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Lake house dust-up roils friendship
Dear Amy: Recently, I went to join my two closest friends and their husbands at "Betsy's" lake house. I arrived early. My friends had gone into town.
Betsy's husband was sitting outside, and I walked down and said hello, but he didn't knowledge me. So I asked him, "Do you want to be alone? Should I come back later?" He said yes, and I left in tears and drove the two hours back home. He was so rude and unkind, and I felt so unwelcome.
I texted Betsy that I was heading home and told her what had occurred.
She said she dislikes the way he treats me, but didn't want to end her marriage. They've been married for 10 years and she and I have been friends for 20.
We have gone on family vacations and have had many holidays together. I consider her my family.
I have always excused his behavior as him being socially awkward. I've never reacted or taken it personally until now.
I'm at a loss. He texted a half-hearted apology days later, but I'm fairly certain it was under pressure from his wife.
Even if my friend was willing to have us in the same space again, I don't know how I would not take his occasional rudeness and shortness with me personally. It IS personal.
I don't want to lose Betsy, or to miss out on our family trips and holidays.
What now?
-- Bereft
Dear Bereft: "Betsy" seems to believe that she needs to choose between you and her husband, and I assume you hope this is not the case, because adults should have the freedom to maintain whatever healthy friendships they possess without their partner's participation. However, are you boxing her in?
I would urge you to consider and accept that the guy just doesn't like you -- and unless you can take responsibility for a specific incident or attitude that might have contributed to this dynamic ... so what? It's on him. (If I refused to be in the company of people who don't like me, I'd never leave the house.)
Leaving the scene in tears demonstrates a level of sensitivity toward this man's behavior that he probably doesn't deserve.
The ability to be in peaceful proximity to people who don't like us is one mark of mature adulthood. It is something for you to work on.
https://www.arcamax.com/healthandspirit/lifeadvice/askamy/s-2282475?fs
Betsy's husband was sitting outside, and I walked down and said hello, but he didn't knowledge me. So I asked him, "Do you want to be alone? Should I come back later?" He said yes, and I left in tears and drove the two hours back home. He was so rude and unkind, and I felt so unwelcome.
I texted Betsy that I was heading home and told her what had occurred.
She said she dislikes the way he treats me, but didn't want to end her marriage. They've been married for 10 years and she and I have been friends for 20.
We have gone on family vacations and have had many holidays together. I consider her my family.
I have always excused his behavior as him being socially awkward. I've never reacted or taken it personally until now.
I'm at a loss. He texted a half-hearted apology days later, but I'm fairly certain it was under pressure from his wife.
Even if my friend was willing to have us in the same space again, I don't know how I would not take his occasional rudeness and shortness with me personally. It IS personal.
I don't want to lose Betsy, or to miss out on our family trips and holidays.
What now?
-- Bereft
Dear Bereft: "Betsy" seems to believe that she needs to choose between you and her husband, and I assume you hope this is not the case, because adults should have the freedom to maintain whatever healthy friendships they possess without their partner's participation. However, are you boxing her in?
I would urge you to consider and accept that the guy just doesn't like you -- and unless you can take responsibility for a specific incident or attitude that might have contributed to this dynamic ... so what? It's on him. (If I refused to be in the company of people who don't like me, I'd never leave the house.)
Leaving the scene in tears demonstrates a level of sensitivity toward this man's behavior that he probably doesn't deserve.
The ability to be in peaceful proximity to people who don't like us is one mark of mature adulthood. It is something for you to work on.
https://www.arcamax.com/healthandspirit/lifeadvice/askamy/s-2282475?fs
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Also, he's put up with you tagging along to his family vacations and holidays for the past 10 years, so... yeah. He's spent more time with you over the past decade than most married people spend with their siblings and parents. How much more welcome can you even be!?
And then he even apologized to you for your unwarranted tantrum. You don't deserve such a good friend as Betsy, that's for sure, and if you make her choose between him and you, she's damn well not going to divorce to please the drama queen.
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Like, there are two possibilities if we take the LW at face value:
a.) he's breathtakingly socially awkward and hasn't bothered to learn basic courtesy in the last ten years
b.) he's breathtakingly passive-aggressive and apparently has been keeping this up for 10 years
She's been dealing with this bullshit for ten years. If I'd been dealing with that from my BFF's husband for ten years--well, I wouldn't, I would have broken in under two years.
