ending friendships
Radical honesty ain’t for everybody or every relationship; even though it should be.
As you get older, you start to discover what your values and beliefs are around some pretty major things like money, fidelity, and politics…These are things that didn’t impact your friendships when you were young.
Even I feel nervous sometimes admitting some of my pandemic behaviors to friends, as I fear they’ll condemn me, or judge me. I mentioned going to a bar (with a mask on, and sitting outdoors, distanced) to a friend, and she gave me a tongue lashing
You start paying close attention to who initiates the hangs. You realize there are some friends you’d literally never see if you didn’t reach out to them. You see what happens if you go ghost on them for a few months and…nothing. Well, you decide you’re done with them.
Every time you see this friend, it’s under tight time constraints. You meet at 12:30 for lunch and she has a hard out at 2. She’s giving you less and less of her minutes.
I absolutely still make time for my single friends but some of them don’t make time for me. I kind of get it. They still want to find their person and, it’s easier for them to do this when they hang out with other single people.
If she doesn’t complain about the relationship, she talks about how perfect it is and how marvelous her partner is. It’s either one or the other: she loves him or hates him that day. When she loves him, she talks about the ways he is “improving” (aka changing/controlling/manipulating) her.
Do you find that you're ready to cut people off over the smallest things, even when you never told them what they did to hurt you? This author can relate...
Have you made this realization about someone you've known for quite some time and considered a good friend?
After falling out with an old friend back in the day and being too prideful about past drama, I made the decision years later to reach out and try and mend things. Would you be willing to do the same thing?