I’ve experienced a lot in the last thirty years. I’ve had
friends come and go, some of them suddenly and with no explanation. Some of
them more gradually but with apparent social media intent. I’ve had arguments
with some that have resulted in time spent not talking, only to return to each
other when the moment’s right. And then I’ve made purposeful changes with some
of them because they weren’t offering me anything of value. All of these
relationships I’ve learned from; and while some of these situations have left
me with the loss of certain friends or individuals that I once considered
close, I can’t say that I miss them.
I think that it’s difficult sometimes to miss something that
you never had. While sometimes I feel the end result is unfortunate, I can’t
claim that I’ve let go of decent people. I can’t say that I’ve moved on from
things that were of immense value. If I cut people out of my life, it was because
I outgrew them, because they were dishonest or disloyal, or because I was
putting way more into the relationship than I was getting. I think the
important thing about friendships is that they’re reciprocal. And if you find
that you’re putting in all the effort just to be deceived or gossiped about,
maybe it’s time to start distancing yourself. Maybe it’s time to find a better
way to spend your time.
But while there’s an entire buffet of behaviors that people
can partake in to label them as subpar friends, there is one in particular that
I want to focus on for the sake of this blog (and everyone’s precious time).
This particular brand of friend I have come to know and gradually start to love
a little less because they are really great at making you feel like a last
resort. I can’t say that they’re terrible people, that they go out of their way
to be hurtful and disheartening. It’s more accurately that you never hear from
them until they absolutely need you. You never hear from them until they’ve
alienated all their other friends and realized that you’re the only poor sap
who will return a half-assed text message. You never hear from them until
they’re single and finally starting to grasp that in the process of forming
their previous, now deteriorated relationship, they cast you aside until they
needed someone to pick them up. And if they happen to mend said relationship,
you won’t hear from them again until things fall apart.
I’m talking specifically about those people who only call
you when there is no one else. Those people who mysteriously seem to remember
your number when their asshole boyfriend dumps them. Those individuals that you
never hear from when they’re happy and things are great. I’m talking about the
people who only come around when the individuals they really want to spend time with have either bitched them out or lost
interest. My mother would always call these people “fair-weather friends” when
I was growing up and I guess that’s the most accurate terminology I can come up
with.
Fake friends are like
shadows: always near you at your brightest moments but nowhere to be seen at
your darkest hour. True friends are like stars: you don’t always see them but
they are always there. –Habeeb Akande
I’m not one of those people who has had oodles of trauma. I’ve
endured somethings, sure but overall, I’ve lived a fairly uneventful life.
Especially throughout my childhood and even more especially since I met my
husband. But the thing is, because I’m so trauma savvy and in tune with other
people’s feelings, I get myself hurt when these types of courtesies aren’t
reciprocated.
I adore listening to my friends vent. I love getting text
messages from my friends in crisis mode because I love that fact that I’m the
solid person they come to in order to talk them off a ledge. I take that role
very seriously and I’ve never been bothered by gossip, venting, or general
discussion about life and relationship problems. I’m a vault and I want to hear these things. I value the
trust my friends have in me and I think it’s awesome that they allow me to use
them as muses for my blogs. I will always, always be thankful for the
inspiration their unfortunate chaos provides me with and their willingness to
participate anonymously in my writing.
What I don’t like is when I’m in crisis and no one returns my text messages. What I don’t
appreciate is that when it’s my turn
to cry about my problems, I’m either talked over and disregarded because
clearly none of my issues were ever considered important. What I have an issue
with is when those fair-weather friends get back with their boyfriends or
resume the relationship with their deceitful best frenemy and I’m no longer on
their radar.
I have [more than you would think] friends who have done
this to me and to be fair, the majority of the culprits have been male. This
isn’t to say that there hasn’t been a fair share of ladies who have acted so
selfishly; it just doesn’t seem to be as frequent of an occurrence. Maybe it’s
because women are generally more thoughtful than men but who can say?
I had this one male friend that I had been close with for
years. We had basically grown up together and had even tried a stint at dating
a few times. But we were young and full of anxiety and braces so none of it
really worked out. Through it all, however, we maintained what I thought was a
great friendship.
We sat together at lunch and pretended to study together in
the library. I would go to his baseball games and little after parties and
cheer him on every time he was up to bat. I made friends with most of his
friends because it turned out that we all had things in common. He even drove
me to the mall one Black Friday because I just had to partake in all the things I thought were sales. He helped me
carry around my bags and listened to me whine about my catty girlfriends. I was
friends with his parents (who were divorced and living in different, nearby
cities) and his brothers (who were both younger than him), and he was at my
house almost more than I was. We went to all of each other’s birthday parties
and knew all of each other’s favorite things. (Mine at the time were anything
George Clooney or Tinkerbell.)