The LW isn't appearing from the ether for these trips/holidays/etc; she's being invited, presumably by BFF Betsy who wants her there. If the BFF Husband sees the LW too much/doesn't want her there/doesn't like her, he can use his words with his wife and ask her to invite the LW less often. He could use his words and ask the LW himself to not come on this one for [insert reasons].
His solution to the problem, however, seems to be 'freeze her out until she goes away forever', which is a dick move period. I'm not even sure 'making her leave' is the goal anymore; after this long, it just sounds like he's having fun fucking with her head.
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I just feel like something is missing from the story. Otherwise, it seems like an overdramatic reaction, or she's left out the husband's actual words, that might a) have an explanation for why she left, or b) rudeness actually strong enough to drive one away from a planned vacation.
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ETA: "I don't want to lose Betsy, or to miss out on our family trips and holidays." Yes, that's the rub. You can choose to miss out on the family trips and holidays. It sounds like they aren't your family, and you are getting involved in somebody else's family trips and holidays; you described them as "your two closest friends and their husbands." If what you mean is "my two closest friends are my family of choice," that's totally fine. Then you and your two closest friends should plan outings. Go to Vegas together! Go leaf-peeping! Stay in and have a poker night! Invent outings for your family of choice! But you don't get to join in on Betsy's family trips all the time, just because you've always been invited in the past.
I'm sensitive to this because I've seen this exact dynamic. Heck, I've been this exact dynamic. I got in the habit of being invited to a friend's annual family event. Over the years, I started to see that the family was choosing to focus their attention on a smaller and closer circle. It was sad, but I stepped back, without waiting to be formally uninvited. It's nice to be welcomed into somebody else's family, but sometimes they just want to be with each other, and that's their right and totally fine. It's sad for you, but it doesn't change reality.
And thinking you have more of a right to be around because you have known your friend longer than their husband has means that you are probably not paying attention to that kind of dynamic, and not open to being asked to step back a little.
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She has been friends with Betsy for 20 years, and I assume the other friendship is also of long standing if they are all going on trips and doing holidays together. With the friends' husbands, who probably didn't know they were marrying LW as well.
She is insecure and brittle in the friendships. She wants and expects, even demands, that everything to be frictionless and perfect. I suspect that Betsy's marriage meant that Betsy was no longer available as a (primary?) source of intense emotional support for the letter writer, because Betsy now has a husband.
We see here a very self-centered LW, one who wants her friends to center her emotional needs in their lives, and one who has not accepted that the friends have developed closer relationships to prioritize. When she writes "our family trips and holidays" she means the two women friends and herself, with the spouses as adjuncts. But those spousal relationships are now the core for her friends, not their relationships with the LW and each other.
This out-of-the-blue sounding "doesn't want to end her marriage" is where I think the iceberg tip of the extreme inappropriateness of the LW's behavior protrudes. How is this subject ever being raised, unless LW is actively pushing a narrative in which Betsy's husband is a brute? How is LW entitled to sign herself "Bereft"---bereaved---because Betsy got married and moved into a new phase of her adult life and her husband doesn't want to spend his downtime with his wife's needy friend? "Bereft" because she went home in a huff instead of amusing herself by doing any of an enormous list of things involving not forcing herself on someone who wanted to be alone?
Flouncing from the lake house because she asked someone if he wanted to be left alone and he said yes is a toxic overreaction. Clearly she expected him to set aside his need to be alone to welcome her and engage with her, and she thought her question was a pro-forma courtesy!* I do not think LW is likely to admit she is pushing herself into her friends' marriages and family life, and if she were told she needs to do some introspection and perspective work on herself she would probably dissolve in tears about how she just likes her friends so much.
A good outcome here for Betsy, the other friend, and their husbands really would be less time spent with LW. LW needs to adjust to her outside-the-inner-family-circle status and become more independent, emotionally and socially. LW might benefit from guidance from a counselor or therapist, but first she would need to admit that there is a problem and that the problem is her.
*Is this Midwestern? It seems Midwestern.
[As a side note, framing the two-hour drive being an enormous distance by calling it out seems odd to me, it isn't a long distance or an exceptional drive to me by the standards of any of the places I've lived.]
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Not in my experience. Every place I've lived, people ask questions that aren't really questions, but part of social ritual (the most famous being, "How're you doing?"). It was certainly an odd question for the LW to ask, and I honestly don't understand why she didn't go straight to her friends in town, but that's about her, not about where she lives.
