shadeofgreen
05-30-2007, 04:11 PM
I started to reply again to the "It's okay to be single" thread, and then realized I was totally threadjacking to go off about this tumultuous friendship of mine. And if it's weighing on my mind so much that I want to tell people on a message board about it, then why not?
Basically, this girl and I have known each other for seven or eight years. For the few years after I graduated college, she and I would hang out pretty much every weekend. We were young, single and stupid together, I guess whatever the female equivalent of a wingman is. We did a lot of dumb shit, the kind of stuff you can later blame on youth and too much alcohol. Yeah, we hung out sober and like normal people, too, though that's less relevant to the story.
It was always kind of a rocky friendship. When she started dating her current boyfriend things got weirder. That relationship was never good from the start, as far as I could tell. At first I thought the guy was just sort of dumb and I didn't get the appeal, but he seemed harmless. Still, she'd be upset about him all the time for one reason or another. I'd let her cry on my shoulder and I'd listen to her talk about all the moronic and inconsiderate things he'd done. But then once she wasn't mad at him anymore she'd turn around and get mad at me for being unsupportive when she got the idea in her head that I didn't like him (and it was all in her head...I was pretty neutral on him until the day I actually witnessed one of their better blowouts and saw how unapologetically and intentionally hurtful he could be. Prior to that I had even played devil's advocate for him once in a while. My mistake.)
She's always been weird about my boyfriend, who I started dating about half a year after she and her boyfriend got together. Once in a while she'd make plans to meet up with us somewhere, but then for some reason she'd never be there. It was kind of a running joke that she was my imaginary friend. But then she'd say things to me about how she was afraid to meet him, either because she was worried that she was going to judge him too harshly because she's so protective of me, or other times it was because she was afraid she'd have too many drinks and start talking about the old days of drunken debauchery. I think she thought I was keeping this bit of my history a secret from my boyfriend, and she thought she'd get me in trouble. And that always seemed odd to me, because if she was really so worried, then why wouldn't she just not get drunk and not talk about those times?
One time, fairly recently, she actually did meet up with us out at a bar where we had gone to see some bands. And as soon as she got there, she started in with, "On the way up I was thinking about all the stuff we used to do..." It wasn't a big deal to me, since my boyfriend is well aware of how I spent my early twenties. But it seemed sort of telling that after she was so "worried" about getting drunk and accidentally bringing this stuff up, she did it dead sober the moment she showed up on one of maybe two occasions where she's actually been around my boyfriend. In any case, I gave some sort of joking answer, something like, "maybe we should ditch the boys so we can actually have fun again." That was pretty much it. For the rest of the evening she was really quiet and eventually moved away from where we were standing.
A few days later I got an email where she went off about how she was so sorry for offending me, and she really didn't appreciate how I ripped her face off and why was I in such a bad mood that night? It was completely absurd. I had hardly said anything to her, because she walked away! Somewhere in the email she apologized for making the comment about ditching the boys, and hoped I knew she was only joking. In my reply to her I mentioned that actually, I had been the one who made that statement, and she never responded to that particular point. It's strange, but maybe just further evidence that she really does revise history to suit her mood. Maybe she doesn't even do it on purpose.
My biggest mistake was not simply deleting that email and ending it there. We got back on (relatively) normal terms again, exchanging regular emails with the general news of daily life. That sort of faded, as these things do, and then a few weeks ago she sent me a quick email, something like, "Haven't heard from you in a while, just wanted to make sure you haven't fallen off the face of the earth." So I replied with something pretty quick, "Nope, still on Earth, just got back from Massachusetts," something like that, fairly emotionally neutral, I thought. And naturally, later I got a reply that was simply, "wow, thanks for chatting." My two sentence reply to her two sentence email apparently wasn't satisfactory. I didn't bother replying to that one, so later I got a familiar, "what did I do to piss you off? So sorry for wasting your time by writing you emails. I'm afraid to call you because I'm afraid I'm going to be bothering you," and so on.
I replied to that one with a sort of "this is getting ridiculous. I'm not mad, my only beef with you is that every time we talk it ends with you acting like I'm breathing fire and ready to kill someone. We can still be friends if we can leave out the melodrama." Something to that effect.
Haven't heard back. And I'm okay with that except that I don't feel like it had to end in some blaze of hurt feelings. We could simply be civil to one another, but when things are happy and quiet she just has to find the nearest stick and poke at them 'til they're not happy and quiet anymore. It's just frustrating to me, that she paints this picture of me the way she does, and I don't know why she does it, or if that's sincerely the way she perceives me, and if it is what I did to deserve that. This person used to be my best friend and now she's the subject of a very long rant (sorry) to a bunch of strangers on the internet.
