Trouble in Paradise
doglove
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Do you fight w/ your friends?
Like serious fights? Light hearted, easy to get over fights? Tell me details please.
Re: Do you fight w/ your friends?
How about light hearted debates? Usually about current events and politics.
The only time I remember fighting with a friend was in high school, a male friend who thought it was funny to throw a giant spit ball at me in class. I was p*ssed and wanted an apology. I got one a week later and everything was cool after that. We still see each other on occasion.
no, not really.
me and an old friend would get into stupid arguments back in the day when we would be drinking. i think because we were more honest with each other and let the other person know bluntly about the bad choices we were making about guys. i guess when we were sober, we kept our mouths closed. we probably had little arguments two or three times.
other then that, no. my friends and i don't argue. i have a friend i talk to almost every single day and sometimes we get annoyed with each other, so we take a break from talking so much.
Depends on the friend. There is one that I got into a pretty serious fight with where I was really upset.
Long story short, she can be a bit flaky when it comes to keeping plans and for a while she would cancel on me all the time. I was really upset and hurt and told her that I was angry at her and felt like she didn't respect our friendship. We didn't talk for a few days but then sat down and had a conversation about it and made up. There wasn't any screaming/yelling/childish behavior but I still consider it to be a "fight".
Why?
3/12 5 mi -- 49:22 Pace: 9:52
5/1 Half Marathon -- 2:11:22 Pace: 10:01
5/22 10k -- 56:29 Pace: 9:00
5/24 3.6 -- 29:03 Pace: 8:18
7/10 15k -- 1:44:46 injured Pace: 11:14
10/29 5k -- 28:24 Pace: 9:04
I had one w/ a friend last night, it was pretty upsetting. It's a friend of mine who constantly complains about the same things without working through them (almost 4 years spent as a friendship w/ her listening to the same issues). I always feel like I am stepping on eggshells around her because I don't want to hurt her feelings - she is prone to depression and is very hard on herself and won't let things go if something negative happens with someone.
I was in such a pissy mood yesterday and I wasn't really in the mood to keep playing the game of listening to the same problems with her, so I just started asking her about WHY she felt the way she did and what she was going to do about it, which started upsetting her. I probably didn't handle it in the best way, but I was trying to talk to her about it and she just shut down and kept saying she had worked through her issues and got defensive and left crying. I wanted to keep talking through it, but she didn't want to. She said she felt very "judged" by me.
I feel bad - I don't judge her on the way she feels, I agree with most of what she says and can understand why she feels the way she does, but I guess I do judge (I'm not sure that's even the right term) her because she doesn't do anything about it. She says she uses our friendship as a way to vent her problems, but I just get frustrated because she complains about the same things all the time. I don't want a friendship like this - I want to go out with her, talk about ourselves and our lives and challenge each other to think in new ways and just have a good time and be myself.
I understand she is not in the same place as me and that's probably why I feel like maybe I have outgrown this friendship. IDK. I feel bad, I did not want to hurt her, but I didn't want to keep pretending I was okay w/ the friendship the way it was.
To me, "venting" is a once in a while thing when you really need to get something off your chest and/or blow off some steam. People who need to "vent" on a daily basis are not people I really want in my life. I prefer well-balanced people who have a positive outlook on life, so I try to surround myself with those types, instead of negative crabapples.
In answer to your OP question, I don't fight with my friends. Sometimes we have interesting debates, but they don't get personal and I've never had a "we're not speaking until someone apologizes" kind of fight with a friend.
The exception would be maybe 3 years ago when my toxic BFF and I had a fight and "broke up" - to be fair, she screwed my sister out of a couple thousand bucks and bad-mouthed me to my sister first. Some of you moldy oldies probably remember her and when I finally got rid of her.
Anyway DL. I think you did the right thing. Your friend sounds like she needs a kick in theass and maybe you had to be the one to give it to her. Hopefully it makes a difference.
i agree with beebee. if you're always venting to me about the same thing, for four years nonetheless, i would be really frustrated too.
maybe this will be her wake up call to her and she'll actually change and get it together.
Well put, ITA.
I tried to think of the last time i had a capital F FIGHT with a friend....it was back in college when I was partying alot. My *BFF* had contracted herpies and was continuing to sleep around. I called her out on it and made threats of telling the men she was sleeping with, we had a good screaming match and haven't talked to each other since. I look back on that relationship now and cringe, it wasn't healthy and we were pretty polar opposites. I think we both just liked to drink and party so we were together all the time, so we became BF by circumstance.
Flash forward several years...the quality of my friendships has increased tenfold. I can count on one hand my *friends* right now, everyone else is an acquaintance. I'm pretty happy with it, we have minimal drama and supporting relationships. Even though we don't all live by each other, or even in the same state, the relationships are very solid.
