agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Carolyn: A year ago, a good friend of mine dropped me out of the blue. I didn’t understand what happened. I knew she had a new boyfriend and figured she was busy with him, but as months went on, I figured she’d moved on or something. I saw her at a wedding last weekend and told her I’d missed her. And she laughed and said she could tell. When I asked what she meant, she said she’d gotten sick of being the friend who did everything. She decided to stop reaching out and see how long it took for people to notice. The friends who contacted her, she kept.

I was stunned. I said she could’ve at least talked to me if she felt our friendship was one-sided and explained that friendships go in waves, but it all evens out. I said I know she helped me out emotionally during the pandemic and after, but her turn was coming again since I am in a much better place now. She asked why, if that was the case, didn’t I call or text? And I said I didn’t want to bother her, and she knows I’m bad about reaching out. She just turned and started talking to someone else.

I feel bad and like I should initiate something with her, but it looks like she doesn’t want that. I also think this was a petty move on her part. You can’t suddenly change the rules of a relationship without telling another person. Right?

— Tested, and I Failed

Tested, and I Failed: You “can” “suddenly” do whatever you want. It’ll just have consequences. The consequences of her rule change are that you slept through a kind of mean, pop final exam. You feel tricked and upset; she feels vindicated. The consequences of letting yourself be “bad about reaching out,” meanwhile, instead of leaving your comfort zone occasionally, were to lose a friend who needed some care. That’s the consequences math.

Her behavior says she’s not accepting any overtures, but I generally don’t endorse quitting before you try. If your conscience says to reach out, then go for it — and take a second cold shoulder as no. You can also quit now over her game-playing and sarcasm, by all means.

There is another reason to cut your losses here, if you want one: You and your friend aren’t well matched. She sees “good” friendship as an active, mutual effort. You see “good” friendship as a more fluid and forgiving thing. Both are valid, but neither works if you’re silently judging the other. And neither of you seems eager to close the gap for the sake of remaining close.

You weren’t perfect, but she greeted your sincere sentiments with bitterness that melted my hair. So, onward, I’d say. And weigh what kind of friend you want to be to the people still speaking to you.

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I'm somewhat less sympathetic to LW than Carolyn is, and correspondingly more sympathetic to Ex-Friend.

It's perfectly reasonable to look at your life and decide that from now on, you'll prioritize relationships with those people who prioritize you back. I would not have advised Ex-Friend to frame this as a "test", and her reported commentary to LW was a bit strong - for anywhere, but especially for a mutual friend's wedding! - but it's okay to decide not to put more into your friendship than the other person.

But what really gets me, and the whole reason that I'm not sympathetic to LW, is that their response to "I was sick of being the one who puts in all the work" is to say "Well, you should've put in more work and told me". And who's to say she didn't? Maybe she told all her friends before, and they kinda blew her off until she decided to set a boundary for herself about all those people.

I'm in the same boat as you. I've been the ex-friend before, and making the choice to step back in your friendships and see if the other people notice is not a decision that's made easily.

I actually lost most of my local friends within the past couple years because of something like this. Our group chat was on Facebook Messenger but I was leaving Facebook - sent a message in the group chat to say "Hey, I'm closing out my FB so I won't be in this chat anymore, but definitely still want to get together! Here's my phone number in case any of you don't have it." I did also send out group texts a couple of times to see if anyone wanted to get together for drinks/brunch/whatever...and wouldn't get responses. There were six other women in the group, and I'm only still friends with two of them. But honestly, I feel a lot happier having two friends who I see occasionally and check in with regularly versus having six friends but never hearing from 4 of them outside of the group chat.

Yeah, I kind of feel the same way you do. I mean, there were certainly times in my life when I wasn't the best at reaching out. And I'm glad people understood that this was not because I didn't love them, but because shit was happening. But there have also been friendships where I felt like I was the only person making any effort at all, and that's not a good feeling.

I think ex-friend sounds kind of meanspirited in the way she went about this, at least from how things are presented here, but I also think I'm more sympathetic to her than Carolyn is... it is frustrating to look at relationships and realize if you didn't carry them, the other person would probably go some indefinite number of years before it ever occurred to them to reach out. It sucks to realize that your efforts as a friend might not just be unappreciated, but totally unnoticed as efforts. It feels like your friend doesn't even care whether or not you're in their life.

Ultimately these two just aren't compatible from the sounds of it. LW needs to find friends who are more their style.

You weren’t perfect, but she greeted your sincere sentiments with bitterness that melted my hair.

Hey Carolyn, the last time I checked, phones and email travel both ways, not to mention social media. It actually kind of sucks to be the friend who puts in all the effort into the relationship, only to be dismissed the way LW did once their friend decided to stop putting in the energy to keep in touch. LW made no effort to connect with their friend at all until a convenient opportunity arose with the wedding. Imho that says more about LW than the friend. While I agree the friend was harsh, she imho wasn't wrong, and I sympathize with the friend. If LW has genuine problems reaching out, then they should find some advice or support to help them do so. Otherwise, this could very well happen again.

I had a friend do this once — she made a post on social media (LiveJournal, at the time), saying that she was unfriending anyone who didn’t respond.

I never saw the post, so I didn’t respond (because it had gotten buried, and I was also going through a lot of real life health stuff), and she wasn’t open to renewing the friendship when I did reach out.

The frustrating part was that we saw each other in person with reasonable regularity, it wasn’t a one-sided friendship where she only did the initiating, and I don’t think that missing *one* post online (which didn’t provide any kind of notification that the post had been made, you just had to have seen it on your friends page scroll, or known to have gone to her page specifically) should be a referendum on whether or not an individual friend cares about you.

