The Vine: March 25, 2009
Just one letter today; I’m traveling later and don’t have as much time as I’d like.
*****
Dear Sars,
I have a close group of friends that I have hung out with since high school, and we’ve all known each other for around five years. When we were in high school, we would have shitloads of fun and always crack each other up and think we were each other’s friendship soulmates and cheesy stuff like that.
Now, naturally after high school people grow apart and sometimes become closer friends with the people they go to college with. However, we still hang out a lot while at the same time we try to branch out and make friends with other people. We don’t seem to naturally connect with other people personality-wise. Obviously, when meeting someone, you can’t know if you’ll be BFFs, but often my friends and I find that making friends with other people really pales in comparison to being friends with each other. This should seem obvious, in that we should just be our group of friends like usual.
There is a problem in that we are beginning to really resent each other. Comparative to a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, where the couple gets to really grate on each other because they become really in tune with each other’s flaws. We have tried letting it go, confronting each other, being honest about our feelings, hiding them, all with not great results. After all, it’s hard for any of us to accept that there is just unlikeable part in our personality. Even though when we hang out, we have the best fun, fun I don’t think I can have with anyone else, when we’re not having fun we can be full of bitterness, passive aggression, annoyance and anger.
This has been going on for years, an on-off really awesome time/really annoying time mixed into our friendship. It could be comparable to one of those sadomasochistic relationships people have, where they keep on breaking up and then getting back together.
I don’t want to lose them as friends completely, but I am thinking it may be a good idea to stop having them as my best friends, which they have been for five years. I was thinking of possibly just hanging out with them less frequently, but I don’t know how to exactly cut the cord.
Do I actually tell them that despite the good times, we don’t work as BFFs anymore? I feel like that would be really harsh and awkward, but maybe it is the best alternative. I can accept being alone for a while or trying to make new other friends, but is it the right choice?
Lost in friends
Dear Lost,
You don’t need to make a big announcement; it just creates drama.Start spending less time with your old friends, and start making a conscious effort to meet and hang out with new people.
It is sort of like a romantic relationship, in that it can take time to move on from a relationship — even one that fundamentally didn’t work for you — because it’s what you’ve gotten used to.You compare new friends to old ones; you’d rather go back to the people who know you well, so you don’t have to start all over, building new private jokes, getting to a point where you never have to remind them you hate Thai food or whatever.
But you have to give it a chance — and it’s different from a breakup because you do still enjoy spending time with your old friends.It’s not completely toxic, so you don’t have to dump them and move on entirely, but when things get bitter or passive-aggressive, call your friends on it, and make it clear from your behavior that, if it’s always like that with them, you’ll have better things to do from now on.
Keep in mind too that friendships can go through cycles where people don’t get along or spend that much time together; you don’t love each other like it’s a car commercial every minute.Again, resist the urge to do something operatic; accept that sometimes people grow apart, take more time away from your old group, and see what develops.
Tags: friendships
Ah, friendships. I don’t know how close you are to your family, but you may have noticed that you can 1) love your family and 2) need to avoid them for at least a week. Being BFFs doesn’t mean you have to spend every second together. It should mean that you can go weeks without hanging out and be able to pick up right where you left off. Don’t stress about it too much–friendships grow and change. It’s possible that your current problems are coming from your groups’ reluctance to go along with that. Also, follow-up: do you always hang out as a group? Maybe some of the tension could be relieved by hanging out with them as individuals.
I may be way off the mark here, but as i read the letter, i wondered if the FUN times were when everyone was getting drunk together, and the bad times were when everyone was sober and there was no alcohol.
Just a thought.
Hey – sounds like the relationship I had with my BF through elementary, and jr/sr high. We hung out a lot together, were very good friends most of the time, but at times fought and would go for a few days/weeks without speaking. After high school we both went to the same college but gradually started to spend less time with each other and more time with other people. Now we’re barely in touch with each other – I saw her last summer for the first time in several years. We’re still on friendly terms, but our friendship died a natural death based on changing personalities, acquaintances, etc.
On the other hand, one good friend/roommate that I had for a while (we argued some and got on each other’s nerves at times) is still a great friend now even though we live in separate provinces. We have the kind of friendship that when we do see each other we just pick up where we left off.
Like Sars said, if you simply start making a conscious effort to spend more time with other people and see what happens it may be that you simply grow apart or that you enjoy your time together a whole lot more.
Well… I ´ve had this sort of experience with friends, and I found that spending some time appart usually fixes the problem and you can go back to being friends. On the other hand, there are other people in the world, and the difference between friendships and romantic relationships, is that it is very ok to have many friends. As in, you can make new friends while being in touch with old ones. And there are 6 billion people in the world. I ´m sure you ´ll find a dozen that you can befriend. Just try not to compare, each person is different, as is each friendship. You may never be as good friends with new people as you are with these people, but you can still have fun and they will still help you grow. Just my 2 cents.
