friendship

[cellio]

A couple days ago browngirl asked an interesting question: what would make you break off a friendship?

I have almost never been in the position of wanting to end a friendship. Even romantic breakups (of which there were not many, because I was never very proficient at the dating thing to begin with) involved efforts to keep relations at least at the cordial level. I have, of course, let people drift away, and drifted away from people, but drifting does not have the finality of actually ending a friendship. Endings have been pretty rare for me.

There were two cases where I came close, and both, fundamentally, involved lack of respect for other people. In one case, someone who had been a good friend for several years, and then dropped to the level of more casual friend, developed stronger and stronger feelings about her brand of religion and began to prosyletize, heavily. Subtlety didn't work. Explicitly telling her "I'm not interested" didn't work. Telling her "I have seriously considered and rejected your argument" didn't work. She was becoming more and more pushy about it, and eventually I told her "this stops now or this friendship is over". That got through to her.

Note that my problem in this story isn't the religion part; it's the not-taking-no-for-an-answer part. She could have just as easily been preaching about diet, or career choice, or relationship status (the "why are you still single?" type); it wouldn't have mattered. Fundamentally, she was valuing her attitudes above my feelings in what should have been a balanced relationship, and apparently she either couldn't see this or didn't see that as a problem. Either way, I wasn't inclined to put up with it.

The other case also involved a fair amount of disrespect for other people -- their feelings, their time, their property, and so on. Being cavalier with other people's trust in you is Not Good. This one took a slightly different spin; it wasn't that the person had an axe to grind, but rather that someone else considering something important didn't matter. This was combined with some major blind spots around double standards. One thing I absolutely cannot abide is hypocrisy. If it is wrong for other people to behave in a certain way, then it had darn well better also be wrong for you to do so. (That's a generic "other people".)

I do not have a problem with friends having different world-views than I do, barring extreme cases. I like healthy disagreement, debate, and discussion. Most of my friends are from a very different place in the political spectrum than I am. My husband and I have nearly-opposite political views on just about everything, and that's fine. I would probably have trouble being friends with someone who holds deep-seated views I consider to be abhorrant if those views affect day-to-day interactions -- for example, a vocal racist or sexist. But those are pretty rare anyway, and I don't think it's really come up. (I reserve the word "abhorrant" for the most extreme cases, after all. It does not do to water down strong words.)

The things that would cause me to drift away from someone are completely different. Primarily, I think this drift happen when our interests change (as happens to everyone over time) and we no longer have much in common. That's pretty much what happened with the friend I described above; we still don't really have anything in common aside from a shared past, but she appears to value the friendship so much that I've let her keep clinging to me. Left to my own devices, I would have drifted away years ago.

The trick, and it's not one I've really learned, is to spot the beginnings of the drift, when you can still do something about it and when you still care to do so, and then take corrective action. I've certainly drifted away from people I didn't mean to drift away from. Perhaps it's the natural ebb and flow of friendships -- or perhaps we just don't work hard enough at maintenance. I don't know.

Comments

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Years ago a gal who I considered to be my friend slept with my then-boyfriend behind my back. She knew it wouldn't be okay with me and didn't care.

This is someone who I no longer consider to be a friend and who I'd be perfectly happy to never see again.