I’m still kind of burned about it, 20 years later! I really liked her a lot, I cared about her, and I miss her :/

Wait, she ended the RL friendship too?

Yes :/

And then she moved across the country, so I’ve never seen her again.

Obviously, she has the right to do whatever she wants in this situation, but I have the right to have some feelings about it!

It was definitely not a situation where she was the only person reaching out or making plans, too.

I don't think I would wonder what had happened to an old friend for an entire year without sending one (1) text.

Right??? That's what gets me. I can somewhat relate to LW as an adhd person who tends to get into things and forget the passage of time. But that's when you aren't wondering. When you wonder, you have the opportunity to ask. It's not like she didn't have her phone number!

And then when Ex-Friend explains LW goes "You just don't understand friendship, and c'mon, I'm me, I'm bad at reaching out!" which - yeah, not the sort of response she was clearly looking for.

"Bad at reaching out" is not an immutable trait, either! It may be a trait everyone, including LW, knows LW has, but it's not an identity group, for heaven's sake, it's not a physical law, it's just a tendency that LW can work on or not. The answer here is clearly not.

"she knows I’m bad about reaching out"

Yes. She does. And this is her response to that.

If I were in the friend's situation, I might indeed have decided to step back from initiating communication, but I wouldn't have told the friend that I had done that. Mainly because if I were willing to put energy into intentional efforts to reshape the friendship, I would have done so at the beginning instead of stepping back, but also because it is a little mean.

But when the LW's best response is "It's not fair to reject me for being a low-effort friend, because you know I'm a low-effort friend," my sympathy is mostly with the friend.

A lot of people tell me they miss me without making any effort to connect with me in any way. I am not at LW's Ex-Friend's point--I haven't decided to just drop them all. But I think Carolyn is underestimating how frustrating it can be to hear "I miss you" over and over again from people who think it means "you should do more, but I definitely will not do anything." A sarcastic "oh, I can tell" looks pretty understandable to me, and I would not be up for being lectured about how I should do more by someone who was doing nothing, I would turn and talk to someone else as well.

I do think Carolyn is right that there are incompatible styles here. I have friends in both camps.

But it's hard sometimes to tell the difference between people who feel a bond with you but only call when they have something specific to say or to make a date or if they need you, and people who are just oblivious to your existence and don't really care if they stay in touch or not.

I felt like Carolyn's answer was kind to the person while also explaining the difference.

To me there is a giant gulf between the "cultivate the friendship thoughtfully always" group and the "I know you are there for me even if lots of time passes" styles. A gulf as big as Ask Versus Guess.

When I went through a long period of time where I was consumed with parents' illness I was grateful that my friends didn't take it personally that I dropped out. They understood and resumed our contact when I was able. There doesn't seem to be a crisis like that in this letter, but still. Also another factor that's not present in this letter is what happens when a friend has kids. I had at least one friend who was totally disappointed in what happened to our friendship with my kids were babies. My bandwidth was just gone for just about everyone, but she wasn't sympathetic at all. Our friendship survived but it was different.

The commenter who was dropped via LJ.... wow that is so stupid that a person would use one solitary LJ post as the cutoff. Very harsh and unrealistic.

To me there is a giant gulf between the "cultivate the friendship thoughtfully always" group and the "I know you are there for me even if lots of time passes" styles. A gulf as big as Ask Versus Guess.

I feel like this can also change depending on length of friendship and physical proximity - like, I have a couple friends from childhood who moved out of the area and we very rarely talk, but we'll get together every year or so when they're in town visiting their parents. Then there are the local friendships where if we don't see each other once a month, it's like "...are we still friends?"

I agree. For me it definitely depends on the person and the circumstances.

I thought it was exceptionally harsh (I was really going through it at the time, my chronic health issues had become disabling, I had to quit my job and was really struggling, so I wasn’t able to go out as often or be quite as checked-in to my whole friends group.)

Then again, I have ADHD and don’t really experience friendship decay, so it’s definitely a very different mindset.

I do feel like I did at least half of the reaching out/making plans/etc. in the friendship, under normal circumstances.

And she absolutely had a right to make that choice, but it definitely hurt! :/

I am not really sympathetic to either party here, tbh - I am the friend who's really bad at reaching out or making plans, and as a result a lot of my friends are the kind who are better at it just for logistics reasons (if two people are both bad at reaching out...nothing happens.) If we've established a pattern where the friend who Plans Things suddenly stops including me in plans... I would assume they had a reason, and wait for them to be ready to reach back out again, or that they'd decided for some reason they didn't want me around anymore, and respect that. If you don't want to be the friend who organizes things and brings people together anymore, but you do still want to do things and get together, you have to say that! People won't pass a test if they don't know what they're being tested on!

On the other hand, LW's explanation really sounds like Friend was on her justified last rope with being expected to do literally all the work and be supportive with no support in return. And that's LW trying to make herself sound good. Sometimes you set people up to fail because you're hoping for an excuse to not have to deal with them anymore...

This is a style difference. I recognize “silent because I don’t want to be a bother” in myself, and I’ve had “silent to see if you’ll reach out” applied to me. Thing is, people can learn other relationship styles or have fallbacks (like, I’m from guess culture, but if someone’s not picking up on my hints, I’ll go to a direct ask). It sounds like neither of these folks wants to do that, at least not with each other right now.

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