The Vine: October 8, 2014
I’m having trouble being a good friend, and could use some perspective on this whole mess.
About a year ago, a friend and coworker I’ll call Erica told me in confidence that she was having an affair with a mutual coworker, “Joe,” and the affair had been the cause of Erica’s recent divorce. Joe’s wife also knew, but had forgiven Joe and decided to try to make their marriage work. Unbeknownst to the wife, Joe and Erica had continued the affair, and had just broken up a few days before Erica told me all of this. About a month later, Erica and Joe got back together. And few weeks after that, they broke up again.
So for the past year I have been Erica’s only confidant as she and Joe have broken things off, gotten back together, and broken them off again close to half a dozen times. He’s separated from his wife and gone back to her twice. Erica has given him ultimatums, but continued to be with him after he chose his wife and their daughter over her. He’s told Erica that he loved her, but treated her pretty shabbily both in her personal and professional life. (The work complications could be a whole different email, but as I told Erica once, I can count on one hand the number times I’ve seen Joe treat her kindly. Without using all the fingers.)
Through this, I have brought cookie dough and wine when he’s dumped her and given her tough love when she’s taken him back. I have tried hard to listen when she was hurting and to be judicious with my personal opinions. (For the record, my personal opinion is that Joe is a selfish, manipulative bag of dicks who knows that Erica will forgive him for anything and blatantly abuses that fact.) Erica is knows I’m not a Joe fan, but I try to temper my language around her — as baffled as I am by it, I know she loves him and me bashing Joe isn’t going to change that.
Recently, Joe’s wife found out that he and Erica were still involved and kicked Joe out again. To me this seems like a repeat of the earlier separations, but Erica swears that this one is different and that Joe has finally chosen her. (I would argue that he didn’t choose her so much as he lost his other options, but I’m a cynic.) To be fair, Joe has gotten his own apartment and taken some small steps towards a legal separation, which he hadn’t done in the past, so there is chance that he might not go back to his wife this time. I still see giant red flags and warning signs all over this, but Erica doesn’t. She feels like they finally have the chance to really be together, and she’s hurt that I’m not being more supportive of her happiness. I have told her directly that as far as I’m concerned Joe is a person who, at his core, is totally okay with treating the woman that he loves like crap. I want her to be happy, but I just can’t like or respect him.
So this is my issue: Since she and Joe have gotten together this last time I’ve found it harder to separate my lack of respect for some of Erica’s choices from a lack of respect for her, and that’s a problem. I’m never going to be Team Joe-and-Erica-Forever, but I shouldn’t be actively rooting for my friend’s relationship to fail catastrophically. I know that if I don’t find a way to at least be neutral about this relationship our friendship can’t survive, so how can I put aside my personal feelings to make sure Erica doesn’t feel like she has to choose between Joe and me? Or is it even possible?
Signed,
Not Joe’s #1 Fan
Dear Fan,
Do you…want the friendship to survive? Or are you kind of done? Maybe it’s a little of both, but you sound kind of done to me, and it’s okay to feel that way. There does come a point, once everyone’s out of university, when a grown woman has to control how much of her personal drama she requires her friends to engage on even if she’s not so good at controlling the drama itself. You know? Erica’s not making the most self-respecting choices, it sounds like, but I think we’ve all made some sunk-costs mistakes with people we’ve loved whom we maybe shouldn’t have. We don’t always learn the first time, or the third or the thirteenth. But what we do have to learn the third time or thereabouts is that everybody else has their own problems, and we shouldn’t necessarily count on friends to come running with snacks and Kleenices when we decide yet again to decline the solutions available.
This is Erica’s life; she’s the one who has to feel good about her decisions, not you, and maybe that’s what you lead with the next time her “hurt” about your (valid, I would say) low opinion of the relationship’s prospects comes up. “Erica, I want you to be happy, whether it’s with Joe or not — but from what I’ve seen, he’s mostly made you upset and lonely. I really hope that’s over and I really am happy for you if it is, but I can’t pretend to adore the dude.” If she’s one of those “but I want you to be happeeee for meeeeeeeee” types, maybe an “I’m happy YOU’RE happy; heyyyy, how about The Good Wife this week, huh?” is the way to go.
