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September 2009
My friendship with "Mary" recently ended. All of a sudden, and for reasons that I'll never figure out, I became persona non grata. Phone calls weren't answered, voicemails and e-mails not returned. It was as if I had ceased to exist. The hardest part of this is that this wasn't some short-term friendship that burned hot and fast, we had been friends for almost 30 years. I sincerely believed we'd be friends forever. To be shut out without explanation after all those years hurts in ways that is hard for anyone who hasn't been through this to understand.
While I am terribly hurt, I am also burning mad that she was too much of a coward to talk to me and end the friendship with some dignity. I felt like I deserved that much after such a long history. But I guess she thought otherwise. If I'm honest, looking back on things, I think I always needed her as a friend more than she needed me. Being an introvert, I've always been one that valued a small circle of close friends over a large circle of casual friends, so I know I put more energy and emotion into the relationship than I should have. I think that she knew that and enjoyed the control it gave her in the relationship, but I chose to overlook it. Anyway, here's our story.
Mary and I met in junior high and were fast friends. We'd literally spend hours on the phone almost every night, talking about anything and everything. High school introduced a friendship rival, let's call her Sally. Despite Sally’s arrival, Mary and I stayed close. It wasn't uncommon for the three of us to do things together, though Sally was extremely competitive for Mary's attentions and clearly took glee in those occasions where she gained the upper hand on me in the relationship. But I worried that I was too needy and that my expectations of the being the BEST of the best friends were unrealistic and so I shared Mary without complaint.
By the time we were in our early 20s the cracks, though infrequent, were starting to show, although I didn't want to see them. While in graduate school, I was living in a studio apartment and Mary was still living with her parents. We decided that we would get an apartment together. Since money was tight, we agreed to get a one-bedroom apartment and share the bedroom. We searched together and found the perfect place. But when moving day arrived, things got weird. At that time, I didn't have a car and she did, so I needed her help to move. I was packing and she was supposed to come to my place after she finished working to help me move things in her car. I had called a couple of times to ask her to pick things up for me on the way (boxes, tape, etc.). At one point, Sally answered Mary's phone and yelled at me for my unreasonable demands on Mary. I was confused, what business was this of Sally's anyway? Later that same day, Mary called me to tell me that she had changed her mind and wasn't going to move in with me because she didn't think it was a good idea and that she was too tired after work to help me move. Clearly, Sally had been working on her and had accomplished her goal. Mind you, it was 7:00 at night, she had the keys to our new place, and I had to be out of my apartment by the next day and had no way to move my things to a new place that was now too expensive for me since I hadn't planned on paying the entire rent. After borrowing my parents' car, I had to endure the indignity of going over to Sally's house, where Mary was lounging on the sofa watching TV to get the keys. I then proceeded to move mostly by myself (with a little help from my dad the next morning). Why didn't I see the signs then???
There were other indignities. When Mary got married, Sally was asked to be the maid of honor, me just a bridesmaid. When her first child was born, Sally was godmother. I had to wait until the second time around. Sally had done a pretty good job of getting Mary to choose her over me on many occasions. But not wanting to be selfish and unreasonable, I forgave each of the slights and accepted them with good cheer. Interestingly, a couple years after Mary got married to John, Sally told her that she didn't like her husband and she wanted to stay friends with Mary but didn't want to socialize with John. Mary said that if she wouldn't socialize with John, they couldn't be friends, and that was the end of Sally. At that point, I felt a little vindicated and sure that I was now the BEST friend. But it was a false sense of security.
So, backtracking a bit, the different paths our lives were going to take started to emerge in college. School wasn’t really Mary’s thing. She managed to get a two-year degree from a community college and went to work in a series of low-paying retail jobs in the town we lived in. I got a Bachelor's degree from a private college, spent a semester studying in Europe, and returned home to earn a graduate degree. After graduate school, I got a corporate job that required a lot of travel. It wasn't particularly well paid, but I was doing well and had a bright future. At that point, really, so did Mary, who had risen to the level of managing corporate chain stores.
But it became clear that Mary was really not corporate material, not because she didn't have the ability, but because she was not willing to deal with the politics and games, or really to work for anyone else, at all. She changed jobs quickly, but after a few months every new boss or company, even when she went back to working for smaller local stores, was "unreasonable" or "unfair" or "clueless." Eventually, she quit working to become a stay-at-home mom. In the meantime, I had gotten a transfer in my company to the East Coast. Three years later, I took another transfer to the West Coast where, being a workaholic, I quickly rose up the ladder, with corresponding increases in pay.