Maybe someday I'll have some real, live, grown up friends, you know?
Basically, this girl and I have known each other for seven or eight years. For the few years after I graduated college, she and I would hang out pretty much every weekend. We were young, single and stupid together, I guess whatever the female equivalent of a wingman is. We did a lot of dumb shit, the kind of stuff you can later blame on youth and too much alcohol. Yeah, we hung out sober and like normal people, too, though that's less relevant to the story.
It was always kind of a rocky friendship. When she started dating her current boyfriend things got weirder. That relationship was never good from the start, as far as I could tell. At first I thought the guy was just sort of dumb and I didn't get the appeal, but he seemed harmless. Still, she'd be upset about him all the time for one reason or another. I'd let her cry on my shoulder and I'd listen to her talk about all the moronic and inconsiderate things he'd done. But then once she wasn't mad at him anymore she'd turn around and get mad at me for being unsupportive when she got the idea in her head that I didn't like him (and it was all in her head...I was pretty neutral on him until the day I actually witnessed one of their better blowouts and saw how unapologetically and intentionally hurtful he could be. Prior to that I had even played devil's advocate for him once in a while. My mistake.)
She's always been weird about my boyfriend, who I started dating about half a year after she and her boyfriend got together. Once in a while she'd make plans to meet up with us somewhere, but then for some reason she'd never be there. It was kind of a running joke that she was my imaginary friend. But then she'd say things to me about how she was afraid to meet him, either because she was worried that she was going to judge him too harshly because she's so protective of me, or other times it was because she was afraid she'd have too many drinks and start talking about the old days of drunken debauchery. I think she thought I was keeping this bit of my history a secret from my boyfriend, and she thought she'd get me in trouble. And that always seemed odd to me, because if she was really so worried, then why wouldn't she just not get drunk and not talk about those times?
One time, fairly recently, she actually did meet up with us out at a bar where we had gone to see some bands. And as soon as she got there, she started in with, "On the way up I was thinking about all the stuff we used to do..." It wasn't a big deal to me, since my boyfriend is well aware of how I spent my early twenties. But it seemed sort of telling that after she was so "worried" about getting drunk and accidentally bringing this stuff up, she did it dead sober the moment she showed up on one of maybe two occasions where she's actually been around my boyfriend. In any case, I gave some sort of joking answer, something like, "maybe we should ditch the boys so we can actually have fun again." That was pretty much it. For the rest of the evening she was really quiet and eventually moved away from where we were standing.
A few days later I got an email where she went off about how she was so sorry for offending me, and she really didn't appreciate how I ripped her face off and why was I in such a bad mood that night? It was completely absurd. I had hardly said anything to her, because she walked away! Somewhere in the email she apologized for making the comment about ditching the boys, and hoped I knew she was only joking. In my reply to her I mentioned that actually, I had been the one who made that statement, and she never responded to that particular point. It's strange, but maybe just further evidence that she really does revise history to suit her mood. Maybe she doesn't even do it on purpose.
My biggest mistake was not simply deleting that email and ending it there. We got back on (relatively) normal terms again, exchanging regular emails with the general news of daily life. That sort of faded, as these things do, and then a few weeks ago she sent me a quick email, something like, "Haven't heard from you in a while, just wanted to make sure you haven't fallen off the face of the earth." So I replied with something pretty quick, "Nope, still on Earth, just got back from Massachusetts," something like that, fairly emotionally neutral, I thought. And naturally, later I got a reply that was simply, "wow, thanks for chatting." My two sentence reply to her two sentence email apparently wasn't satisfactory. I didn't bother replying to that one, so later I got a familiar, "what did I do to piss you off? So sorry for wasting your time by writing you emails. I'm afraid to call you because I'm afraid I'm going to be bothering you," and so on.
I replied to that one with a sort of "this is getting ridiculous. I'm not mad, my only beef with you is that every time we talk it ends with you acting like I'm breathing fire and ready to kill someone. We can still be friends if we can leave out the melodrama." Something to that effect.
Haven't heard back. And I'm okay with that except that I don't feel like it had to end in some blaze of hurt feelings. We could simply be civil to one another, but when things are happy and quiet she just has to find the nearest stick and poke at them 'til they're not happy and quiet anymore. It's just frustrating to me, that she paints this picture of me the way she does, and I don't know why she does it, or if that's sincerely the way she perceives me, and if it is what I did to deserve that. This person used to be my best friend and now she's the subject of a very long rant (sorry) to a bunch of strangers on the internet.
Maybe someday I'll have some real, live, grown up friends, you know?