Oh, for the love of Jeebus! There is a huge difference between “nudie pics” and “boudoir photos” and the kind that make good art pics. Eg/ This print of Lance Armstrong was on display at a local coffee joint for months. Oh, noes! He’s naked! Big whoop! (And since nothing but muscles are revealed it’s probably SFW unless you have extremely rigid standards.) It’s not something that violated community standards and it doesn’t sound like the Godiva shots were either.
It’s not like he’s got a porn shot of his wife in his office cube.
So while I was lunch I started to reply to Meredith’s email. I was going to be civil but blunt, I told myself. There’s stuff about herself she needs to hear. So I went for a couple of paragraphs about her gradual morphing into a psychic vampire, and I started to list the many, many ways she has been offensively, Dworkinishly stupid in the last year – such as her claim that Kim only THINKS she was the aggressor in initiating our relationship, because the dynamics of male-female relationships make that impossible, and thus Kim needs to see the truth of the situation without patriarchal goggles. This went on for a couple of pages as a lot of stuff that had been irritating me spewed out.
Fortunately I wrote this email in Word. For, as I was about to transfer this, I heard my therapist’s voice in my head. “Skaldimus,” she was saying, “all this drama in your life that you say you hate so much–how much of it do you contribute to? I understand that you have a family of insane whackjobs, and friends from your old life who don’t fit into the new one–but you have to understand that you can let it go. You don’t have to enter into the cycle. Before you escalate an argument with a nutjob ask yourself what purpose it will serve. Is someone keeping score? Will you be awarded money if you win this argument? Or will it just raise your blood pressure?”
So I deleted the first email and wrote one saying Yes, I was deliberately cutting her out, and No, I am not willing to get together and discuss it, and wished her well.
Of course, me choosing the less-dramatic course probably means teh world is ending. If the Cubs win the next World Series, we’re all screwed.
Congratulations on doing the deed - as long as you handled it in a way that was right for you, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks (well, as long as you didn’t literally tear her head off or something).
The problem with that tact, even when it is an accurate assessment, is that the Bad Friend will interpret it as: “A-ha! This is really the wife’s idea! I knew she’d try to interfere with our friendship. Jealous bitch!”
As for “just not making the effort and the person will go away”, it doesn’t always work that way. My experience:
I had a workout buddy, we’ll call him Dave the Downer. He was a nice enough guy, at first, but the longer he’s your friend the more intrusive in your life he becomes. Kind of like the MPSIMS thread about “dating the crazy”. He started out as a cool workout buddy from my cycling group. Then he became part of the Circle of Friends (although he was sometimes a bit of a downer). Then he seemed to think he was a BFF! And his “sometimes a bit of a downer” was “Holy crap! Eeyore is an optimist compared to this guy!” To make matters more annoying, he was a bit socially inept, so if you said “Sorry, I can’t hang out this weekend, we have plans for Girlfriend’s birthday” he would probably show up uninvited with a(n inappropriately expensive) present. So he started inserting himself into people’s lives more and more.
Trying the “drifting apart, not returning his calls” method resulted in phone messages like" (sentences spaced out for a sense of the timing)
"This is Dave…
:: sigh ::
I could leave you a detailed message…
but you probably won’t call back anyway…"
And he kept calling. It was almost like having a stalker. Then one fine Tuesday morning he showed up on my doorstep at 7:00AM. So it was time for The Talk. It’s probably the only time I’ve ever “broken up with” a dude.
Dave the Downer similarly wore out his welcome with other guys in our cycling group, but one did report back that, since I’d mentioned something about my social time being prioritized to my girlfriend and family first, he concluded it meant that my girlfriend didn’t like him and wouldn’t let me hang out with him.
Definitely the right thing to do. The first email was for you, the second email was for her. Hopefully that will be the end of it, but I suggest if it’s not that a simple “I made myself clear last time, I will not be responding to you further so please don’t bother” exonerates you from any further contact. After that the ‘delete email’ button is your friend.
Way to go Skald the Rhymer! That is a good reply. It is hard to judge, even being someone’s friend for a long time, how to respond to the ‘what did i do wrong?’ question. I for one gone the dumbass road: gotten out of a poisonous decade long friendship by betraying said ‘friend’ the exact same way they did me. In retrospect i wish i told my reason face to face, but i know the ex-friend was a drama-queen and it would be a drawn-out situation.
I strongly agree with that (except that I wouldn’t hint at her potentially changing).
I indeed think that after 20 years, you “owe” her an explanation of sort. A closure, as some put it. Calling her a “psychic vampire” would be unnecessarily hurtful. And referring to the specific incident you mentioned would probably result in her argumenting, maybe apologizing, and insisting on forgetting the regrettable incident and being friends again.
So some kind of “We’ve drifted apart, I’ve other priorities now, that’s life” message along with some vague and not too accusatory reference to the general reasons why you feel that way seems about right to me.
