The Vine: March 21, 2002
Hi Sars,
I have a guy friend that has been around since childhood. Dude is a lovely person, but he is sucking the life out of me. He is fairly depressed and rarely leaves the house. We do have much in common, and speak on the phone all the time. I just need more of a friend — someone who will go out and be fun. Am I evil for growing tired of the relationship? Probably not. How can I motivate him or change our dynamic?
He is the Betty Finn to my Veronica.
Love the paté, but I gotta motor if I’m gonna make that funeral
Dear Paté,
It’s not always the case that a single friend can do it all; not everyone has one friend who slices and dices and juliennes potatoes. Lots of people have different friends from different parts of our lives that play different roles — work friends, childhood friends, friends we shop with, friends we go out for drinks with, friends from book group, and so on and so forth.
It’s not that you dislike your homebody friend; it’s that you like to socialize more than he does. Try to meet new friends (or spend more time with old ones) who go out more often and like to do stuff outside the house, and accept that he’s your kind-of-depressed phone-chat friend. That’s the role he plays right now, so enjoy your phone chats with him, and rely on other folks to fill the role of hanging out and having fun.
There’s nothing wrong with having different friends for different reasons or activities, and if you wait for this guy to shake it off and put on his dancing shoes, you’ll start to resent him. Make plans without him now and then and feel good about it.
I feel like I’ve missed out on a Girl Etiquette meeting, and I was wondering if you had the notes. What do you do if a girlfriend tells you that her boyfriend particularly admires some part of your body? You wouldn’t think this would come up particularly often, but it has, several times, and I feel that somehow my response has been lacking when my friends say things like, “Bob thinks you have a really hot ass,” and I say, “Errr, that’s nice of him.” So far I’ve been responding as if the comment was “nice shirt” instead of “sexy hips” or “great tits,” but this seems inadequate. I really don’t particularly want to know what my friends’ boyfriends think of my breasts, to tell the truth, but it seems odd to tell a woman who comes to me to bitch about her bladder infection that she’s giving me too much information.
The thing is, it’s not that it really makes me feel awkward about the boyfriends involved. I know how to deal with a guy who thinks I’m hot — mostly by ignoring it. It’s the girls who confuse me — why are they telling me this? What do they hope to gain? Or what do they hope to give me? Am I just being dense here?
Girls Confuse Me
Dear Girls,
Honestly? It sounds to me like Mrs. Bob is hinting around to see if you’d dig a three-way with her and Bob. I can’t think of another explanation.
I would just ask Mrs. Bob straight out why she keeps sharing that sort of info with you. Maybe she’ll ‘fess up to trying to set up a little two-girls-and-a-guy action, in which case you can accept or decline as you see fit. If she’s vague, just tell her that it’s awkward for you to know that kind of thing about Bob, and you’d rather not hear it anymore.
Tags: etiquette friendships