But if it really is a situation where Erica is going to dump you as a friend if you show insufficient enthusiasm for her emotionally lazy married boyfriend, girl, let it happen and enjoy all the free time you’ll reap as a result. Friendship doesn’t actually mean signing off on every single thing the other person does; it means sometimes you roll your eyes but you love the other person anyway. And it also doesn’t mean thinking you can control the other person’s reaction to your incessant, eminently avoidable soap-operating. Tell Erica that you support her, but you need more time coming around on Joe (which, no rush — he’ll have a second girlfriend by Valentine’s Day, is my bet, and there you’ll go again), and if she can’t accept that, she can’t — but I don’t think you’re the one who’s having trouble being a good friend, actually. You’re just the only one with a grasp on what it means.
Tags: friendships workplace
Honestly, I cannot imagine wanting to stay friends with someone horrible enough to cheat on her husband and continue an affair with a married man. What exactly are you getting out of this friendship?
Hi Fan: when you subtract the Joe drama, what does it leave? In what ways does Erica support you, care for you, listen to you? If she’s really the person you can call at 3 am to give you a ride home/to the ER/to the airport, well, maybe it’s worth giving it a few months. If the what’s left isn’t much, that should tell you something. You are clearly a kind-hearted person; but if you asked this question, then you also have a fine spine and brain. Maybe Erica doesn’t appreciate those things as much as a friend should.
Why does Erica have to choose between Joe and you? Are you openly rude to Joe? You say you’ve tempered your comments about him-so where is that coming from? My guess is either Joe, because he’s an ass, or Erica because she’s a drama queen. If you are polite and civil to Joe when you have to be, why does anyone have to “choose?” U
Let me ask you a question. What does Erica bring to this friendship? Because you don’t mention anything good about this relationship-that you like the same movies or shows, or you go dancing together, or you both like to shop or eat out, or anything like that. It seems like almost the entire relationship is based on you listening to Erica & Joe drama.
Because-my answer to your question is that you finally, once and for all, tell her that you are done. You are happy for her if she is happy, and you will be civil and neutral around Joe, but you don’t want to hear one more bit of Joe drama. She’s going to turn that around and say the you are making her choose stuff. Don’t fall for it-you aren’t. You will be perfectly neutral and noncommittal and not disparage him, but you aren’t going to pretend to like him and you aren’t going to hold her hand if (read: when) he dumps her again. And then-enforce it. Every time she starts crying about Joe-“Erica, we talked about this. It’s not that I don’t love you, but I just am talked out on this subject. I am happy for you, and I’m going to be perfectly civil to Joe as long as he’s civil to me. But I also won’t pretend I think this is a good idea. But-the only way you’ll have to hear that is if you keep insisting on bringing it up. Otherwise, we’ll just agree to disagree. The only person who can make you choose is Joe or yourself. Hey, how about those Giants, huh?”
My guess is, once you refuse to be her drain pipe sucking down all her drama, she’s going to lose interest in the friendship and dump you. Or you are going to find out you really have nothing in common with her and move on yourself.
What I want to know is whether or not ERICA is a good friend. Friendship is a two-way street, and while it’s never going to be even and it’s unproductive to keep score, but if one party always needs and the other always gives, it’s unsustainable. I haven’t dumped truly good friends who went through hard times–even rough patches lasting a few years–when I also felt like I was valued for more than just a shoulder to cry on. However, I have ended friendships with people who were never there for me when I needed support and only focused on themselves and their drama. It’s hard to tell from the letter whether the OP and Erica were already close before Erica confided in her about Joe, but my gut is telling me that they weren’t. It’s okay to not be friends with somebody who was never really a friend to you.
Yup. Yup yup yup. Honestly, from my experience in this particular drama grove, the Erica in the relationship is far, far more aware of her beloved’s myriad shortcomings then he/she acts. The whole “I need your support”, especially for the second, third, ad infinitum go-rounds is less “I’m delusional” then “I WANT to be delusional, because I love someone unworthy and have invested a huge chunk of my life that I’ll never get back into a loser, and I don’t want to admit it.”
If you’re done, you’re done. Be kind and honest about that fact and then tell her you just can’t do the hand-hold routine anymore because it hurts you too much to see her treated/ treat herself like this, and then don’t engage. She’ll either drop you (which, let’s face it, would be a relief) or, perhaps, have come to Reality Jesus moment and drop him. Either way, you don’t have to be a supporting player in somebody else’s melodrama.
I have to agree. A friend of mine started dating his FIRST COUSIN and I had such a hard time dealing with the ick when they decided to get married (the weekend of her prom!). I just supported him as best I could and when that shit finally went sour (thank god!), I made sure I was there to be supportive again. In between, I just made nice noises and extracted myself from the mix as much as possible.