While I was certainly far from wealthy (I was still paying off a boatload of student loans!), by this time I was doing quite well financially, but Mary was not. Having been a stay-at-home mom for some time had taken a toll on the family finances. What's more, John, also not the kind that enjoyed working for others, had tried his hand at several business of his own, none of which were particularly successful. Money was always an issue. It wasn't unusual to call and find their phone had been turned off. John's parents sometimes helped them with the mortgage. And they made so little, that they qualified for the low-income health insurance offered by the state where they lived.
Our realities were also drifting farther and farther apart. Even though we had both grown up in a sizeable metropolitan area, she and John had moved to a small town where it seemed like she entered a 1950s sitcom. I was shocked to learn that she was too "confused" by things like finances (even though she had successfully managed million dollar retail operations!) and had just given control of the family's finances to her husband. Her name wasn't on the deed to the house they lived in, only his was. And she didn't even carry a checkbook or an ATM card, just took "an allowance" from her husband each week and if she needed to go grocery shopping, he gave her a signed check. What??? OMG! And suddenly, the city we had grown up in was too big and dirty and loud and busy and she couldn't stand to go there anymore. The much larger city I now lived in may have been crowded, expensive, and often dirty, but I adored its energy, diversity and culture.
Then there were the kids. I like children (and had always doted on both of hers) but had no desire at all to be a parent. She became the ultimate mother and supposedly, the kids always came first, no matter what. To her, it was selfish for a parent to want to pursue their own goals and dreams if it meant they couldn’t devote endless time to the children. I agree that children should be of primary importance, but I don’t think it’s healthy to be a martyr for them. How does that teach them to be strong, independent individuals? But then maybe that’s why I don’t have any. And I suppose it’s admirable to sacrifice for your children, but sometimes that resulted in she and her husband making what seemed to me to be odd choices.
For example, she chose to stay at home so she could devote more time to the kids, but not working put terrible financial strain on the family. Similarly, she gave her husband a hard time about how much he worked because it meant that he had less time to spend with the kids, but at that time he had a job that paid no salary, only commission on the sales he made. So, if he didn't work, they had no money. Doesn't putting your kids first mean you do what's necessary to provide for their basic needs? They were smart, capable people with plenty of options, but by choice could barely make ends meet from one paycheck to the next; they sure weren't putting any money into college funds for the kids. What was going to happen when they couldn't afford to go to college? Is that putting your kids first? I don't know. I couldn’t fathom her choices, but they were hers and I never spoke to her about them. It wasn't my business or my place to judge and if she was happy with her life, then that was what was important. Besides, I didn't feel like I had to agree with her on every single issue in order for the friendship to survive.
The real beginning of the end seemed to start about two years ago. Having grown up poor and envying the rich kids I went to school with (where I was on scholarship and work study), I made sure to never make an issue out of Mary's and my financial differences. Still, they started to affect the friendship. Mary generally visited me every other year or so for a girlfriends trip, but her income impacted what she could do. On one earlier road trip we took, she couldn't afford to stay in a nice hotel. She really didn't mind staying in cheap hotels, but it was my vacation, too, and I didn’t take them often, so I wanted to stay somewhere a little nicer. I told her to pay what she could and I would cover the rest. She refused. So I made the compromise and stayed places I didn't want to stay to not make her uncomfortable. After all, it was supposed to be about the friendship, not the surroundings, right?
But during that last trip, we were going on a daylong boat trip that departed at 7:00 am about three hours from my house and I didn't want to have to get up and make the drive in the middle of the night and I just didn't want to debate it (it was only one night!). So I just took matters into my own hands and reserved a hotel room, with the intention of covering the bill myself, and didn’t tell her about it until she arrived. It wasn't like it was the Ritz-Carlton or anything, it was just a mid-level chain hotel and I’d gotten a good deal online. It had cost maybe $130 for the night. But when we arrived and she saw the room, she was clearly unhappy.
The rest of the trip was bizarre for no reason that I could put my finger on. Where we used to be able to talk endlessly, now there were long, uncomfortable silences. She'd get weird and moody for reasons I couldn’t understand. She'd asked to go to a particular store in the next town over, but it was in an area where traffic was a nightmare and it was absolutely impossible to find a place to park, so I suggested a comparable store closer to where I lived where she was able to get exactly what she wanted for the same price. At first she said that was okay, then at the last minute she said she was uncomfortable going there and didn’t want to go anymore, but wouldn't explain why. On the day she left, she was struggling down the stairs carrying both a large suitcase and a carry-on bag, but wouldn’t let me help her by taking one of the bags and got testy with me when I tried. I wasn’t sure if I was blowing things out of proportion and didn’t want to make more of it than I should, but I couldn’t do nothing. So in an e-mail exchange after she returned home, I tried to open the door to let her talk about what was bothering her by saying that I felt we had been a bit out of sync and was worried that she hadn’t had a good time. But she just insisted that she had and didn’t say anything else.
