Breakin Up Is Hard To Do

Over the years, there have been friends who have fallen by the wayside. Everyone has them – people you knew and were a huge part of your life that faded away as your life changed. It is not a bad thing, but a natural progression. I remember the anxiety of high school, which is a time of such fast growth, and realizing that the people who had been my friends for 2 years (which is practically forever then) were people that I did not quite identify with anymore. Arguments and drama ensued, but I have to say that most of those people I am still on good/friendly terms with. I have never had a real “break up” where bridges were burned completely. Even the girl who, literally, said I should be burned at the stake, is still one of my very best friends today. Things have a way of working out, especially if all parties involved can take a step back and realize that not all friends have to be in your business 24/7. You can still love and care for each other on a, dare I say, more convenient basis. I realize that has awful connotations, but let me explain...

I am blessed with wonderful friends who occasionally check in on me. They have busy lives. I have a busy life. I do not expect them to have ESP and magically know when I need them. If I need them, I get in touch with them. Similarly, if they need me, they do the same. It is, in a sense, convenient. Does our friendship have less meaning because they do not know my daily ongoings? No. In fact, I would say it is even stronger, because no matter the time or distance between meetings, everything falls back into place immediately. This is something I really really appreciate. It is basically like having brothers and sisters – that bond is not going to disappear.

I have other friends (also wonderful) that are part of my more daily life. They are people I work with, people I sing with, and people who live in close proximity. They are the people that I see on a more regular basis, that I might go to the movies with or go to a museum with. They are people to have game nights with or meet up for an event. I still do not require very much of them, and I do not expect them to require much of me. That is the beauty of good friendships – they are easy and care-free! I am not super offended if I am not invited somewhere, and I do not think they are offended if I do something without them. I try to spend time with everyone on a regular basis and am more up to date on what is going on with them. Some friends are closer to my heart than others, some know more than others, some would be classified as “good friends” and others closer to “acquaintances”. No big deal – just a lot of nice people to hang out with, who, again, I could count on in a pinch. My work friends are actually probably the closest of the bunch because they really get the full brunt of everything that happens to me. I would consider them good friends.

I guess I feel that I have a laid-back approach to friendships. Is that lazy? I am not sure. That is part of my question to you readers out there. What are your expectations of a friend? Does it depend on who the friend is? Does it depend on how you met? What happens when you have different expectations of how a friendship works?

The reason I wanted to write this post is because I have been watching the slow disintegration of a friendship that ultimately will result in the complete burning of a bridge. And, no, I am not the one with the lit torch and pitchfork. Though I would not have this bridge burned, there is not much I can do about it it seems, and as this is titled, breaking up is hard to do. It is particularly hard for me because I cannot really say that I have ever “lost” a friend. Mutually moved on, maybe. But those were high school friends and college friends who drifted away – no one that felt so negatively about me that they actively stopped being my friends in a hostile way.

Yet, that is what I am dealing with.

Honestly, I thought that this sort of behavior went by the wayside in junior high, but here I am at 30... and she is in her mid-30's! Yikes! Get a grip!

So maybe you are wondering what happened. I would love to recount it, but to be honest, I am not sure. She has tried to explain it to me (you know, back when we were still talking – about a year ago), but her mindset is so completely foreign to me that I could not make heads or tails of it. Here is what I think happened:

Her expectation of what a friend is and does is very different from mine. I am not a big fan of gabbing on the phone – we would basically talk all day at work anyway – and she was upset that I did not want to do that. I did not have much time to spend with her outside of work (I was taking 2 grad classes a semester for my masters, working at the hospital two weekends a month, planning a wedding, singing, taking aikido 3 days a week) and it upset her that I did not have time for her. She expected me to have ESP and ask about her family, although she was very secretive and did not like to give up details – yet she wanted me to drag stuff out of her. She does not like my husband, so if we were to spend time together, it had to be alone.

I called her my work spouse, and in a lot of ways, I spent so much time with her during the day and mentally (often emailing after work) that sometimes it felt like I was cheating on my husband! I remember one time I had stayed late after school playing a board game with her and was late to a planned family dinner because I lost track of time. I felt guilty, like I was with a lover! That was unacceptable to me, so I scaled it back. I think she realized it.