I guess you could label us as “best friends” but over time,
things started to change. As we started to get older and develop as young
adults, I started to feel like our friendship took a backseat. And honestly, it
was never on my end. To this day, if he called me and said he needed something,
I would probably drop whatever I was doing to help because that’s the kind of
friend I am. That’s how much I care about people I deem as friends. But with
him, things started to change.
I think it had a lot to do with his rampant search for a
girlfriend. From where I sat, it seemed like he was borderline obsessed with
getting a girlfriend and in all honesty, he seemed to have no standards for the
girl he chose. That probably sounds really snarky but I’ve got to tell you,
it’s insanely accurate.
He would sort of bounce from girl to girl, as they became
available and paid attention to him. And when this happened, he suddenly forgot
about his little friend Katie that used to cheer him on at all his games. He
forgot about the girl he taught how to golf and decided that the only time she
was worthy of his attention was when one of his two-bit girlfriends finally
came to her senses and dumped him. When he realized that I was the only real
steady female in his life, he would keep coming back. And every time I welcomed
him with open arms because I wasn’t jealous; we were friends and he was obviously trying to find himself in
these Port Richey hookers. I couldn’t blame him for wanting a relationship that
would ultimately take away from his social life and academic achievements. Who
was I to judge?
There are going to be
some people who at some point in your life will become your friends. And some
friends, who at some point, will become just people. –Chandra Kaushik
But as we got older, it just started to get worse. He ended
up getting in this pretty serious relationship with this bratty, teenaged
former Barbizon model and once their relationship was official, I never really
saw or heard from him. I would wager to guess, based on what I know now, that
she probably forbade him from communicating with me because she felt like I was
a threat. Regardless of whatever happened, I never heard from him until one
day, she broke up with him.
I don’t even know what the argument was about anymore but
because I was so naïve, I was under the impression that I had gotten my friend
back. But truth be told, our relationship never went back to the way it was
after his crazy, chaotic relationship with her.
They obviously ended up getting back together multiple times
and eventually, they even got engaged and rented an apartment together. An
apartment that I, in a desperate attempt to get out of the apartment I was
living in that was about to be re-rented, ended up moving into as well. What I
thought was two friends helping each other out (their rent went down and I
wouldn’t be homeless) turned out to be me incessantly inconveniencing them. All
of a sudden, I was either invading their space (it was a two-bedroom apartment
so I never understood this) or acting anti-social. Soon my coffee pot was
making my roommate’s miserable fiancé “nauseous” and he asked if I could just
take the coffee pot with me to work instead. “You’re the only one that drinks
it,” he shrugged.
Not long after that, a bunch of my garments and expensive
shoes began to disappear and eventually a two karat diamond pendant that my
ex-boyfriend had given me. My “best friend” was now telling me that I needed to
calm down because his wretched fiancé wasn’t trying to “steal” my Steve Madden
polka dot pumps; she was just “looking to see what size shoe I wore for a
Christmas present”. (A Christmas present that I obviously never received and a pair of shoes that I caught her
wearing in their digital picture frame. A picture is worth a thousand words,
you miserable sass bucket.) My “best friend” was now claiming that his awful,
incessantly scowling betrothed was just trying to get inside of my brain and be
friends with me because I was “so antisocial”. He alleged that she wanted to be
friends. But I knew better from the very beginning. That trick was scandalous
and every time I think about her now, I subconsciously grind my teeth.
Eventually, after all their fights and drama (of which there
was plenty), they finally broke up.
And honestly, when I heard about it, I about cheered. It just never hit me
until way later that after I had moved out and we weren’t forced to talk to each
other somewhat regularly, I never heard a peep from this supposed “best friend”
until he dumped that miserable piece. But suddenly, once he was free of her
deep sunken claws, he quickly found my phone number.
It wasn’t long after that that he began seeing a pseudo
version of his last mess of a girlfriend. This woman was slightly more approachable but she still had this constant
attitude. He ended up getting this one pregnant and because I think they had
legitimate problems, they ended up calling off their relationship. They had
worked out some sort of [allegedly] friendly custody agreement and once again,
he texted me nearly every day he was free.
Sometimes it was because he had his son and was bored of
sitting around the house. Sometimes it was because he didn’t have his son and he was bored of sitting around the house.