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The husband may or may not be rude here, depending on details we don't have, but I find it very hard to read "someone was sitting outside looking at the lake, I asked them if they wanted to be alone out there, they said yes, so I immediately drove two hours in the other direction, in tears" as... any kind of reasonable reaction to the information we have here.
Maybe he was deliberately rude and it's part of a long pattern of rudeness to her. Maybe he is the sort of person for whom that's a teasing expression of affection, and thought the had that kind of relationship with her. Maybe the reason he stayed at the cabin when the others went out is that he really really needed some silence by the lake, and he'd talked to the others about how much he needed to be alone this weekend, and thought Betsey had already talked to them and knew this. Maybe he had a migraine. And there's no evidence he meant he didn't want her at the cabin, anyway - he was sitting outside, it seems reasonable to me that he read the question as "do you want company outside or should we just go in and unpack."
IDK, I can't imagine being in any group of friends that was close enough to go on 'family' vacations where "Yes, I want to be alone for a bit" is reasonable justification for someone else storming out, but then I make friends with introverts and neurodiverse people.
My guess based on really inadequate information here is that Betsey is the last of her friends to be single and is feeling very left-out by her singleness and is handling that very badly and has been for awhile, but idk. This is quite a letter.
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Arriving at a place that is a distance away and not having your hello returned sucks. It's just common courtesy to at least wave back if you're not feeling verbal and return a greeting. I can see why it affected the LW badly no matter what the background is. I wouldn't blame someone for crying and feeling alienated and leaving--telling them they are being over sensitive like the adviser here, whatever their issues is frankly borderline abusive. The online dubbing of leaving as "floucing" can be overdone--it is not equal to a tantrum. People feel what they feel, and leaving is better than staying and throwing an actual tantrum and throwing abuse around.
It's one thing to act civil with people who don't like you--it's another to put up with their being rude to you. I don't think taking that in stride is a sign of adulthood--it's a sign of acquiescing to abuse. It's bad behavior to receive in the work place--it's worse in your chosen circle of friends/family.
There's a ton of missing info--I don't know whether LW said something to invoke the nonsequitur of Betsy saying she won't leave her husband or if it came from Betsey--without knowing that, how can you blame the LW for making Betsy choose between them? Maybe it's Betsy blowing things out of proportion. As far as we can tell this is the first time the LW has brought the problem up to Betsy, and through her the husband. So I'd say, it's good LW has finally pointed out her problem with the husband's behavior to Betsy and that Betsy has been noticing he's been a jerk to her--its confirmation of what LW is experiencing. It's all in the open now--good!!! This is good.
There's no info on why he's being a jerk--I don't see why the adviser has jumped to the conclusion he dislikes her--there are lots of possible reasons people are rude to others. He made an apology. The next move is to see how he acts toward her now and if he makes efforts to not be a rude jerk. But right now, all she can do is wait and see if he changes behavior now that he has been called on it, and carry on her friendships. LW did the right thing. Waiting is hard, but hopefully progress will go in a good direction for everyone now. This would have been the kind response to the LW, not knowing any more about the situation to go on.
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There is some of that transactional fallacy, too: one's spouse's or partner's friends are not automatically one's own friends. Even after ten years.
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In light of this, expectations of what the LW needs to do and think to be worthy of the time and attention of this group of heterosexual couples is ill-founded. Even if the worst possible thing a female human can be is demanding and high-maintenance, perhaps there is a greater problem with Betsy's husband treating her friend poorly, and that this is something they need to work out without exiling the LW from lake house gatherings.
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Answering a question honestly and concisely doesn't fit as rudeness to me, even if the answer isn't something that I want to hear. Without more examples of poor behavior on the husband's part, all I see is a letter writer who wildly overreacted and then tried to create problems between Betsy and her husband.
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>>>Betsy's husband was sitting outside, and I walked down and said hello, but he didn't knowledge me. So I asked him, "Do you want to be alone? Should I come back later?" He said yes, <<<<
Why on earth did she ask the question? Did it ever occur to her that just possibly he was telling her the exact truth? That maybe he actually DID want to be alone, and it was none of her business why? I can certainly see why she annoys the man.
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There is a lot of context the LW didn't give us. I do still think this incident is a straw/camel sort of situation, in which one small-looking thing from the outside is actually the point at which a larger pattern of behavior becomes wholesale intolerable.
Also, Betsy's husband reminds me uncannily the person I called my nemesis from the ob I called "the hell job".