That covers most of the main points. I suppose I could go into the deep psychological aspect of all this. I used to worry myself sick (no, literally, I threw up one time) because I hated upsetting her and I hated all of this drama and angst. She is the master of really nasty emails, though she hates verbal confrontation.

My mom's solution was easy: ditch her. No one needs someone like that in their life.

But I didn't. I kept trying, I kept pushing. However, last school year, I realized that my life WAS way too busy. I quit the hospital. I quit aikido. I started my gluten & dairy free thing. This basically takes us to last fall/winter. I had a very stressful school year with over 200 kids and 3 preps. As a result, I was not working as closely with this friend because of some departmental changes and how much I had to do for my students.

As I focused more intently on work and on figuring out ways to reduce my stress, we talked less and less, checking in maybe once a week, if that. After a few months, it finally hit me: I am happier without this girl in my life. It meant not walking on eggshells all the time. I meant not worrying that she took something I said the wrong way. It meant that instead of using precious work hours to drag information out of her, I could focus on getting stuff done that was required of me.

But it was hard.

She sent me an extraordinarily nasty email on Christmas (of all days), which made me cry while I was trying to enjoy time with my family. I did not respond. We met up for a few hours at a Barnes and Noble and I told her, flat out, that I was sorry for not living up to her expectations. However, I also told her that a friendship takes two, and I knew that if I stopped pursuing her, she would not pursue me.

And here we are a year later, more or less literally, and I have almost put this friendship to permanent sleep.... but I still struggle.

What I predicted was exactly what happened - I stopped talking to her (not on purpose, but out of busy-ness) and she never attempted to contact me.

So it should be over, right?

The issue is that I continue to watch this girl, someone I still really care about, go down in flames. One of her best friends, someone she has treated horribly, but who has stuck by her through all of her attitude swings, is now not really in contact with her after a volley of several really awful email in which she accused him of things he did not do and called him a variety of names that were neither pleasant nor true. Due to this collision, she has quit a program that our group of friends here at work participate in together - really the last formal place where we got to hang out on a regular basis. Our department chair, another good friend of hers, is not really talking with her because she long gave up trying to sugar-coat things so that this girl would not get angry. And the final friend, the poor thing, is still holding on, but her cryptic nature and general nastiness is finally getting to the final friend as well. Recently, she told the two girls not to get her anything for Christmas or her birthday because “she does not need anything”... but it felt much more like a big f-you to those girls, and it really upset them.

So what am I to do? I have made peace (more or less) with the fact that my ex-friend has some legitimate mental issues going on. As I said, there is a lot of backstory psychologically about her childhood and things that I could go into. However, she is 35 years old. When do you stop acting like a 13 year old and take responsibility for your own actions? When do you gain the maturity to look past the fact that you were completely sheltered and had every whim catered to as a child, and realize that you are an adult. She is so completely miserable with herself, but she blames the world for it because she has never had the strength to change her life.

Last week, she stopped by to the one friend who is still hanging on, telling her that I “will do the same thing to her” - referring to me! What? Wait, what did I do? I stopped letting you drag me down into your crazy mental spiral of destruction? Sorry, that seems like a good thing to me. Let me mention again that life is much sunnier without your teenage angst.

Again, to the point of this blog... what am I to do? She is saying nasty things about me behind my back, but that does not bother me too much. She can think what she wants. The bigger issue here is that this IS someone I still care about, even if she does not want to be my friend, and I am not sure what my obligation is to try to help her. I am not sure I CAN help her. But is it not a friend's duty to tell another friend when they are being an idiot? It is so clear to see that she is pushing all of us away and blaming us for it. Maybe if it was just one person, maybe if it were just me, then I would be more concerned that it WAS my fault. But when you see her push away 4 people who have done nothing but put up with her bs for the past 5 years.... at some point you have to think maybe it is not US, but HER.

I do not really care if our friendship picks back up again. It would be nice to be friends, but right now I am just concerned for her mental well-being. She really has problems that need addressing. I am concerned for our other friends who still really care about maintaining a friendship. It destroys my friends when this girl is so mean to them, and I am angry that they are being treated that way.

So what do I do? If you see someone trip on the sidewalk, don't you help them up? Or do you stand there and watch?