Ace, after 5 years I just broke off my friendship with a girl who always had problems. I felt rotten, like I was kicking her when she was down, but after 5 years I’ve learned that she is her own worse enemy, and she’s never going to stop getting in trouble. While we had some excellent fun between times, she wasn’t worth the sleepless nights and headaches.
It’s taken me a long time to reach this point, but she’s never going to change, and she’s taken to repeating the same mistakes over. It was wearing me down putting up with her crap. No matter what I said or did, I couldn’t make the slightest influence in her life, yet I was the one expected to pick up the pieces when her world came crashing down - I don’t mind doing this for a friend, but when said friend constantly ignores everyone, lives recklessly and then crashes and burns, it gets to you. I felt helpless, weak and frustrated. Apparently, I was good enough to console her and help her out, but not good enough to advise her. She had unrealistic expectations of my commitment to her - she was hinting around once for me to say that I would put her above my fiance, but I’m afraid my fiance is the person I’m sharing my life with and comes before all others. My friends have a high priority, but no one else who would expect me to consider them before considering my future husband.
I’m no control freak, I accept she chooses her own destiny, but if she’s going to make me so much a part of everything she does, she can at least listen to me when I say “That’s a really bad idea and it will end badly for these reasons”. She pays no attention! She asks my advice, and then tries to talk me out of my opinion. Afterwards, she says “I’m too close to the situation to see it clearly” - that’s an excuse for choosing to be reckless instead of cautious. I’m the first person she runs to when things are bad, but I don’t get to share the good times that she mortgages her future for. I get the misery without the fun.
I may seem heartless, but I’m not. My door is always open, and if my friends need someone to talk to, I try to be there for them. Yet this girl abused that. She took it to an extreme. She spent 5 years constantly in trouble of her own making. I’ve done everything I could to help her, yet she won’t help herself. She makes her own bad luck by being reckless, vain, rude and selfish, and then expects me to drop everything for her. I’m just so fresh out of sympathy. When it came down to the last straw, I couldn’t handle it anymore and I walked away.
The last straw? A friend who’d betrayed her years ago came back into her life, telling her he was sorry and he’d never do it again. She welcomed him with open arms, despite knowing that he was telling other people that he was going to win her back and then cast her aside again because it would be even funnier the second time. It’s so very obvious how that is going to end, and I can’t face going through the whole process over again. Especially following within the month of her engagement breaking up, throwing in her job to move back to her hometown, leaving everything she owned in the care of her fiance who dumped it in another state, finding she hated her hometown because she knows no one there except an exboyfriend who is now married unhappily with a small child (we all know what’s going to happen there…) In every case, she was warned about what would happen, but she chose to have fun and ignore us until she needed sympathy.
I know thinking of the baby disturbs you, Ace, but you need to let it go. Down that path, madness lies. There’s nothing that can be done or could be done to change things. This is not your fault, and it’s not something you can dwell on. You might want to consider talking to someone you can trust about the baby, and finding a way to let her go, because you can’t bring her back. Look to the future, look forward to the time when you can bring your own little ones into the world in a safe and loving enviroment, and don’t grieve too much for the baby who wasn’t born. Meanwhile, take stock. Is this girl ever going to stop making her own bad luck, and if not, are you strong enough to handle watching this cycle repeat for years and years to come? Perhaps you need to take a step back away from this girl and find someone who is in control of their own life, because if you’re waiting for her to grow up, it might take a while. I spent 5 years waiting for my friend to grow up, and at age 22 she exactly the same as she was at 17. She likes to put on airs and graces and think that she’s so much more sophisticated, but she doing the same stupid things over again, and when it’s pointed out to her that it always ends badly, she replies “It won’t happen like that this time”. How can you fight an attitude like that?