Time again for Romance Solves All Your Problems, except for that one with the thing that you didn’t tell your doctor about, naughty naughty.
Today’s letter is about friendship. Sort of.
I have this friend I’ve known for seven years. She’s unemployed and uninspired to find a job because she can mooch off of everyone, including me. So she spends her time blogging about her latest month-long boyfriend and telling the world how much she loves him, until he tells her he wants to spend time with his friends without her because she monopolizes his attention.
She gets pissed off and threatens to leave him and tells the whole wide internet what an asshole he is—and people agree with her and say that if they lived near her they would burn his house down. I am the lone reader who tells her she’s being irrational and selfish and The Boy Needs Friends. Big mistake. I’m attacked by her and her house-burning readers, because True Friends always have your back and agree with you no matter what. They don’t pull that Dan Savage crap, because that’s mean and cruel and if I don’t want to hear about what a jerk the boyfriend is and if all I have to say is mean mean mean then maybe we shouldn’t be friends because I just don’t appreciate her!!!
So now we’re no longer e-friends and I’m banned from responding. I could easily call or go to her house, but that would make the passive-aggressive a little Edward Cullen stalkery for my taste. Am I really that bad a friend for telling her she’s acting like a psycho bitch girlfriend with a boy she’s only been nailing for a month? If seven years of friendship can be washed down the drain because of a fight over a passive-aggressive blog post, should I just quite while I’m ahead and DTMFA? What would Secondary Character BFF do?
Now Relegated To Former-Friend Tertiary Character
So let me make sure I have this right: she mooches off of you and her other friends, she has an active blog life with many fangirls supporting her every move, and men don’t really stick with her because she expects the same attention from them as her fangirls give her.
You disagreed with her, presumably on her blog, and she’s banned you from commenting and you are no longer, as you put it, “e-friends.” You, and I say this gently, are a heroine I’d like to grab by the shoulders and shake a bit, and then offer a very strong cocktail.
This person is not your friend. Full stop. Friendship isn’t about worship, admiration, or blind support, and though calling her out in public on her site was an antagonistic thing to do, one would think seven years of real friendship would withstand that.
As far as calling or going to her house, if your friendship has existed mainly on the internet, that seems way out of bounds. Moreover, what would doing so accomplish? You want to repair your friendship with this person? What on earth for?
Every now and again you’ll see a heroine in a book who realizes her friends aren’t really her friends. Maybe they’re people she hangs out with out of habit, even though she doesn’t have much in common with them anymore, or maybe she realizes she’s grown up and they haven’t. Whatever the reason, friendships are not permanent entities, and her happy ending requires some new friends.
The internet can make people seem much bigger in their own minds than they really are. While she may be casting herself as the heroine of her own drama, emphasis on drama, this girl is not behaving like a heroine. I certainly wouldn’t want to read a romance about her.
Therefore you are not the secondary character. I’d argue you weren’t really her friend, bff, e- or otherwise because real friends can be honest with each other, and can weather fights without needing an army of readers to soothe the ego. Moreover, real friendships are more than just whether or not you can comment on someone’s site.
It is well past time for you to be the heroine and jettison this person who isn’t your friend in favor of people who are.
I always wonder what past-life karma brought forth a soul-sucker into a relationship.
Consider this your Amityville Horror Hint + 1/2; as Eddie Murphy once said: The ghost telling you to “Get. Out.”
Be smart and just tip out the door.
Now you can breathe again… Look Ma, no garlic.
😀
I think Robin’s comments are particularly insightful—I have a “draining” friend who doesn’t rise to the level of emotional vampirism but it causes issues nonetheless (unending weepy 3 am phone calls, canceled vacations, etc.). She has true psychological issues (borderline personality disorder and depression) and so on some level her life just IS an unending series of catastrophes. Still, I don’t mind being the one person who *doesn’t* cut her off—I think it is important for everyone to have someone who will never, ever give up on them (you know, the person who sends you care packages in prison and would cut a b*tch for you!). For me and probably for most it’s my mom, but she doesn’t have that sort of mom.
That said, it’s worth it to me to do this for her because she’s kind, brilliant, utterly hilarious, creative, adventurous, and when not wrapped up in her own drama to the point of paralysis, very supportive of me. With any relationship I think you just need to be aware and be making active decisions about what you are getting out vs. what you are putting in rather than merely reacting. If my friend doesn’t experience some emotional growth and healing eventually it may be hard to keep supporting her—we’ll see how it goes. For now I love her enough to be very patient.
I guess I’m a lonely voice of (slight) dissent for sticking with people when they’re behaving badly (at least up to a point). My boyfriend’s mother was in an abusive relationship when he was a teenager, and as he recalls the vast majority of her female friends “dumped” her because she kept going back to the abuser and they just couldn’t deal with her “stupidity” and the “drama she was creating.” Having no support system made it really hard for her to ultimately leave him and she still remembers it as the most hurtful experience of her life.
All that said, in this case after 7 years of mooching and the silent treatment over a blogwar, it may be time to call it quits. =P
How is it that through all these threads we don’t talk about our own part in these dramas? I mean, no one is holding a gun to our head and demanding we stay in these relationships, are they? I have had my share of friends who demand more than they give, and as long as I complied, I was resentful and blamed them. Now that I am older and wiser, I know that these people were in my life by my choice, and they were there to help me learn how to say no and how to set boundaries.
The thing is, we are ALL the star of our own life. While we play supporting roles in each other’s stories, we take the lead role in our own story. So saying someone is a drama queen misses the point that we are all drama queens – it’s part of human nature to like drama. Some people like more than others. We have the power to say how much drama we’ll be involved in, and what that will look like.
I would hate to think any of us are powerless to say no to an imbalanced relationship. It’s part of our journey toward maturity. No one is to blame. We just rewrite our story.