He who angers you controls you. –Unknown

Being a woman, I can more than understand the propensity to stand by your man. You want to be there for them, you want to nurture them, you want to be the woman behind the man. And listen, I am all for that. I think supporting each other in relationships is absolutely vital to their success. I mean, if you go around life at constant battle with each other, your relationship has no chance at survival. And at the end of the day, you really only have each other. At the end of the day, it’s just you, the person you lay your head next to, and the night. (Or, if you’re me, it’s all of those things combined with three cats and a seventy pound pit bull. But I digress.) 

But I also believe that you need other people in your life. You need friends, for example, to vent to and bounce ideas off of. You need another person to hear you when your partner won’t. You need someone to tell you that you’re being irrational when your partner might have a valid argument. And most importantly, you need someone to hold you when everything else goes to shit. When things fall through with your partner, you need someone to pound whiskey with and someone to feed you Gatorade when you’re hungover and still have to go to work.

 These people, I believe, are unbelievably vital. Without them, we would probably never get out of bed in the morning. And when that brand of friendship is threatened, it can throw you a bit off kilter. It can make you feel really awful about yourself because this is supposed to be your best friend; this is the person who is supposed to love you at your worst and watch terrible eighties movies with you because obviously, no one else will. This is the person who is always supposed to be there for you when all else falls away, the person who isn’t supposed to judge you when you go on a whiskey bender or spend $190 on a pair of wedges.

Because they, of all people, understand their importance to you. 

A true friend is someone who never gets tired of listening to your pointless drama over and over again. –Lauren Conrad

Here’s the thing: I have no problem being put second to someone’s romantic relationship because if said relationship is legitimate and worth anything, that is exactly how it should be. I am more than happy to be bumped lower on the list of priorities when it means seeing my friend happy. I have loosened my grip on a lot of people that I really loved because if they were happy, then I was too. 

I love love. I love being in love. I love crazy wedding diets (Please do me a solid and Google Eva Longoria’s workout regimen and diet prior to her wedding to cheating idiot Tony Parker. She is perfection.) and creeping on sexy honeymoon pictures. I absolutely die for wedding albums done by way of the People Magazine exposé. They are my favorite fucking thing in the world. All of this is fine, okay? Peach Schnapps and cream liqueur. (I’m not so good at sayings…) 

What I have a real problem with is being lied to. There are two things that I really cannot stand: being lied to and being ignored. It’s disrespectful and I won’t allow it. I am truthful and attentive, and quite honestly, I expect the same courtesy. And to be real, I don’t think that’s asking for a lot.

So naturally, when someone has an absolute MELTDOWN in public and then tells me the next day that said event has set her back emotionally; when someone stands over me in my kitchen, watching me wash all the dishes from the night before, and tells me that this guy (the aforementioned gentleman from the previous blog who drove nine hours to visit her) is perfect for her but the timing is terrible, you can understand my aggravation when she emails me a few months later to say she “has a boyfriend”. When she tells me that it isn’t him, it’s the fact that she just isn’t ready for a relationship; that he is perfect and she’s just not ready, you can imagine my confusion when she sends me an email chronicling how her and this new guy met, fell in love, and are now talking baby and a wedding. In that order. 

And all of this allegedly happened while the nine hour driver was here. 

Surely you can understand my lack of clarity, right? Since not two weeks earlier, she had literally cried in my arms and told me how awful she felt for the guy I had set her up with, because she just wasn’t ready. Yet, she met someone a couple of days prior to all of that who she is suddenly ready to marry? Am I in the goddamn Twilight Zone? Is it just me? Am I not supposed to be upset by this? Am I not supposed to be sensitive to the fact that this bitch straight up played me?

Well listen, I am. I feel betrayed. I feel lied to. I feel extremely taken advantage of. I feel tricked. And I don’t like these feelings.

Remember when Britney Spears shaved her head and just sat around on curbs? That’s what you look like… -Rebecca Wright, Bad Judge

But being the type of person that I am, I let it go. I gave her (and her newly coined “boyfriend”) the benefit of the doubt. I tried to tell myself that I was just getting bent out of shape because it didn’t work out between her and the gentleman I had attempted to hook her up with. I tried to tell myself that I was being totally irrational (real talk: like always), getting mad over something miniscule and stupid. But the more and more I rehashed it and thought about it, I really wasn’t. 

