, then pick up like the last time we spoke was yesterday. He came down here to be my best man nine years ago, and brought all my belongings with him.

Mark is a luddite, and would have nothing to do with computers until last year, when he acquired a computer-literate girlfriend (marriage went south ages ago). Slowly, he began to use e-mail. I’d write him big, long letters, and I’d get back a paragraph where he didn’t address any of the questions I asked, or anything else. Then his replies would come further and further apart. Then he started forwarding me all this knee-jerk political glurge. I had already asked him not to send me anything like that, or to put me on a list for forwarded glurge, but he did it anyway.

Either he, or one of the other people in his address book, has a virus that sends infected spam to everybody in the address book. One of them was me. I wrote him and fairly reamed him out for disregarding my wishes, and compromising the security of my computer like that, and giving out my private home address to a lot of people I don’t know. I got back a couple of sentences in all caps, telling me not to worry about it, it’d never happen again. I haven’t heard from him since then. I suspect I never will. He has my number, but hasn’t called it. I had to block him as a sender of e-mail, so I don’t actually know if he’s written again, but I doubt it, judging by the tenor of his last missive. According to him, he’s the injured party here. Right, Mark.

If that’s all it took to dissolve a 40-year friendship, what was it ever all about?

25

It was more one person in a circle of friends. My mom was friends with Sandy and Cindy. It turned out that Cindy and I were pregnant at the same time. She had her baby and I had mine six weeks later.

We would get together about once a week with our babies and chat. Swap baby stories etc.

One day my mom called and asked if I heard from Cindy. I said I had not. I tried to call several times and got no answer. After about a month I decided to try again and she answered. When I inquired to what was going on and if she was okay she promptly told me that she never wanted to hear from me or my mother or Sandy ever again and hung up on me.

Eighteen years later none of know what the issue was or why she was angry at all three of us :confused:

I think Sandy and my mother tried to call her sometime later and her phone was shut off.

26

Not exactly petty……

My brother has disowned, abandoned our Mother. Won’t talk to her period. All because she called him on some really, really bad choices he was making.

That’s what mothers do.

It seems that the chip on his shoulder is more important to him than any of us.

Anyway I tried and tried everyway I could think to get him to sit down and talk things through. I spent hours, days even composing letters trying to get him to understand that Mom was just worried about him.

I asked him the rhetorical question ‘how can I be your brother If you won’t be our mothers son?’

His terse reply? “That’s your call”. Heh.

I had pretty much had it at this point. I told him he was being cruel and making Mom miserable. I told him he was destroying the family.

That was back in February. Haven’t talked to him since.

27

This is a good point, and, I would add, with wheels on it! when involving equal friendships with both of a married couple, as in my case in Post 16. I can’t win, being the odd man out – they still have each other as best friends. If I could win I probably wouldn’t want the victory since I can’t see how it wouldn’t compromise their marriage. The complications multiply the painfulness and I will be wary of this type of friendship in future.

28

Ooh. Nice ultimatum there. People who really love each other do that all the time. As the brother in a similar situation I wish my sister would just butt the hell out. She doesn’t totally understand the conflicts between me and my mother except through my mother’s one-sided whinefests. She’s never going to get the whole straight story from my mother and I don’t feel any responsibility to correct the record to defend myself. Why can’t she let us all have our own individual grown-up relationships with one another without trying to control the terms of said relationships?

29

This would be a phenomenal theory if my friend were not a flaming homosexual. :slight_smile:

It still hurts, but at least now I have the dignity of knowing he wasn’t a very good friend in the first place to just beg off for no apparent reason without feeling I deserved even so much as an explanation.

It is still very hard to trust people though. There is a dark underbelly to this story I have not discussed, but basically he jumped out of my life right about when the shit hit the proverbial fan. He abandoned me at precisely the point that my life fell apart, my family was destroyed and all my other, lesser friends jumped ship because they couldn’t handle ME needing some support for once.

And then there are the ones that never left and are still here. They bitched and moaned the whole time, but at least they stuck around.

As they say, ‘‘You find out who your friends are.’’

30

Yeah, I wasn’t going to touch this one, but I felt that was a pretty immature way to handle the conflict between your brother and your mother. You are just in essence taking sides and contributing to the conflict in your family. Calling your brother cruel for making a choice that is entirely his to make in the interest of his own mental health (or denial, or whatever, it doesn’t really matter) probably made the situation worse, makes him feel like now his whole entire family is against him.

And I just wanted to say I don’t think it’s possible for a child to ‘‘abandon’’ a parent. Parents abandon children, not the other way around. IMHO.

31

Umm no. A child that will not talk to, email or answer any contact from his mother whatsoever has pretty much abandoned them.

He made a pattern of bad decisions again and again. When the shit hit the fan again and again, it hit all of us. Our Mom pointed that out.

As I said. I tried again and again to get him to sit down and discuss this. Not his choices, to hell with that, but the way he is now treating our mother. Put it behind all of us and move on. He won’t do it.

