Quickly….

I definitely 100% appreciate your ‘essays’ of a response. And I heartily agree with you, communication is challenging in itself and all of the very many brilliant things you said. which sparked some ideas/thoughts. 🙂 Just to give you more information, all of the current stuff has been going on since early May. It now being mid july, having huge delays in dealing with anything repeatedly has me to the point that I dont care. I can care for a good number of days, but eventually, it just seems like a lot of energy. As for her past transgressions, I was clear about what hurt me, clear about what I wanted, and set fair boundaries. although we can each have different pasts and different definitions of what friendship is, I think that each relationship is a negotiation and a defining of terms, in a way. As with the other friend I mentioned, she let me know there was a boundary she didnt want me to cross. While you might appreciate repeated jokes about shampoo, she doesnt, so I know where her boundary lies and I respect that. That’s an early negotiation in the friendship. And if the boundaries are ignored repeatedly, or not really understood, that’s a pretty big problem.

What concerns me most about S is that she isnt hearing the boundary line being drawn, she doesnt understand what it means, and she doesnt know how to respect it. She has always been a bit immature, has had serious trouble with boundaries in many of her relationships, and I have had to communicate stuff like this a lot with her. Which is fine – it’s been a great learning experience for me to negotiate the friendship. Ultimately I wonder if it is just a situation where I have outgrown her. I’m healthy now, and she’s still destroying herself and in such a strange state of denial about it. I think the friendship has lost a lot of strength. She can be very understanding and compassionate, but she can also flip out and do very strange things (not just to me). I know I am very, very verbose (oy), and perhaps my desire to be really clear can actually make me more confusing. I’d been sitting on this issue for a long time and needed to write it out. I did give her a lot of compassion and understanding in that first email, but the long delays have drained me. I guess I’ll see how it goes. oh Kari, this does hurt.

Oh that was a great note and apt metaphor. I dont think I said that she did reply well to my second email back in May saying she’d been expecting me to figure it out and it wasnt fair and she was sorry, which was well said, but what remained were the huge delays, two weeks here, two weeks there. and when I asked her what was going on, that’s when she started a month later saying I “should have emailed her” – the contradiction was a bit puzzling. I love how you talked about relationships being overall more uplifting than negative. What I am guessing/thinking is that when there is a conflict or issue, there is a sort of fragility and need for careful handling of issues. You cant prolong or ignore things for big amounts of time without causing ruptures or breaks in the fabric of the friendship. the friendship can become only associated with the conflict and lose any beneficial connotations. Certainly there are ways to heal things, but prolonged neglect can really cause problems. I guess I’ll just see what her response will be (she sent an email saying she read it and is wanting to think about it before responding). which makes sense to me.