Because as my friend, she should have been honest with me. As my best friend, she should have respected me enough to say that for whatever reason, suddenly or otherwise, she had lost interest in the old guy and had found a new person. But she didn’t do that. 

Instead, she ran around and hid from me, like a child with their hand caught in the goddamn cookie jar. Instead, she played the role of a victim, insinuated I had set her up for something she wasn’t ready for, and let me feel guilty for pushing her to like someone. 

When I had originally set this up, she prefaced the conversation with, “He’s amazing and I really like him; I just hope that when we meet in person, I’m not intimidated by him. And I hope he isn’t annoyed by my nervousness.” This was primarily because he was a man; she had allegedly had a bad experience, and was still dealing with the aftershocks of it all. And also because, she naturally didn’t want him to think that she was crazy. 

Listen, I don’t want to pretend like I know what she went through because I don’t. I don’t want to claim to know what happened to her because I don’t. All I know is what she told me happened, what she explained to me took place, and how she claimed she felt. Because of what I do every day and what I have experienced throughout my own life, I would never discount anyone’s feelings. No matter what the situation. I would also never assume something that a “best friend” told me to be untrue, no matter what it was. Partly because A, why would anyone lie to their best friend? And B, why would anyone not believe their best friend? 

Am I right? You see where I’m going with this?

But instead of being real with me, she played me. She let me coddle and worry about her; she allowed me to set her up with someone and then turned it around on me. She allowed me to think that she was so emotionally distraught that she couldn’t even entertain the idea of getting serious with someone, when all the while, that’s exactly what she was doing. How could I have been so blind to all of this? It is incredibly frustrating. 

All those days that she was allegedly so swamped with school, she was with her new man. She wasn’t “studying” and “pulling all-nighters” like she claimed, and she wasn’t shying away from my set-up because she was scared or unready for a relationship.

She had met someone else and for whatever reason, she didn’t want me to know about it. So she kept me in the dark until she had to tell me, because she wanted to show him off at my birthday. Because she wanted to brag about all his nonsense, superficial attributes. Like I give a shit.

And don’t misunderstand: all of this is fine. In the beginning, I even liked him. (Well, I wanted to. I think he had well-meaning intentions but he was “nervous”, so he overcompensated. Which annoys the shit out of me.) It wasn’t the relationship that upset me. It was her goddamn blatant disregard for my feelings. It started around the same time that she met him and it just continued. She was so wrapped up in their absolutely CHAOTIC relationship that she just stopped caring about everything else.

But again, as with the last blog, I will get to all of that later.

Moral of the Crazy: I am not pleased with how any of this went down. I don’t like any part of the situation and to be honest, it all left me questioning our friendship. Where was the trust? Why was there suddenly no honesty? When had we started hiding things from each other and making shit up? And more importantly, how could I have been so stupid? I just allowed this to happen. I allowed her to treat me this way. 

There is obviously far more to this story that I will eventually chronicle so it all makes sense. The take away from all of this is to be kind to each other. And I don’t mean baking cupcakes and holding the door open for people when you walk in ahead of them. Being kind means being considerate of others. It is realizing that you are not the only one on this planet. It is having self-awareness and understanding that your actions, or lack thereof, have an effect on other people. It is the realization that you are not a country unto yourself. It isn’t, damn the consequences or whoever else gets hurt.

The take away is that relationships take work and they hurt sometimes, but there is only so much bullshit you can take before it’s pathetic. At some point, they become more like emotional vampires than actual friends. Suddenly, that isn’t Rachel Green sitting next to you; that’s the selfish brat who is bleeding you dry because she wants you to validate her feelings. She knows that you’re caring and sensitive and she’s using you to make herself feel better.

It’s disgusting.

I just find a lot of pleasure in being good to people. I don’t do it to get things. I do it because it makes me feel good. I do it because it’s how I think people should be treated. It’s how I want to be treated. And I’m sorry but when I’m good to people, I expect the same respect. Especially from someone who knows my character, someone close to me who calls herself my best friend.

I’m not asking for anything. I just think we all deserve better. I think that we owe it to ourselves to be better.

Stop letting people who do so little for you control so much of your mind, feelings, and emotions. –Will Smith