Hoo boy. Well, she’ll always choose Joe over you because nobody picks just a friend over whoever’s giving her a deep dicking…but it kinda sounds like the friendship is circling the drain here anyway, and you might just want to quietly exit or at least not contact her so much and drift away. She’s clearly not in any state of mind to see any reason and if she’s demanding enthusiastic love of Joe from you and you can’t fake that (and really, who wants to), then I think you’re not the blind-adoration friend she’s looking for. If such a thing exists, that is. She’s going to be even more insane that now she’s “getting what she wants.”
If you choose to stay in the fight, trying to change topics frequently or spend less time together or just saying “mmm” whenever wonderful Joe is brought up might help.
But overall, when it comes to the similar-ish situation I’ve been dealing with (except mine has been married for nearly 30 years to a guy who treats her like crap 95% of the time), it helps for me to realize that she’s never gonna leave him. She’s getting some benefit from this relationship, she doesn’t consider being single better than to be with him, and she’s willing to put up with whatever crap he dishes out. Having hopes of that never does any good. She wants to stay and it makes her partly happy, so… I can’t get anywhere arguing with that unless someday he really escalates into much more horribleness. Which I doubt will happen unless he finds a 21-year-old who will make him dinner every night until he dies, you know? He’s getting enough out of it to stay too.
One option is to let Erica know, gently, that you can be her friend, but you can’t be involved in conversations about the ongoing drama. That you and she differ on the decisions she should be making, and on what kind of guy Joe is, and you think it’s not useful to either of you to continually hash out the latest developments. Be her friend, but not her friend who talks with her about Joe.
Kleenices! Love!
Yuuuuup.
Dear God, I can’t even imagine the fallout from this folie-a-deux at the workplace. Here’s me sending up my wish that the poor LW reports to neither of them, and that neither of them are on her immediate team. Gah.
My shoulders are up around my ears with these two. One more ‘be happy for meeee!’ and I’d go straight to the quiver full of ‘get the fuck over yourself and pronto’ arrows. And start lettin’ ’em loose.
Not seeing what makes Erica deserve a good friend.
You say you’re her only confidant. I say you’re her audience. Her drama seems to need somebody to fill that role.
I hope she isn’t your only friend. I’d like to see you give your time to others who have a more healthy way of going through life and who give back to you. I totally assume Erica’s not a giver.
I think you have to ask yourself what you’re getting out of being her audience and comforter. It sounds very angst-y to me. I love a good trainwreck, soap opera, what have you. But at some point you have to question how much attention you give to these things, and if there is anything in your own life that it’s distracting you from fixing or achieving, and deal with your feelings about fixing or achieving whatever it is.
Everything ferretrick said.
Oh, God help me, this makes my teeth itch. Erica is someone who clearly, as others have beautifully pointed out, does not deserve a good friend because a)she’s determined to milk this for all the drama it’s got, and b)she’s equally determined to make piss-poor choices and expect approbation or at least perpetual tolerance, and NO, and c)while Joe is unquestionably a glistening bowl of afterbirth for treating his wife and daughter that way, Erica’s an accessory. These are two horrific people who, in a world jam-packed with suck, have managed to find each other. I’d wash my hands of it and wish them hell.
I ain’t mad. I’m just sayin’, is all.
Um. I think I actually meant “wish them well”, but sometimes Freudian slips come in my size. With lace and everything.
…I need to hear more about the teenage cousin wedding.
re: Laura says:
October 8, 2014 at 7:47 PM
Kleenices! Love!
That was pretty much my takeaway from this letter. I’ll never call them Kleenexes again. T-shirt.
(Nothing remotely useful to add to the discussion, just Kleenices Heh!).
+1 on the Kleenices love.
It’s grace notes like these that have kept me reading this site for over a decade.
Halo makes a great point: “What I want to know is whether or not ERICA is a good friend.”
Also:
Erica: Wants to be happy. (Good.) Wants to be happy with Joe. (Not good.) Wants to end up happily ever after with Joe, who is not only still married, but has a long-standing pattern of being just a really rotten guy who treats her like crap. (Delusional.) Has learned absolutely nothing from the experience and is still pursuing the daydream that things have changed somehow; Joe will now make all her dreams come true. (Just plain sad.)
With a guy like Joe, I sense that the outcome will be: He may leave his wife, and he may keep Erica around for a while… but only until the next gullible woman comes along.
Leopards don’t change their spots.