Sometimes it was because he was short on this bill or that, he needed formula
for the baby, or the child’s mother had bled him dry with child support.
Each and every time I fell into the trap. I was in a better
financial position than him, so I would always run him some money the moment he
called. I couldn’t let his child starve, could I? Sometimes I would meet him at
the Chili’s near where we lived and buy him lunch because he was broke and just
needed to vent. I wouldn’t hear from him for actual months and when he texted
me for something, I would drop what I was doing because I always thought we
were “best friends”.
Little did I know, he was apparently having this on and off
relationship with his child’s mother and he would only talk to me when they weren’t together. I figured this out one
day because my husband and I had gone to that same Chili’s that we would always
go to. Of course my “best friend”, that I hadn’t heard from since his reconciliation
with his baby momma, was there with his kid and a few other people. I ran up
and said hi to his son and sort of awkwardly tapped him on the shoulder because
I hadn’t seen him in so long. I didn’t realize that up ahead a couple of feet
was his on-and-off again girlfriend/baby vessel. She literally just turned
around to face me and sneered. My “best friend”, the guy who knew he could
always count on me in his time of need, the man who I had just recently loaned
a decent amount of money to (that I never got back but that’s not important),
the man who I had literally grown up with and been “friends” with for years
looked at me like he didn’t even know me. He barely said hello to me.
He didn’t introduce me to his scowling baby momma, he didn’t
shake my husband’s hand, he didn’t even act like he had ever seen me before.
That was the last time I saw him in person. But he would hit
me up occasionally after that to ask for more money or to hang out because he
didn’t have a girlfriend to spend time with. He’s now allegedly happily married
(to someone completely different) and living a life free of his former “best
friend”. At least that’s what I’ve seen on Facebook.
Since he’s formerly taken now, I obviously won’t be hearing
from him.
Buy a dog a gift and
you’ll be amazed at the way it will dance and swerve its tail. But if you don’t
have anything to offer it, it won’t even recognize your arrival; such are the
attributes of fake friends. –Michael Bassey Johnson
Now listen, friends. I’m not a total idiot. I realize that
when people get into relationships, they tend to sort of taper off from their
other, “less fundamental” relationships. It’s normal; it’s what should happen
when you’re in a relationship with someone that you genuinely care about. But
that isn’t what this guy did. He would maintain that we were “besties” when it
was convenient for him, when he was single and had literally alienated all of
his other friends. I was perfect company when he was broken up from his
irrational baby momma and he needed gas to get to work. But when I see him out
in public or text him on my own accord, he can’t be bothered? That just doesn’t
seem like a genuine friendship to me.
Maybe he felt that our friendship was so strong that we
didn’t have to keep in constant contact. And honestly, I do have some friends like that. But I’m telling you, when I saw him
that day at Chili’s, it was like he had never seen me before in his life. He
didn’t want to know me, he didn’t want to say hello to me, and honestly if I
hadn’t made such an effort to say hi to his son, he probably would have avoided
me all together. I just don’t understand how one day I could be that important,
and then the next it’s like, he can’t even be bothered to introduce me to his
girlfriend that’s standing three feet away from him. The whole situation was
just so awkward and quite frankly, something I never want to experience again.
I must have looked like such an idiot.
Or maybe an escaped mental patient.
Moral of the Crazy:
One of my co-workers endured a similar experience and when she asked me what my
blog was about this week, her eyes actually lit up. She told me this story
about a friend of hers who pulled something similar on her. They had started
out as fast friends, hanging out all the time and engaging in social outings.
They had things in common and had maintained a friendship for a few years
before things started to change.
Soon this woman met someone and ultimately decided to get
married. (My co-worker’s theory is that she had a fear of being alone.) She had
been discussing with my co-worker all of the wedding plans and this obviously
led my co-worker to believe that she would be included on at least some of it.
Well after some of the wedding planning was underway, my co-worker’s friend and
her soon-to-be husband went away on some vacation and came back married. “We
eloped!” she exclaimed excitedly to my co-worker, who just sort of sat there
confused.
Maybe it was that this woman wanted to keep everyone’s
opinions out of her decision to elope. Maybe it was that the stress of the
wedding was getting to her and she just wanted to get married and be done with
it. Maybe it was that the decision was spontaneous and they didn’t have the
time to tell anyone. Whatever the reason, the strangest part was that she still
had a wedding after all of this. Yes, they had eloped but the wedding went on
as scheduled.