As someone who has been on both sides of this painful situation, I’d say you’d be giving her some closure to at least give some kind of brief explanation. I abandoned a friend who was a histrionic, manipulative, lying bitch and never discussed it with her. She was torn up about it for a long time.
Likewise, I was abandoned by a friend who to this day still remains friends with some of my family members, yet he wants nothing to do with me and for years outright refused to give me an explanation. I still ache about it–STILL-- 8 years later, it’s like a death. I honestly couldn’t describe the depth of loss I feel, and what makes it all the more horrible is he never even bothered to talk to me about it. If he’d come to me earlier and was honest with me, the whole painful scenario could have been avoided.
When he finally DID come clean six years later (after a relative badgered him into it), his reason was that, six years ago (now eight), when we were SEVENTEEN, I was spending too much time with my boyfriend and not paying enough attention to him. It’s true that I ditched him a few times, but it was less out of spite and more out of the fact that my entire life was falling apart and I didn’t want anything to do with anyone. I felt like a pariah and even if he showed up for me I assumed it was for my other friends and family. Other people understood that, but for whatever reason, he couldn’t accept it. Now that I know his rationale I feel better because a friendship with someone that guarded and irrational would have never worked anyway. It still hurts, but at least I have something to work with on those dark nights when I’m missing him.
There is middle ground between getting caught up in the cycle of drama and just giving someone an honest explanation.
On review, belated advice. I should have read the whole thread before posting (not the first time)
However, I found in this thread a relatively enlightening comment, that I find relevant and possibly useful in my personal circumstances, so I didn’t waste my time reading this.
Seems that I came at this thread a little roundabout, having hit the other one first.
You did the right thing, Skald.
Not knowing can hurt a lot and prevent closure, certainly. But there comes a point where KNOWING can cause one helluva lot more damage. Besides, as evidenced in this thread, people will always insert their own “real” reasons anyway - and half the time those might even be true in some respects.
Actually a better rule is “treat others as they would have you treat them”. Not everyone wants to be treated the way you would have them treat you. I forget what the rule is called though.
Well… That’s fine I guess. Giving her a laundry list of everything that sucks about her would probably put her on the defensive and piss her off. I know if someone did that to me I’d be like “How about you fuck yourself? You think YOU’RE perfect or something?” A better way would be to tell her how her behavior makes you feel. ie “When you criticize my relationship with my wife, if makes me feel like you want me to choose between my wife and you as friends and I’m not going to do that.” She can’t get defensive about how you feel because they are your feelings.
I’m always wondering about what is the best (most honorable) way to let the other person know how their behavior makes you feel AND that the ending of your friendship is non-negotiable. Because it always seems like there is a big, gray, swimmy area in there where the other person has room to A) try to convince you why you’re wrong B) try to convince you that it’s really you with the problem C) try to convince you they’re just going through a rough patch D) try to convince you they’ll try to make some changes, and it becomes this huge black hole of a discussion which, with some personality types, just can never, ever end.
I have the same problem with a woman I’ve known for about 10 years. She has no friends, and adopted me as a friend. I’ve told her I’ve got my own stuff and I can’t fix her stuff, and to please not call me, only to email me so that I can have enough emotional distance so that her present situation doesn’t overwhelm me. After a few tries this worked, and she still occasionally emails me, and I respond with care. It helps that she lives several hundred miles away from me.
I believe that anybody has a right to end a friendship anyway that they please. Even if she had been the greatest of friends, ever working to bring you pleasure, you don’t need to tell them why you’re dissing them. As noted before, you don’t have a contract. I, myself, have been done in as you have done to your ex-friend, and I only wish it had been more obvious. Wanting an explanation seems to be manipulative, especially from this strange creature.
More troubling to me, though, is the overtones. What are you doing letting overtones creep into your house? Involving your whole family with overtones? I guard my relationships zealously to insure that there are NO overtones, and I hope you can learn to do the same.
Knock off the overtones!
It’s hurtful for someone to hear negative things about themselves, but it can be even more hurtful to be shunned without an explanation. At least an explanation can be constructive.
I went through this very issue when I was 25 with someone who had been one of my best friends since I was 5 years old. This friend and I got along great and were extremely close, the problem was he just wasn’t a good person, in fact he was an actively bad person. A crisis I had in my own life made me realize not only this, but that his whole attitude and worldview had rubbed off on me to the extent that it was dragging me down too.
After much thought, I decided to end the friendship with no explanation. I figured in the end it would be more hurtful to him for one of his best friends to tell him that he was a horrible human being who was dragging me down with him than for him to just think that I was an asshole who decided to move in a different direction in my life.
I still can’t really say if the way I chose is the right way. In the end, there probably is no good way to go about ending a long standing friendship.
Deducing somehow that I had blocked her from sending me emails, Meredith opened a yahoo account to demand that I return the cat I got from her when her own cat had kittens.
