Ending Friendships That Don't Grow With You

Corbis

When I was younger it was easy for me to accept certain negative qualities about the girls I chose as friends. When I was younger my values were also all messed up and I was always intrigued by the mischief in life. The girls I met in the sixth grade were just as lost as I was and naturally, we found direction in one another.

Over the last five years, like many other 25-year-olds I know, I began to realize that my time is limited, I value more, I have grown up, and my tolerance for BS is slim to none. I can’t keep up with the nonsense like I used to, so I’ve allotted all my tolerance for ish I can’t control to the whims of my two pint-sized children.

I’m a mother now and part of being a good mother for me means surrounding my children with positive influences. The quality of the “village” in which I raise my children takes precedence over everything else. If those are values that I hold, then trying to maintain a friendship with a woman who shows little moral character goes directly against all that I envision for my family. I had a friend like that, and things didn’t turn out well.

With the influence of my children aside, it is my strong belief that had I known or embraced my true self at a younger age, it would have been merely impossible for our friendship to form. Besides the length of time between us, any blind man could have seen that the distrust, disloyalty, dislike, and disrespect forever present in our circle made us more enemies than friends. I’m speaking for myself when I say that some of the women I considered my best friends over the years were women that I could no longer stand to be around at one point. Nene Leakes of “Real Housewives Of Atlanta” fame recently said that as she got to know Cynthia Bailey better, she realized that she didn’t like her. Though I knew these women for all of our teenage years, I had to re-learn who they were as grown women. The more I learned about myself as a woman, the more I learned that grown up Opal did not like the same set of women I chose as friends when I was a pre-teen.

If you’ve got a group of girlfriends who fully support one another, enjoy each other’s company, respect one another’s opinions and advice, and are inspired by each other’s success, then you’ve got gold when it comes to girlfriends. Some of us aren’t so lucky. We get stuck in friendships that are past their expiration dates and should have been tossed out with old Melissa jelly sandals and T-Mobile sidekick cell phones (which were popular when my former friend and I had more in common). Some of us stay bound to each other simply because we’re comfortable and don’t want to start over with other people. We put up with disrespect from our besties and chalk it up to “that’s just how she is, you’ve just got to get to know her…”

I can’t speak for the women I’ve had to leave behind as I’ve grown, but I can say for me that the end of our friendship was inevitable. We had been slowly breaking up for years, but my comfort zone fed me excuses that allowed me to remain miserable in a familiar situation that was hurting me. We’ve beared witnesses to the biggest moments in each other’s lives and that will keep us bound in one way, but that doesn’t mean that I have to continue to put up with people I would probably be better off without.

There wasn’t a long conversation held among any of these women once I realized we needed to go our separate ways. Nobody got cut, cursed out or un-friended on Facebook. In fact, I can still see all their updates on social media, but the only difference is that I am less involved in their drama and I like it that way. I’d like to be able to see that they are doing good and living well. I don’t know if I’ll ever entertain a friendship with these women the way I had before, and I think some of the “comfortableness” between us is what drove us apart. For now, I’ll have that personal “girl talk” about the trials of my life with my spouse, as it’s just safer that way. When it comes to making friends at this point in my life, I’m going back to the basics and keeping friends for entertainment purposes only. If it sounds like I’m a “friend scorned” it’s probably because I am, but I’m thankful for the lesson.

Opal Stacie is a freelance writer out of the Miami area. Keep up with her on Facebook.com/thecolorsofOpal.