What’s even crazier is although my co-worker had been left
out of the decision to elope, she had temporarily forgotten about it because
she was asked to assist with some things for the wedding. She had helped them
set up and assisted with other ancillary details because hey, they were
friends. She wanted to be involved in her friend’s wedding. Who wouldn’t be?
Well the crazy part isn’t this woman’s decision to use my
co-worker as a set-up and break-down crew. It’s the fact that after all of
this, after the mystery decision to elope and then the back peddled decision to
still hold the wedding as planned, after expressing an interest in my co-worker
as someone to help and be involved with the wedding, she wasn’t even invited.
When my co-worker was telling me this story, I sort of found
it strange that her friend would keep her on the line like that, just to not
invite her to the wedding. It just seemed sort of cruel; I mean, I know people
change and sometimes drop you when they get into relationships that they think
are important, but that just seemed like a lot of roundabout work to
intentionally hurt someone’s feelings… I guess I had better things to do when I
was planning my wedding.
I guess I just can’t understand the whole hot and cold thing
with this brand of friendships. I mean, the whole idea behind a friendship is
that they are a support to you. They are supposed to be there for you through
thick and thin. They are supposed to always
be there, not drop you the moment they meet someone. I mean, I just don’t
understand that. How is that a friendship? Someone who just uses you for
company (and other things) until they find their preferable mate is not someone
who genuinely cares about you.
It’s like the meme with a picture of Britney Spears and
Beyonce: “If you can’t handle me at my Britney, you don’t deserve me at my
Beyonce.” I guess it’s just that I want that sincere support from the people I
call my friends. I don’t want them to only call me when they’re single and
super lonely. I don’t want them to only call me when they have a fight with
their boyfriend and need a place to sleep. I don’t want them to only call me
because at the end of the day, all their smart friends told them to get lost
because they’re exhausted of being neglected when their friends aren’t in
crisis mode.
I mean, to be honest, some of the people I know seem to
support Hillary Clinton more than they support their own friends. Seriously, think
about it: they leave work early to vote in order to ensure that their voice is heard
#forher, they take the time to read articles exonerating her and allegedly
clearing her name, they get in public Facebook arguments with people they’ve
been friends with for years because they feel it’s their job to defend her, and
they share cute little memes disintegrating Donald Trump because he picked on
Hillary on the playground. People are literally more loyal to their proverbial
Commander in Chief than they are their own friends, their own people. It just
seems ludicrous doesn’t it? (And probably a pretty big reason why the world is
the way it is now. There is no
loyalty to anyone anymore. I don’t
understand it and it’s absolutely not the way I was raised but it is what it
is.) It just doesn’t seem fair.
I guess I would just like an explanation for all of this. I
don’t understand how you just “forget” people who are important to you and move
on from them simply because you’re in a relationship. Sure, there’s going to be
a natural, small rift and you probably won’t see them as much as you once did.
But dropping off the face of the planet until you need money? Come on; don’t
take advantage of my kind nature. I’m only going to allow that shit so long.
I’ve often thought that maybe it’s a respect thing. Like
maybe with this particular friend, he felt it was disrespectful to maintain a
friendship with another woman while he was in a relationship. Maybe he felt
like it would lead to his girlfriend/wife feeling threatened (although there
would never be a reason for that, I can understand that point of view). Maybe
he felt like I would just understand that he would fall away when he got into a
steady relationship but quite frankly, I don’t. I think it’s nonsense. As long
as the relationship is appropriate, there’s no reason that men and women can’t
be friends. And that day that he pretended not to know me? I was with my husband. I couldn’t have been that much of a threat…
It’s just that in light of everything, in light of the
election and the way people are just so disgruntled about the way things have
turned out, the way that people feel wronged and duped by the “idiot voters”
who didn’t vote the way “they should have”, I feel like this is the perfect
time for this blog. It’s pretty clear that a lot of us just don’t know how to
treat each other. We take advantage of our friends, we cheat on our significant
others, and we drop our friends despite the fact that they’ve always been there
for us. I think we could all benefit from learning how to take better care of
each other.
So tonight, after you’ve read this, text a friend of yours
that you hold at high value. Tell them you love them and that even though it’s
been a really long time since you’ve seen them, they’re never far from your
heart. Tell them that although you’ve allowed life to get in the way as of
late, they’re still one of your favorite people. You’re still just a text away
if ever they should feel the urge, if ever they should need you.
Sometimes a few pretty words go a long way.
This is what happens.
You tell your friends your most personal secrets and they use them against you.
–Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic Ties the
Knot
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