Also, sometimes when you have a few friends and NO OTHER FRIENDS, the insular nature of the group becomes suffocating, and someone’s tendency to always forget to lock the door or whatever annoying thing they have gets bigger and bigger in your imagination, until you’re convinced that they KNOW you like to lock the friggin door and you KNOW that they JUST DIDN’T because they KNOW it ANNOYS you. BITCH.
You know? Like a romantic relationship, friendships that don’t have individual, other relationships outside the friendship get toxic. So, if you make a friend who is not one of your current BFFs, it might be enough of a “pressure valve,” almost, and take the pressure off your current group. Which is to say, you can make new, good, close friends without trading in your BFFs for a new group of BFFs. Also, true BFFs are like family, and you can just not talk or hang out for a few years and then get back together and it’s like nothing changed. See: my two best friends form high school, at age 23.
I don’t know if this helps, but I think friend groups do go through transitional phases. Especially if you start out as “kids”–sorry if that sounds insulting. My high school friends can be frustrating on occassion (I’m sure I can be to them as well, Lord knows I’m not perfect), but we’ve made it through several chapters of life (and have more to go). Right now, we’re in baby phase. That’s a tricky one, let me tell you. Some friends have dropped off, some have joined in (mostly spouses). Some people are more annoying than others, its true. Some people have absented themselves from the group for a time and joined back in for various grievances.
Everyone has other friends. Some of them we know since they cross-pollinate, some you don’t. You have a big party or a wedding or some such and invite friends from many groups. You pick up friends from college, grad school, etc. From work, from the gym, from church.
I have some best friends from High School and a best friend from college. Sounds like it would be a conflict, but these things can coexist. Or they do for me. Certainly neither of them calls me up and asks to confirm who is the bestest-ever-ever.
I guess you have to ask yourself, are your friends horrible? Are they actually bad, incompatible people? Or maybe you need to remind yourself of their good qualities, that everyone has some bad stuff, make a few new friends to widen your own friend circle and forge ahead.
I think the key is that you are now out of high school. It’s a change from living in the same neighborhood, going to the same classes, being almost exactly the same age, etc., you are broadening your life and moving on. I keep in touch with a couple of high school friends but my best friends were made in college, where I was thrown in with people who really had the same interests and focus as I did. It’s natural, and as Sars says, it doesn’t need to be dramatic. It’s kind of called ‘growing up’ and it’s bound to happen with most of your high school friends.
I agree with Sars–start spending some time with other people, and see what happens. My husband and I are great friends with a couple that I have known practically since birth. It’s hard to describe how much I love these people–they’re like my family. We joke about how we should just move in together and get a joint checking account to cut expenses. Nobody has ever understood me like they do, except one other mutual friend who lives out of state so we don’t see her as much.
That said, occasionally I find myself complaining to my husband about how one or the other of them is getting on my nerves. After all, we are all human and have annoying habits and traits. Partially for this reason and partially because our friends have started frequently including in our activities another couple whom we find kind of annoying, we have started taking “breathers” and hanging out some with my husband’s coworkers, usually on Fridays. This wasn’t planned, it just happened. But I find that after we haven’t seen each other for a while, I am overjoyed to see them again. I think a little time apart is a positive thing sometimes.
Anyway, as Sars and the others said, either this will happen to you too, or you’ll grow apart, but either way you’ll probably be happier in the end.
Oh lord, those types of friendships are the best and the worst, aren’t they?
My group of HS friends had a REALLY AWESOME summer/most of a year back in like 1996 (the year after we graduated) and after it was over, it was never the same. One person moved away, we all sort of lost touch, and now only see each other through facebook or something (even though we all still live in the same city… even the one who moved away, moved back.) It makes me sad at times, because it was SO FUN back in the day. But now, with kids and families and dogs and cats and mortgages, it’s just not the same.
I sometimes have daydreams that someday it will be like The Big Chill (hopefully without the funeral!) and we’ll all get together for some awesome weeklong bonding someday. It’ll never happen though. It sucks, but it’s life.
I agree that you probably just need a bit of a break from your very close friends. People you spend a lot of time around are bound to start getting on your nerves, and that’s fine, but if you want to maintain your friendship with them, it’d probably help a little to start spreading your time over more than one group, or person or whatever.
You’re also going through a transition into making friends at college, and in my experience, that’s a way of finding new friends who may be more similar to you as you are now, as opposed to the friends you’ve had awhile who you first met at a different time in your life. This isn’t to say that you are now incompatible with your high school friends, but I find that I can do certain things and have certain conversations with my friends from college that wouldn’t always happen with the close friends I still see from high school.