Mom dared to point at the elephant in the room, but since my brother does not believe he can ever make a mistake, rather than talk to her, and maybe just say “it’s none of your business” he abandoned her.

32

I think that the mature way to handle this would be to sit down and discuss it. My brother won’t. My Dad (divorced from my Mom, but living next door to my brother [that makes things interesting]) wanted to cut my brother out of his will over this. I talked him out of it.

33

You and your mother could both easily say “we’ll drop this whole disagreement, come back, we miss you”. Instead it seems like you’re intent on hearing him confess his failures for previous mistakes and repenting for being a neglectful brother and son. It sounds like you’re the ones who couldn’t put it behind you and move on. As a result, he has moved on… without you.

I think a solution to this is within your power but not as long as you feel as if you’re owed some sort of contrition.

34

Not at all. My Mother has called many times asking to just let this be. Lets forget it.

It’s harder for me to forgive him. I’ll give you that. Listening to your 78 year old mother cry because her oldest son has abandoned her is tough.

When my Aunt (Moms sister) was dying in the hospital and trying to talk to my brother for one last time, he never called her back (my Aunt and my brother where also very close). She left multiple messages for my Brother. She died. He never called or went to the funeral.

My Mom also left messages about how much she loved him and that we just want to be a family again. Water under the bridge and all that.

35

I gave up on a friend a few months back over an accumulation of things, petty and grand. The last straw was, in and of itself, fairly petty.

First, I posted a stupid comment on my LJ blog, a crack that I’d meant as a joke, and she took it as a serious criticism. She ripped into me over it, I was appalled she’d taken it that way, and she said some choice, hurtful things that she later apologized for.

I was happy to accept the apology, and I asked her if she would please make a point of emailing me like she used to, either in reply to emails I’d already sent or on her own. We used to swap five emails or more a day. I was hoping for maybe an email every couple of days. She agreed, but in two months, she’d replied to one of my emails and hadn’t sent any of her own.

She used to be my biggest fan when it came to writing. She’d get on my case if I hadn’t sent her a chapter in the past few days. I’d finished my second novel and sent it to her, and she just would not read it. I told her it was okay if she didn’t want to read it; that was fine. She swore she would read it. Instead, she spent her time reading the most godawful fanfic she could find online (seriously, Harry Potter slash fic, it was so bad), and told me she couldn’t read my stuff just then, because it was too intellectually challenging (yeah, I write fantasy/horror heavy on character, just not that challenging).

Then, one weekend, I had a blow out, the second that month, and asked her for a ride to the tire place my car had been towed to. Her odious mother-in-law was visiting. My friend had invited her, having scheduled dental surgery a few days before, in the hope that she could pass the visit doped to the gills on pain killers for her teeth. Unfortunately, the dental surgery was rescheduled for several days beforehand, and she was now lucid and trapped with her MiL. I figured it would give her the opportunity to escape the house and her husband’s mother for half an hour, I could pour sympathy on her and buy her Starbucks in thanks, and it would be fair payback for the number of times I’d babysat her kids, run errands for her, or otherwise rescued her. Instead, I got the most contemptuous, condescending “didn’t you know I was otherwise engaged” response I’ve ever received from anyone, including sworn enemies. I ended up calling my brother, who took a long lunch and drove all the way across town to help me out.

Add on to that a few comments from her that I added up to realize that she had, over the course of the past two years, embezzled nearly $200K from her mother’s estate that was supposed to go to her nephews. Her sister’s lawyer had to threaten her with criminal charges and jail time before she finally got the estate in order and set up an escrow account to pay back the missing money. Her own lawyer dropped her, he was so disgusted with her behavior.

The thing is, I haven’t even cut off contact with her. I just stopped initiating it. Since late July, she has sent one email to me personally, and I responded to it. I apologized for not being able to go to her birthday dinner, as I had a previous commitment. And that’s it.

I find that I don’t miss the drama. I don’t miss the misery she constantly wallows in. I don’t miss the compromises I found myself making with my own character. I waffle back and forth, thinking I’m a bad person for dropping our friendship without making some Grand Declaration and thinking, no, I really don’t owe her a thing, especially since she was incapable of treating me honestly.

Obviously, I’m still conflicted.

36

A couple months ago, I started a thread in which I was totally baffled that a life-long best friend had totally turned into an ice queen. She and her little brother and my big sister and me, used to be like “The Four Musketeers”. Our families sometimes spent the Christmas holidays together. We have about 30 years’ worth of “best friendship” with her and her brother.

I sent her an e-message a few months ago, she answered with “Do I know you?” and I didn’t understand what that was about, but she was in fact, pretending not to know me. I finally got the chance to go out for a beer with her brother. Apparently she became a queen bitch after her 30h birthday, almost five years ago. She doesn’t speak to her brother anymore because she feels he “married beneath him” and won’t speak directly to his wife (always talks to her as if she isn’t in the room. Ex: “Would she like some tea?”).

