This summer, two friends of mine seemed to become overly skeptical of me…. They seemed to always hint and nudge that they felt that I was a “*****”. I went from enjoying spending time with each of them to only seeing them grow more and more restless and uneasy around me and seeming to insult me at any given opportunity, and often for no reason at all.
One day I got sick of it and stopped talking to each of them. I went from hanging out with these 2 kids that I had been best friends with since pre school (we are now 23) almost every single day to never speaking with them and I haven’t voluntarily hung out with them since the summer time. So its been months. I honestly feel liberated and feel I should have done it sooner. I now just speak to and spend time with other people I consider myself friendly with and will only continue to do so so long as there exists mutual respect.
The other 2 guys that I more or less threw away ended up sorry about it. One of their girlfriends even reached out to me asking me why I wouldnt answer her boyfriend and to tell me how upset he is over the whole thing. I didn’t give her a legitimate answer. “sucks for him” I thought. If he really treasured the friendship so much, why did he never act like it while I was still giving him the time of day?
As for the other friend, he was at least man enough to reach out to me directly. He told me he wasn’t sure what he had done and why we went from being together all the time to barely ever seeing each other. I didn’t give him a legitimate answer either, really. Once again, where was all this kindness and concern when he still had the chance to give it to me?
As of now, I dont really feel bad over anything I’ve done. I genuinely believe I’ve never done a harmful thing to anybody before unless they’d had it coming. Just interested to hear other’s thoughts. I’ve never really discussed the situation at length with anyone.
3 comments
I’m 32 and most of my life has been figuring out how most people aren’t worthwhile friends, even though I continue to give some of the same people many chances since I’m not good at meeting new people. I think what you did here is fine, as long as you feel okay with it. I would hate to say anything here that puts different ideas into your head and sends you down a different path of decision making. But I will say that you at least got kind of lucky to find out, from one of them directly and indirectly from the other one, that they at least regret it or wonder what happened. There’s at least a little satisfaction in that versus disappearing and never hearing from them again. It’s not fun when you really find out how little people cared when you just go away and nobody even notices.
If you want to stand by your decision that they wouldn’t have behaved how they did in the first place if they respected and valued you, that’s fine. I’m a sucker, if I at least got the satisfaction of the other people reaching out and expressing that they didn’t know what they did, I’d be tempted to at least discuss it and see if it could be made better. But before I sound like I fully the support the idea of giving these people another chance, in every situation where I’ve decided that I don’t like holding a grudge and try to understand that other people are flawed like me, it usually isn’t long before they’re making me feel bad again or behaving the same old way.
It is possible that they just don’t perceive what they did. Another idea that I am constantly trying to digest is just how different people can see things or process things. I’ve spent too much of my life thinking it’s common sense that people should be seeing things mostly the way I do. Not in an arrogant way, just kind of not realizing how different other people’s minds can function based on all the experiences they’ve had that I didn’t and vice versa. So maybe they really don’t understand what they did to hurt you. If they knew they wouldn’t be coming back around saying they don’t know what happened.
I think that’s about as much as you can expect from other human beings, the best you can hope for is people interested in smoothing things out and giving it another shot, versus expecting flawless relationships in the first place. Maybe that’s me setting the bar low, maybe it’s perfectly reasonable to expect friends who are never nasty, because much like you I think I can say that I have never done this sort of thing to other people, but they sure do it to me. So maybe someone with better self respect is capable of setting the hard rule that you should cut people off the second they show that they can treat you poorly.
Ultimately it’s your choice based on what these people meant to you, if you think they could be genuinely sorry and unaware of what they did, and if any part of you would like to have them be a part of your future. I always end up finding myself thinking of our mortal condition overall and I can just never find the spine to hold a grudge, knowing we will all be gone from this planet some day. But there are some friendships where I definitely should be over it by now, held together with too many band-aids and second chances and still not achieving a level of mutual respect in the relationship.
I guess the middle ground would be to communicate to them what it is about their behavior that they found hurtful. See if you receive any satisfactory expression of remorse or an explanation that they truly didn’t understand how they were making you feel. But like I said at the start, I’m not trying to tempt you to do this if you feel okay with the way you’ve handled it so far. I don’t really have any examples where I can “I gave a person another chance and it turned out to be wonderful and I think you should consider doing it”. Quite the opposite, when I give people more chances it’s usually the same thing all over again at best, people really don’t change.
If you truly think they were knowingly being malicious towards you and that it’s insulting your intelligence for them to suggest they don’t know what they did, then have more self respect than I do and maybe leave them permanently behind.
Thanks alot for that, I think that in suggesting they “don’t know what they did” they are totally spewing BS and certainly insulting my intelligence. I think they’re done for for good. Again, thanks for all you had to say!
I’ve never had a friend… I guess I don’t believe in it. But I’ve also never wanted a friend. Why would you need friends if you are just going to kill yourself?