FWIW, I’m the sender. I know the tone is odd and stilted, but I felt kind of odd sending it. I would like to be friends with this girl again, if she’s grown to be someone I can be a friend with and not just another ear to jabber at. But there’s really no way of knowing how she’s changed in the last three years without getting back in touch with her. I’m not looking for validation of what I said or anything like that. I just wondered what other people might think.
. . . Is a completely shitty thing to say to anyone under any circumstances.
I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, but this e-mail makes you sound both self-centered and mean-spirited. It seems calculated to make sure this person never gets in touch with you again.
I would probably think “WTF, why did you bother” If you have a problem with the way someone interacts with you, you bring it up while its happening, you don’t throw it in their face a few years later.
I think you should replace the first three paragraphs with “It was nice to get your card”. Normally one would apologize for not replying sooner, but you obviously aren’t sorry. If you absolutely insist that all this information needs to be shared (which its doesn’t, BTW), do it over coffee, or at least until after you hear back and have confirmation that they still actually want to have a conversation with you.
If it were me, I might throw it out, and throw your address away, partway through the third paragraph. It sounds like it’s a “no really, get the hell out of my life, what were you thinking sending me a Christmas card?” letter. The “and these are the changes in our lives” part sounds like it’s from a different letter.
If you really, really must reference an awkward past, just say something vague like, “I know we’ve had our ups and downs but I appreciated the card and hope to have a fresh start with you.” Don’t drag out all the nasty details and the “you just dumped your problems on me” and “I thought your marriage was a mistake” and all of that unless you’d truly prefer to not hear from these people again.
Yikes. If a friend said something like this to me, I would assume that she intended to hurt me, and I would have a powerful desire never to hear from her again.
My God! If you’d send something like that to a person you wanted to patch things up with, what would you send to someone you want to break things off with?
That had to be one of the nastiest letters I’ve ever read. I was just about to tell you what a horrible person I thought the emailer was and by golly, it’s you!
Hm. I can understand the sentiment, as I’ve been on the same end of a similarly one-way “friendship,” with me being the unloadee. With this person, however, you could never ever ever say anything to intimate that there was anything wrong with their behavior, life choices, etc.
So I haven’t . . . Eventually I just reached the point where I didn’t want to deal with this person anymore, and just quietly backed off. And I’ve noticed that in the considerable time that I’ve ceased initiating one-on-one contact – just a few “all our friends” party invitations, because stopping those would definitely be noticed – there has been <thinking . . . > ONE contact from them saying “Let’s get together.” So we did, and it was friendly, but brief. So my hunch was true that it was “my job” to arrange get-togethers, ask “how ya doing,” start chatty e-mail exchanges, etc. And it’s not shyness – this person is never at a loss for words.
Perhaps better to be vague and say something like (on preview) what Ferret Herder said.
If you already sent it, though, you probably won’t have to worry about this person unloading on you anymore, yeah.
I’d assume that you really and truly didn’t like me and I’d never contact you again, and I’d feel like an idiot for having thought it was a good idea to send you a card in the first place. To me it reads like this: “you were a sucky friend and I finally got rid of you. Oh, you’re back? Well let me gloat about the awesome things in my life, to balance out having to hear you talk about your hard times. Oh, if you’ve risen up to my standards you may contact me and I will audition you for friendship worthiness again.”
I would probably want my X-mas card back. It seems like a very mean letter.
FWIW - I’ve dumped friends before. If one of them contacted me out of the blue and I wanted to contact them, I think I would just give them a call. I certainly wouldn’t send them a nasty letter designed to make them feel bad. After three years you really should have gotten over it.
