My friend brings out the worst in me
DEAR BEL,
I HAVE been friends with Anne for over 50 years. We met at work. We made a happy foursome with our husbands, meeting several times a year (we lived some way apart) until my husband died 16 years ago.
Anne and her husband were very good to me. When Anne’s husband died some years ago, I stepped up the friendship as she seemed to need extra support. But things have started to go downhill.
I think we’ve both reverted to the people we used to be before marriage. I have always been quite laid back, never worried about anything and always seek the quiet life.
Anne is always on her soapbox, very competitive, throwing her weight around and generally treating me as if I was of inferior intelligence (I might be but I don’t like to know it!). She and I have nothing in common at all. She is very sociable and I know she is very lonely.
She has lots of friends where she lives, but I am the only one who stays overnight.
We have been on several holidays, which I’ve hated because my hackles rise in self-defence whenever I’m with her. I’ve told her that at 75 I want to live my life on my terms. It doesn’t seem to have sunk in.
She’s in hospital now and I’ve rung her on several occasions — and she says she has others she has to speak to and could I ring at a more convenient time?
This makes my blood boil — and I now feel it is time to end the friendship. When she’s back home, she’ll be on the phone again wanting me to visit — and I don’t want to. The problem is, although she is kind, she brings out the worst in me. What to do?
HELENA
When I look at the photographs of my second wedding, a happy day in September 2007, I can’t help noticing that of that small group of friends in the church quite a few are no longer a part of our lives.
Two have sadly died, but there are others whose friendship just . . . ended. It happens.
At the time, those people mattered very much. But gradually life takes a new course because events and people change, causing friendships to evolve too. And sometimes fizzle out.
Maybe we all worry too much about this perfectly normal process: after all, if you kept in touch with everybody from the past, there would be no space for new friends.
In your case, the friendship-foursome was the key, wasn’t it? That dynamic gave you many good times — and please celebrate the fact that it leaves you with good memories.
So when you say that you and Anne ‘have nothing in common at all,’ it’s not strictly true. You have a shared history in common, and surely it’s important not to forget that.
Yet with the passage of time, your differences in personality have become more pronounced. Anne annoys you because (I suspect) she has locked you into an image she formed of you years ago — one which is no longer true. Yet in truth, you view her in the same way, too — that is, as over- confident and opinionated. And it drives you mad!
But there’s an interesting contradiction here, because you know Anne is lonely and needs people more than you do. So much for her self-confidence.
One minute she is putting you in a queue for conversation, next moment she’s making demands — and to me that reinforces a sense of her vulnerability. It sounds as if you are probably the stronger of the two.
So what to do? She has friends and so do you. And since you live at a distance, why can’t you proceed with a civilised lessening of contact, without ditching the whole friendship?
During lockdown you can’t go to stay with her anyway, nor go on holiday — and so when at last life returns to normal, the old habits will have been broken.
I know exactly what you mean about an irritating old friend; I have a couple like that (I expect I annoy them, too!). Yet because of our long history, I’d be sorry if they disappeared from my life.
It can be a good gauge of one’s feelings to ask: ‘how would I feel if I got a phone to tell me she had died?’
If the answer is an honest ‘sad’, that’s a good sign that the old friendship can be parked on a shelf in your heart, allowed to rest there peacefully with a little dust-off every so often.