I hope so BBE. I think she is in serious denial. She even said she had "worked through" her issues last night when she was getting defensive during our talk, but just 20 minutes before she had been talking about the same mess that constantly drags her down in her life.
I think I am ready for things to be different in my life - I want to be surrounded by well balanced people too. I've done a lot of work to get to a healthy place in my life and feel like it's time for me to step it up and put myself into healthy situations. I think I finally figured out last night that listening to that for 2-3 hours and going home mentally exhausted was just not what I wanted to do.
She was exhausting and filled with drama. Drama she usually made. Very dependent on me and when it got to the point I finally felt like I had nothing in common with her and we weren't in the same place in life, I stopped returning her phone calls and cut her out of my life.
I don't remember ever fighting with her. I think I cut it off before I couldn't take it anymore and blew up at her. It was hard at first, she would call me and cry and ask why I didn't like her.
I think the only thing you can do is tell her the truth and say you need a break from the friendship.
This this this! You need to do this.
Yes, part of being a good friend is being supportive. But you also need to take care of YOU and make sure that YOU are nurtured by the friendship too. This sounds very one-sided and a little soul-sucking and hey, to me, that's not a friendship anyway.
What you said above is exactly what I said to FI last night when I got home.
Not really anymore. In college, occassionally. but for the most part, anyone who is immature enough not to talk something out, isn't worth my time. Well, except for my DH, I guess.
I had a friend like this (if you remember, the one who spent 18 years of her life as an occasional booty call for some dude, but is still in love with him). I dumped her for good last summer after she flaked out on plans again - plans she knew were important to me. I just never called her again and she never attempted to contact me again either. For a time I felt bad that I didn't feel bad about it. My BFF is still friends with her and tells me what's going on in her life, and I wish her well, but I just have zero desire to be sucked back in to her hot mess vortex. She was fun when I was Newly Single Girl, but once I got my shiit back together, I outgrew her. She was almost 40 years old but still had relationships that would be immature by high school standards. I didn't want a front-row seat to that.
Honestly, some people are meant to be in our lives at certain points and for a set amount of time. It's rare to find a life-long friendship. It's almost like a marriage. You find one or two that you grow with in similar ways and both put in the work to maintain the relationship over decades. Everyone else you just date for a while until it peters out. Such is life.
So, to answer your question, I fight with my short-term friends. I disagree occasionally with my long-term friends, but apologies are quick to come and grudges aren't held.
I have had a couple serious discussions and disagreements with my friends. Usually its about politics or religion (all the forbidden topics lol) and in the end we usually agree to disagree.
I hope you and your friend can work it out.
I have had fights with friends. So far, only one has stuck around afterwards. We lived together and we were fighting a lot. After she moved out, we didn't talk for several months. But then we started to miss each other and talking again. She is once again one of my best friends.
I had an ex-friend that every time I tried to talk to her about an issue I was having, she pulled the 'my life is worse' card. For instance, my wedding ceremony was a whole 5 minutes long. Seriously, I have the DVD to prove it. I was really upset about it for a little while. When I tried to vent to her about it (XH was just making things worse for me), she would say "At least you didn't have this and this happen at yours". That was her standard MO. The final straw came when I tried talking to her about how her actions on the day of my bachelorette upset me (she had set her moving day for the same day and invited all of the same people who were going to be at my bachelorette. So instead of being in the mood to have a party that night, all of my friends were too tired from helping her move and wanted to go to bed right after we had dinner. And she was the one planning my bachelorette...). Instead she tried turning it so that I was being ungrateful and not understanding and at the point I was done. The last time we talked was when I told her I was pregnant. DS is now 7 months old.
Just wanted to add DogLove (apologize as I didn't read all the way through so may be kind of repeated): You NEED to be able to say things like this to your friends- if a friend doesn't call out a constant negative complainer, who will?? I would expect my friends to let me know when something in my life is a bit off, and expect them to want (& appreciate) reciprocation.
Do you get what I'm saying here? I haven't gotten into heated life-changing fights w/ all my friends; don't worry not getting feedback from drama llama here.
Thinking specifically of 2 that have happened. I am so utterly grateful that both friendships held strong and grew from said fights. One took a yearish break, but we're now back on track and better than ever. Essentially, if she can't take it/ doesn't want to deal with it, then I think that you're better for being done with the friendship, and hopefully moving on toward more mature relationships.
I don't think I've ever gotten in a fight with BFF.
I got into it with a good friend last summer when she was acting like a total biotch for no reason. We were both drinking, so the next day we apologized, but things haven't been the same since. We rarely talk anymore and it makes me sad that we weren't good enough friends to get over something so stupid.