And why does she pretend not to know me now? My fiancée’s income is greater than mine and it would be “embarassing” to introduce me to her other, classier friends.

37

I should also say that these are emails, phone messages and letters. Mom also forgave him of a $50,000 debt that he owes her.

But he has enough money to buy TWO top of the line Harleys and a $14,000 entertainment system. And has the odasity to whine to me that he can’t afford a new car.

“Moms being mean to me” Heh. Grow up. You’re 50 freaking years old. You make $60,000 a year and Mom pretty much gave you the house you are living in.

38

That’s me, too. Conflicted, I mean.

We met when we were 7. I was jumping rope out front and she had just moved in. I thought the sun and moon set on her. I was the youngest of 5 and ignored by my older sibs–here, finally, was someone my own age to play with. She was also the youngest of 3.
We were inseperable. She was in the grade below me, but other than that-we were BFF. This continued into HS, except she liked to hang with her cousin, who was basically a jerk. He was mean and cruel to others-I wont’ say any more. She idolized him. Ugh.
Things started to go sour when she took the sublet of one of my roomies (I was in a triple) in college for the summer. I may have loved her as a friend, but I did not like living with her or her boyfriend. I didn’t like lying to her mother, who was a second mom to me about her whereabouts when the mom would call. I didn’t like her BF, who turned into her fiancee and then her husband.

But what I really didn’t like was how I was categorized in this relationship. I was the brain, the geek, the weirdo. She was the fashionplate, the trendy one, the cute one. My family was fucked up, her’s was not(ha! her mom was an alcoholic, and her parents got divorced 3 years after mine did). I didn’t like being the moon to her sun, at all.
We maintained contact through the early years of our marriages. What happened was this:

  1. I got tired of being the one who schlepped my two itty bitty kids into the mini-van, either tried to parallel park this monster on Chicago streets or pay big bucks to park it. (she never came out to the 'burbs to see me. The suburbs were bland, horrid places–soul destroying etc-she grew up in a suburb, mind you). So, there was that.

  2. Her husband talked himself into a job at a major bank.(I really don’t like this guy-one of those lampshade on the head and I’m the life of the party guys). I knew someone at the bank, very senior to this guy, who might be able to help them re career etc. I invited Bank Guy and family, and my “BFF”'s family down for a casual dinner. They pulled out the day before the dinner. Very rude.

  3. My sister died. I tried to get hold of “BFF”, but she never picked up. Finally, I left this message on her voice mail, re my sister’s death and could she please call me. Two days later, she leaves me a message, telling me all about her flu and how she felt like crap and had a fever and was in bed etc. And then, as an addendum, she added, “oh, sorry to hear about [sister’s name].”

That did it for me. You have the flu and that takes precedence over my sister’s death? WTF?

I did try to contact her a few years ago. I didn’t do it very well–it was very awkward. I had since learned she had been diagnosed with lupus and had been sick (nothing to do with the flu-this was later). That was when she told me that she had replaced me with someone else. Those were her words.

But what to do? This person knows my childhood. I have 2 sibs left–one of whom was away for most of my growing up, the other wasn’t really a part of it. There is no one now with whom I can share my girlhood with–that remembers practicing kissing on my knee and our first lip gloss/periods/Halloween stunts etc. I am saddened by this, but can’t see a way to heal the breach…

39

I lost one of my best friends at his wedding. His wife never did like me much, even though I never had anything but good things to say about her. At his wedding, while the wedding party were at the head table, I tipped one of the waiters $20 to get a serving tray, a white napkin, and a cold bottle of Miller Lite (his favorite beer). As a joke, I threw the napkin over my arm, put the beer and a water glass on the tray, and came up on his left to serve him the beer. Now, this was a guy who loved beer and who would split pitchers with the entire softball team after a game, win or lose. I said " Here is your beer, Monsuer…!" with a big friendly smile.

Dead Silence in response.

His final reply, in an almost Joe Pesce tone, was

“Do you think I need you to serve me beer? There’s an open bar over there which I’m paying for. If I’d wanted beer, don’t you think I would have gotten up and gotten one for myself? I’m not drinking beer today… and you opening that beer is a waste and costs us money. What were you thinking…?”

I don’t think I ever saw his new wife smile as much as she did at that public Dis.

I took the beer back to my table, drank it, and left the reception. I’ve called and spoken to him twice since that happened 15 years ago. His wife always answers the phone and always gets that laughing condescending Annette Benning tone to her voice when she hears its me. When he did come to the phone, both times he was vague and eager to get off the call.

We had lived next door to each other since I was 5 and had been best friends into our 30s. We shared triumphs, failures. I was there for him so many times, as he had been for me. There are so many stories that are pointless to share with someone who was not a part of those years…from little league & fireworks to first beers and handling first crushes.

I have no idea if the French ever actually say “Dès que la chienne passe la porte, les congés d’amitié par la fenêtre…”, but if only in this one single and unique situation, it’s very true.

~Fin~

40

By virtue of her chosen name alone.