I think this is a good opportunity to meet lots of new people while lessening the time you spend with the friends that have been bothering you. Also, I wouldn’t worry about whether you’re “best friends” with your high school friends. You don’t have to define things for the friendship to be strong, and no one is going to make you say who your best friends are, so it’s putting a lot of power in a title that could be rather fluid.
Maybe y’all are TOO close. It’s sort of itchy & painful to outgrow friends, but it sounds to me as though that is happening with you. Do they seem “SO high school” (eyeroll) to you? Maybe because the friendships were formed in that time of your lives, and you’re no longer in HS, the friendships & jokes seem outdated and less mature than your new selves.
I think you’ll find that with friends this close, you can put that friendship down for awhile, and when you pick it back up it’s just the same. My HSBFF is like that – I hadn’t laid eyes on her in a decade, and after maybe 90 seconds we had a new inside joke & it was as though no time had passed. It’s a wonderful thing to have friends like that in your life, but I hope you can make new friends who are that close to your heart.
Also? It’s funny when your old friends & your new friends mix & they all start telling each other about dumbass stuff YOU did! Heh.
(@Alie – so true! LOL! Awesomely described.)
Platonic relationships can be just as abusive and just as damaging as romantic ones–sometimes more so because we’re not as likely to peg them as such. People talk about abusive romantic relationships all the time, but abusive platonic ones don’t exactly grab headlines.
I was in a verbally abusive romantic relationship at the age of 18, recognized it as such, and ended it after two months. A few years later I was in an abusive platonic relationship with a female friend that was mentally and emotionally torturous, and we became hugely co-dependent–but I failed to recognize it and end it for two years. An abusive BFF just doesn’t raise a red flag in your brain the way an abusive boyfriend does.
Travel safely, Sars. <3
Well this is a very timely vine: My group from high school/early university are just in the process of meeting up together for the first time in god knows how long. Yes we will party like it’s 1995. Until we get tired and need to get the baby home!
We fell apart as a group a couple of years out of school, and I third Sars’s advice not to make a scene out of the natural parting of ways. A lot of heartache and acrimony could have been avoided in our case – even when you’re annoying the crap out of each other, the loss of such formative friendships is nothing short of heartbreaking.
That said, it wasn’t all that bad really, and we stayed in touch in various ways and to varying degrees. Most importantly, we all got to be part of a really rather awesome wee gang for few years there, and I can’t wait to see everyone again next week.
This sentence really jumped out at me– “Obviously, when meeting someone, you can’t know if you’ll be BFFs, but often my friends and I find that making friends with other people really pales in comparison to being friends with each other.”
Making new, good friends really is hard, at least for most of us. If you don’t force yourself to do it, you will never make friends as good as the ones you already have, because you’ve known those people for years. I think this is particularly true in making the transition from high school to college (you go from seeing friends-in-the-making every day to maybe a couple times a week, unless you’re living together) and definitely from college to post-college, especially if you lived in a dorm setting in college (suddenly you have to plan times to hang out with people! good lord! and you’re not in all the same student organizations or classes!). At any rate, it’s worth it, but it takes real time, and you have to really commit to it, IMO… otherwise you just get stuck with old friends who might not really fit (or gradually drift away), but no one to take their place…
LizB, I think you hit on a really important point. Making friends in school or uni is quite easy. These people are always around, always hanging out, moving in the same circles, going to the same coffee shops and parties. But making friendships as an adult takes a lot more effort. You actually have to plan to meet up – you have to kind of, well, date! And it’s easy to think to yourself that if a friendship isn’t effortless then it isn’t right, or natural, or as good as your old ones. But this isn’t true. It’s always worth making the effort. I promise you, you still have amazing people ahead of you that you haven’t met yet. My mum, who’s nearly 60, is still making friends – wonderful, hilarious, brand new friends. It’s a lifelong process.
I second what Lauren says. I have definitely been confused and hurt within what is supposed to be a friendship.
In the tone of the letter, i got a sense from the writer that they saw it almost like an all or nothing/inside-outside thing. if Lost is a recent college grad, maybe it’ll take some time on this but… as Margle said, it’s a bit different after. I had a group of 4 core friends in college, and another group of friends from an activity I did, and another from my classes. But I’ve found that the need or desire to have separate groups has pretty much evaporated. Yes, there are still loose “circles” of people who’ve been friends for a while, but as we move around people fade in and out. New friends join us and groups merge, or diverge. It’s not a conscious process where i’m thinking “Do I feel like old friends or new?”. They are all just friends. Do things that you like to do, hang out with people you like. Hey- some of the “new” people that my core friends originally met ended up becoming even better friends with me or someone else when we all hung out over the years.