Maybe I’m a weird duck but I stick by my friends through almost anything (the one exception being one made a pass at my wife)
I’ve had friends go through years of depression. One go to prison.
I never cut them off…because…they were my friends.
There was a movie scene that really hit me. It had Wyatt Erp and Doc Holiday. Doc Holiday was sicker than hell and he was climbing on a horse to go behind his friends back to confront a guy in a gun fight that he knew Wyatt couldn’t win and Wyatt would take it bad if he knew that Doc was doing this. He thought he might die as he was far from top form.
The guy that helped him onto his horse (he was too sick to climb onto it) asked him:
“Doc, why the hell are you doing this?”
“Wyatt is my friend”.
“Hell Doc, I have plenty of friends and no way would I do this for them”
Doc thinks a bit then says “You do?..Well…I don’t”.
He then rode off to confront the opponent.
That scene stuck with me…because THAT is exactly how I feel.
IMO, friends are not to be thrown aside because they are having a tough life.
That is not the case here. This is a friend making life tough.
To me, a friend is someone whom I find makes my life better by being around. Hopefully, I make their life better in the same way. If life is worse with them around, then not so much of a friend.
That’s not what I’m doing, or at least I hope it’s not. The Lady Godiva photo incident was the camel-back-breaking straw, but it’s not the only thing Meredith has done. For instance, she once insisted that no woman could possibly enjoy sex of any stripe, and oral sex in particular was degrading by definition; when Mrs. Rhymer countered that sex was fun, getting head is wonderful, and giving head makes her feel powerful, Meredith told her that she was necessarily self-deceived to believe this and needed therapy to discover the reasons she was deluded on the issue.
And not just ANY therapy, either; the only therapy she believes in is her psychodrama, which she thinks everyone–everyone–needs.
Another example: I used to have a bad dog phobia. My therapist helped me past this not only by talking it over, but by gently acclimating me to having a dog around me. First she’d have her little Jack Russell terrier in the room and on her lap during sessions, then by having it walk around while I was in the room, then by waiting until it and I were comfortable enough for the dog to sit on my lap, and so forth. Now I can feed her great big Shepherd without freaking.
Meredith, noticing that my attitude towards dogs had changed one day (I was holding my niece’s dog without concern) asked what had changed, so I told her about the conditioning. She immediately averred that it was bullshit because it hadn’t involved psychodrama. Only by reennacting the childhood incident that caused me to fear dogs–only by role-playing as the childhood me, the adult me, the person who brought the dog around me, AND THE DOG THAT I WAS SCARED OF-- could I become “truly” healed of my phobia, she said. I had to understand what was going through all these characters minds, INCLUDING THE DOG. Otherwise I only THOUGHT I was better, and I was self-deluded.
:rolleyes:
Yes, I do need to vent. And yes, it has occurred to me that I should have given her the heave-ho quite a long time before I did.
My normal state being one with very few friends, I generally feel the same way. But just over two years ago, I broke off two friendships at the same time over mostly the same issue. That being, they were both being serious asses in regards to a D&D game that I was running. But even more than that, it was other long term issues with both of them;
1> Was a huge pile of neuroses and excuses. Constantly asking for advice seemingly only so that he could argue with it and offer pitiful excuses for why he couldn’t do the most basic things in life. He also had a more serious problem of getting some obtuse idea into his head, then arguing that point well past any reason, while not being capable of hearing anything you said to the contrary. And I mean really simple things where, if he actually listened to what you said, he’d know how off in left field he was. That got really really tiresome.
2> Was just too random, chaotic and undependable. Also had the attitude that people could be as contrary and self-serving as they chose to be and that the rest of us should just pleasantly accept this as a perfectly normal and acceptable mode of behavior. They’re making themselves happy, so we should embrace it. :dubious: (Perfect example of the D&D alignment Chaotic Neutral.)
I respectfully disagree. In fact, I would call that attitude a ‘sunny-day friend’.