She made it abundantly clear through her actions that she held me in utter contempt, while maintaining a sweet momly midwestern facade. From my second day forward, she never returned my hello in the mornings (she spontaneously greeted others in the same desk-bank daily). She spoke to me shortly, in a tone that conveyed exactly how stupid she thought I was for asking. Every day, during my lunch break away from the office (but never in my presence), she looked over my work and wrote up up an excessively nitpicky list of things I'd done wrong and/or should have asked about. Once I had not caught the first name of our supervisor, and asked where "Rob" (his name was Rod) sat so I could ask him a question--she snapped off "I don't know who that is, no one named Rob works here."
At one point I asked her whether the mistakes I was making were commensurate with my experience--and she thought about it a minute and said that I was doing well.
I cried every day after work. Sometimes for two or three hours, sometimes starting from the moment I got into the elevator, because she deliberately made me feel stupid, worthless, and useless.
After 10 weeks freelancing, they offered me a full time position, which I desperately needed at the time. I turned them down, because I could not fathom sitting next to this passive aggressive bitch for one single day longer.
For the next year and a half I jumped into hyper-vigilance every time I heard an email tone. It seriously hindered my ability to find full time work in that time.
If she had been married to my best friend for ten years--I don't even know what I would do. My best friend and I consider each other family--she's the closest thing to a sister I've ever had, or will probably ever have. I do not know what it would do to me if she dated, stayed with, and then married a person who treated me the same way my nemesis did--the way I suspect Betsy's husband has been treating the LW for over 10 years.
I would certainly, and I think rightly, feel hurt about it.
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(Seriously though, she was the most heinously passive aggressive bitch I have ever encountered, and I was raised by the queen of the silent treatment.)
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LW said this guy is treating her badly and her friend confirmed it. I believe her, even if she's being emotional about it. I'll accept the drama from someone who has been treated badly. I'm not going to tell her to buck up.
And that's what this all comes down to.
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Let's say this is exactly how it went down. It certainly doesn't look like LW is exaggerating details here to make him look worse. What exactly did he do wrong? Was he supposed to lie and say he wanted her company when he didn't? How exactly was that going to help anything?
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I know I feel lousy when I say hello to someone who I know heard me and they don't respond or acknowledge me--a nod or even just a finger in the air suggesting they are chasing a thought and can't talk right now can suffice. So he's slighting her. It's got to be even lousier when it's someone in your core friend group. It's normal behavior for a teenager, especially if they're your kid, but adults are supposed to be beyond that crap. Of course, someone might be lost in thought and not hear your hello, but LW verified that he did indeed hear her when she then asked the question and he answered it.
The honesty of the answer didn't matter as much as the verification that he had in fact heard her when she said "hello" and chose not to return a greeting or deem her worth acknowledging, and further affirmed he wanted her to just go away. I don't know how she came up with that question, but for reasons she did not disclose, she must have known that was a question that would elicit an answer from him and verify that he did hear her when she greeted him.
How hard would it have been for him to say something like, "Hi! Please excuse me right now--I need some time to myself--go make your self comfortable." She hasn't come upon him unexpectedly at home or by accident at a coffee shop where he expected to be alone--this is a vacation gathering place that he is one of the hosts of and he knew she was going to be arriving at some point. He obviously doesn't think she deserves his greeting and is beneath his acknowledgment for some reason unknown and that's a pretty lousy put down of someone in a gathering of friends.
I also agree with the commenters here who suspect this incident was the straw that broke the camel's back for LW after 10 years of making excuses for him and probably having a harder and harder time not taking it personally as his slights became more obvious. Maybe her original letter had a whole list of rude incidents and the editor chopped it. A bad editorial chopping would account for the odd jumps and sparseness in this letter; either that or the LW is not great at storytelling.
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And I realized this may be the same Amy who is often on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" Not one of my favorite participants, but then everyone pales next to Paula Poundstone and Peter Seigal. Her reading of this letter, as jumpy and nonsequitur-like as it is in places, is really pretty cranky and mean--she should have slept on it.
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Now, if I'd known when we started our day that we'd end up in the ER, I would have brought a deck of cards with me. Then the two of us could play rummy and we'd have something to freaking do that would inhibit her ability to make very unpleasant conversation. And so somewhere around hour two I said "I wish I'd brought a deck of cards".
And sometime later she burst out that I should JUST LEAVE because I really wanted to JUST LEAVE and she could make her own way home, and she KNEW that's how I really felt because if I didn't feel that way why would I have said "I wish I'd brought a book"!?