But after that, it became harder and harder to get ahold of her on the phone. No matter what day of the week or what time of the day I called, somehow no one was ever home (especially after she got caller ID). I’d leave voicemail messages that never got returned. And on the rare occasions that we did talk, she’d say that she must have missed my message or that she’d just been too busy with the kids to call. I didn’t take the clue.
I wanted to be respectful of her time and she was always sending me (and like 50 other people on her mailing list) annoying chain e-mails, so I figured that maybe it’d be easier to stay in touch by e-mail. And for a while we did communicate by e-mail, but then even that got scarce and she started to insist that she didn’t have time to read e-mail. Though interestingly, she still had time to forward those chain e-mails and had also started a Facebook page that she had plenty of time to update. I was a little offended, but still afraid that I was being unreasonable. By this time, she was dealing with ailing elderly parents and had also returned to work out of financial necessity. So I knew she was really busy and I didn’t say anything.
Christmas came and I sent the family gifts, as I always had, and got only a short e-mail reply saying that I shouldn’t have sent them anything because they were having such a rough year that they weren’t buying anyone gifts (which I had no way of knowing since we hadn’t spoken for months). I replied that it was no big deal, that I didn’t buy them gifts just to get gifts in return, and asked her to just give me a call and let me know what was going on since we hadn’t spoken for so long. But I never got a call and not even a Christmas or birthday card (my birthday is in December). Ooookay.
Still, foolishly, I didn’t get it; I made excuses for her. After all, it was a rough year and maybe they hadn’t had time to send cards and long distance calls are expensive, right? In January, I had a health scare and had to get some pretty unpleasant testing done for what could have been a serious medical condition. Due to a genetic disorder, Mary had had this test done before, so I e-mailed her and let her know that I was going to have this and was not looking forward to it. Foolishly, I expected her to be concerned about my health and to at least offer me some support or tips about taking the test. Nothing. Luckily, nothing bad turned up in the test so I was fine, but now I was really annoyed and decided that I wasn’t going to contact her if she wasn’t going to contact me.
Still, a couple months later, a different medical condition arose (it wasn’t a good health year!). Though not life-threatening, it was something that would require me to have a major surgery and take several months off work to recover. The months leading up to it were full of angst, with me having to have a number of medical consultations and tests and not being sure if I was going to be able to find the right doctor. Having always been really healthy, this was a really upsetting time. Mary had always been rather sickly and had been hospitalized numerous times during her life, so it would have been nice to have her to talk to know what to expect in the hospital. I became really upset that I didn’t have her support, so I contacted her. I didn’t tell her what was going on. Instead, I just sent her a very short message asking what was going on and why we hadn’t spoken in so long. It had been over nine months since our last conversation and probably three months since any sort e-mail communication, even a chain e-mail. I got no reply.
Several months later, out of the blue, I got another of Mary’s chain e-mails. I really believe that she had forgotten to delete me from her mailing list and had sent me this by accident. But my anger finally got the better of me. So I sent her an e-mail, telling her that I was really confused about what was going on and couldn’t figure out why we weren’t talking and that I was frankly both angry and hurt that she would treat me this way after thirty years. I said that if she felt we had grown apart, if something was going on and she needed space, or if I had done something to make her mad, she should tell me. But there was no reply at all.
So, I guess even I can’t deny it any more. The friendship is truly over. Dead as dead can be. Was it because of the difference in our financial situation, in education, in our outlooks? Did I say or do something to offend her? I’ll obviously never know. If she’d simply told me she didn’t want to be friends anymore, I would have been sad and hurt, of course, but I would have gotten over it with time. The worst part of the way she chose to do this is that I feel like it tarnishes the entire friendship. I have thirty years of memories that I can’t bear to deal with.
And, it makes me afraid to trust anyone else. After moving to the West Coast (where I knew no one), I had two short-lived friendships with women I worked with that both went sour when my career eclipsed theirs. And just like this time, both simply stopped talking to me, even though we worked in the same office! We had talked about that and she knew how upset it had made me to be frozen out with no explanation that way, then she did the exact same thing! Was that on purpose? Am I just being paranoid? Regardless, that was upsetting but not nearly so much as this. At least then, I knew why it had happened. This time I have no clue. But when you add those situations to this one, it makes me feel like I don’t know how to choose friends that won’t abandon me and I don’t want to go through this again. It’s too hard.
I’m also really mad. Really mad that she has the ability to make me feel this way. Mad that yet again, she’s more important to me than I am to her. I know it’s still too fresh, so I’m sure that I’ll get over this in time, but right now it feels like I never will. It totally sucks.
Thanks for letting me vent. If nothing else, this is cathartic. Your book is a life-saver.
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