Presumeably when you became friends he/she was a positive in your life. However, life is tough. It grinds on people. This is precisely WHEN you need good friends.
Being a friend doesn’t mean you have to put up with his/her crap. Sometimes they can step over the line (like making passes at your wife and so the friendship needs to end). However, if a friend is being an ass, call him on it.
Well, in that second case, I did call him on it, more than once. His reaction was always something along the lines of “I’m making a perfectly valid choice for me and YOU need to change in order to accomodate my (choices/quirkiness/unreliability)”
Um, NO I don’t, and that’s a perfectly valid choice for ME.
As for the OP thing, I smiled when I saw Skald hitting the “wow, I should have done this a long time ago” post-decision phase. That’s a true mark that you’ve been putting up with someone’s shit for far too long and you’ve made the right decision in cutting them loose.
That whole “sex is wrong for women” thing is just plain silly. I’d suggest that the psychodrama she needs as therapy for that view is to be laughed out of the room by a large group of other women, but I doubt she’d see the light.
People who treat you and your family like shit are not your friends. If they are passive-aggressive, it can take you awhile to realize they treat you like shit. That is more or less what happened in the OP.
You have inserted an invisible assumption in your judgment of me. I do not necessarily find it to be burdensome to help friends who are having problems in their life.
To be fair, there’s a huge difference between bailing on someone who is willing to support you just because they need some support for a while, and no longer flinging all your emotional resources into a black hole.
I’ve got one of those people in my life. When she has real problems, like when her aunt was about to go to prison for forging checks or when her other aunt was diagnosed with cancer, I’m more than willing to do anything I can to help her out and to offer her all the support I can. But 99% of the time when she has a huge horrible problem and needs me to spend hours listening to her yammer about how awful things are, it’s something that any sane human being would consider…well, stupid and trivial.
In the last 6 months or so, she’s had 3 serious, hardcore, call 50 million times because she has to talk to me right now crises in her life. The first one was when she went over to a co-worker’s house for an evening, and his roommate smoked a joint in front of her. The second was when she found out the guy she used to take guitar lessons from has cancer. The third one was when she got a subpoena to testify about a blood alcohol level in a drunk driving case (she works in the lab in a hospital.)
That’s not life being tough and grinding you down and needing a friend. That’s your life not being tough enough to give you a sense of perspective, so you grind everyone else down with your over the top drama. If me not supporting her through this kind of stuff makes me a fair-weather friend, I’m totally okay with that.
Good job on deleting the drama. I tell my bff, when she deals with her crazy sister-in-law, not to play with crazy because crazy doesn’t play by the rules. You’ll never win if you play with crazy. It’s like Calvin Ball! Crazy will change the rules, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and claim the win.
Sometimes friends have told me things about myself that weren’t easy to hear, and probably not easy to say, but that I really did need to hear. I tried to make a point of thanking them, because they didn’t have to do that. And I know that I have really been a drama queen in the past and am grateful for the people who did put up with me. If positions had been reversed, I don’t know if I’d have put up with myself.
For the person on the receiving end, it might have been helpful to hear specifics of her actions and how you felt about them. If, big if, she had been able to hear them, it might have woken her up. But what might have been the time for that is now past. I agree that you should not respond. Or it will be really easy to get drawn back into explanation, justification, negotiation, etc, etc, etc, and more drama. Any reply. ANY reply will be seen as an opening/encouragement.
Delete her messages. Don’t read them. This will take work, but do it. Keep at it and it gets easier.
I’d prefer that kind of closure, a cussing-out, something. I had what I thought was a rock-solid friendship apparently ruined by some misunderstandings during a move of hers. This was someone where we had many “dark nights of the soul” discussing and working out a variety of different deeply personal issues. Did she call me back to get my side of the story (I was feeling woozy walking up and down the steps umpteen times, and had a night class during the 2nd part of the move, and she had 3 other people to help her as well)? Give me the benefit of the doubt? Nope, just a solid wall of silence.
but I stick by my friends through almost anything (the one exception being one made a pass at my wife)