I had two former friends stop speaking to me right at the start of the lockdown, one saying I was “too mean” (no 20-plus text messages in a row? What a pity!) the other had a meltdown on their public Facebook group and then blocked me. Why do people discard me when I am no longer of use to them?
Eleanor says: Because it sounds like you’re kind of mean.
That’s OK, plenty of the people I love best in the world are kind of mean. They cringe at displays of affection, hate the pageantry of social media and are quick to declare things and people “stupid”.
There’s some contempt in how you’re talking about these former friends of yours, and it’s probably not difficult for them to pick up on that – not many people want to have their feelings described as a meltdown (even if that label is accurate), or have their ways of communicating seen as foolish and excessive. People choose who to have in their life because they want their life to feel nice; enough cantankerousness and they’ll wonder why they keep you around.
The trouble is some level of cantankerousness just feels factually fair. Sometimes our friends do have meltdowns, or unreasonable expectations about how available we will be throughout the day. Sometimes they’re too influenced by norms that we don’t endorse and expect us to be effusive about something we don’t think deserves celebration, or to join in rituals we don’t see the point of.
But if you and I are friends, the fact that something matters to you can make it matter to me. My considered beliefs about how often people should text, or how appropriate it is to vent emotions online, are just one part of how I interact with those things. The other part is wondering how I can show my friend that she matters to me; how I can demonstrate that my reasoning and behaviour is different for the fact that she is in my life.
This isn’t a matter of valuing everything your friends value. Sometimes it’s more touching if you don’t: when my sour friends who would never celebrate their own birthday make the effort to dress up for mine, I know they are doing so because – and only because – it matters to me.
It has to be reciprocal – if it matters to you to not look at your phone all day then it should matter to your friends that you have that liberty. There are ways to express differences like this that don’t involve litigating who’s wrong (“I’m sorry I’m not as responsive by text as you might like, I really try to keep my screen time down.”).
But if you interact with your friends’ values and habits by adjudicating them on their factual merits, you’re missing the part of friendship that involves deciding not to do that. You’re missing the part that says “what you want from me matters to me just because you want it”.
Of course, you might not want a friendship that asks you to value too much of what you normally wouldn’t. That’s fair.
But if you show people that you don’t value what they do, and that it doesn’t especially matter to you that they value it, then they aren’t necessarily discarding you when they move on. They’re just acting on what was already true: there are a lot of differences in the relationship, and not enough love to put them aside.
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