I want to be very clear, I never leave the house without at least one book. I didn't say "I wish I'd brought a book" because I had brought my Kindle, she'd seen me reading it earlier in the day, and even if I had said that that wouldn't necessarily mean "I secretly want to abandon you here".
But because she felt not-so-deep-down that we all consider her a burden and that we don't ever like her company (untrue, I like her company just fine most of the time, and I give some leeway to her being sick) her perception had to back up that "fact". Therefore I really wanted to leave, therefore she could tell it by every little thing I said or did, even if details had to be altered slightly to make it fit.
In the past she's accused me of not saying hello to her even when I have - sometimes when she probably didn't hear me, sometimes when we actually exchanged a few words. She's absolutely accused all of us of deliberately ignoring her if we ever don't respond to her, when sometimes the truth is we didn't hear her the first time but we heard her the second time because she spoke louder.
And if she feels hurt or offended, it's because we were trying to hurt or offend her. There is never any other explanation. (If she hurts or offends us, it's because we want to be hurt or offended, of course.)
I love my mother, but she can be very difficult to get along with, and when she's upset she absolutely cannot distinguish between her feelings and objective reality. She feels like a burden, she feels like we don't like her, she feels unloved, therefore that must all be true and everything we do only confirms it.
So here we have the LW. It looks like she's the only one in this group of five who isn't paired up. She is the fifth wheel.
She also reads, a lot, like my mom. She might not be like my mother deep down, but honestly, I have a hard time understanding her reaction if she's not doing what Mommy does. So here's what I think. I think she doesn't have very many friends, and so she puts undue importance on the ones she does have. She resents that 20 years of friendship doesn't trump 10 years of marriage just because she has dibs. She feels awkward and uncomfortable being the only singleton in a vacation full of couples, and she may be right that her friend's husband actually doesn't like her. So whatever he says or does, she's bound to interpret it as a rejection of her, and then drive off sobbing for two hours and never come back to the vacation again. Because "I want to be alone" must mean "I hate you and everything you stand for, you stink both figuratively and literally". Because she feels like that, he must have meant that.
I could be wrong, I don't know these folks. All I know is that the precipitating incident is pretty small (and we all know that nobody is going to make the other guy look better and themselves look worse, if they do bend the truth it's bound to go the other way) and her reaction is pretty damn big. And I've never seen anybody storm out for such a small thing and thought, after careful reflection, that no, they had a point. Mostly they're all like my mother in that one way - they feel it, therefore it must be real.
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But MY LW, she's way too hot for this group of heterocentric norm-clinging wankers, and Becky, stuck with this monosyllabic schlub, can only blurt out in anguish, "But I won't leave him for you!" when LW says she's through with her shenanigans, keeping her hanging on, and putting up with her ornery scum-bubble of a husband who snubs LW because he can't stick her braids in an inkwell and what good is a single women but for needing his dick?
"I've had enough of your fucking complicit silence and your crappy dilapidated lake house, the lot of you!" she yells as she strides to the garage and pulls out her Harley and mounts in one fluid motion with her long, magnificent legs.
"I remember when you used to sit behind me, Becky! So full of life! Your arms wrapped so tight around me I could barely breathe for the joy of it. But look at you now! Such a respectable shadow of who you used to be! Tied to a burning hunk of lumbering sullenness, and you just sit there and put up with his crap, and let him have at me, and say nothing. I am soooo done!" She ties back her unruly hair, revs up the engine, and takes off for parts unknown, embarking on a journey that will change the world . . . . TBC.
I'm sorry, but I am definitely winning at having more fun with this letter and my lovely LW's budding potential. (-;
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To be fair to my mom, she is a lot of fun when she's not miserable and full of herself. Alas, when she's not happy she just wants to spread the misery. And maybe that's the case with LW as well!
Either way, I will agree that if she wasn't happy at that vacation, leaving was a good choice.
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I'm rooting for LW. I don't read that she's spreading misery beyond where it's earned and appropriate, and it's about time, but I could be wrong, too. We will never know. In any case, may LW sprout shoots and grow green and wild, and develop better narrative skills.
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As for LW, much though I might roll my eyes at her (as I do at my mom where she can't see, let's be real, sometimes you just gotta) I also would like her to be happy in all the ways. And her friends, and their spouses! Just lots of confetti and happiness, that's all I want for them.