Best Ends

Posted by fxckfeelings on January 9, 2020

Lasting relationships based on instant connections are like positive news stories and quick-yet-healthy weight loss techniques; they’re so nice to hear about but so hard to believe they aren’t bullshit. Getting close to someone quickly feels wonderful, but like most good feelings, it isn’t necessarily good for you. And if the need for friendship drives you to become close before you really know someone, you are more likely to discover their bad or obnoxious side when it’s too late to back away without causing pain. Instead, develop your own ways for getting to know someone safely and slowly. That’s the only way to make a BFF without all the unnecessary pain and BS.

-Dr. Lastname

I have a very close friend who is driving me crazy! I’m not sure why but I feel as though everything she says is mindless and completely irritating. For example, she offered to lend me an upholstered chair for a work project. I know that was a nice thing for her to do, but it was the wrong color. And when I told her that it was the wrong color, she said I should “paint it,” which I’m pretty sure is nonsensical advice because it’s a chair, not a table, and if I try there’s a huge risk it will look like crap and be useless to both of us. The problem is that I know that she hasn’t changed at all during our friendship—she’s always been a little flakey—but my feelings towards her have, and I have no idea why. This has happened to me before with other people that I’ve been close to and I’m sick of it. My goal is to figure out why my feelings have changed and what can I do to stop being so irritable, because I’m tired of losing patience with her and losing friendships in general. 

F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship

While it’s good that you acknowledge that your irritation with your friend is both unreasonable and part of a larger pattern, knowledge, in this case, isn’t power. At least when it comes to changing your feelings with this friend or future ones.

Not only does knowing you have these feelings not help, understanding why you have them is also useless. A better goal then is to accept that you have a serious, painful problem with friendships and see what you can do to manage them—your friendships and your feelings—more successfully.

First, ask yourself whether you choose friends with certain qualities that, in the long run, tend to drive you crazy. Often, we gravitate towards the types of people we’re familiar with, even if such people are hard to respect or get along with. That’s why dating one type of loser often leads to future relationships with like-losers, or being raised by someone with a negative, irritating quality draws you towards similar(ly irritating) people. In other words, your bad habits may go beyond how you treat friends to how you pick friends in the first place.

So, with possible help from a coach or therapist, look for such a pattern in past relationships. If you find one, accept that you’re allergic and respond badly to certain traits in others, no matter how familiar and appealing those traits may seem at the start. Maybe that means you can never make things right with friends that you’ve wronged, but it will also free you to find better friendships with non-doomed personality types.

If you don’t see a common bad trait among your ex-friends, ask yourself whether you tend to share too much and get too close too fast when you meet someone you really like. It’s exciting to meet someone you want to spend all your time with and tell all your secrets to, but friendships built on strong chemistry and rapid sharing are also prone to intense explosions when you encounter differences. You might quickly tell each other all of your secrets without ever sharing the obvious truths about the kind of people you are day-to-day.

The remedy, in such cases, is to accept the fact that you can’t follow your friendship-making passions and instincts. Instead, force yourself to let the friendship develop slowly and carefully, and with lots of time for each of you to be independent, exercise individual quirks, and get to know not just each other’s exciting secrets but the boring stuff, too.

Meanwhile, continue your efforts to be nice to your friend while sharing less, keeping things non-personal, and creating a little distance. Try to reset the relationship so that it requires less communication and contact while making sure that the contact that you do have is friendly and pleasant. It won’t bring you closer, but it may allow you to turn down the heat and preserve a friendship you don’t want to blow up.

It’s hard not to want to make a close friendship work, but if you want to be better at close friendships, period, you first have to discover what can’t work and let it be. Knowing what doesn’t work for you will give you a much better chance of finding lasting friendships that won’t leave you hating your friend, yourself, and friendship in general.

STATEMENT:

“I hate feeling so angry at a close friend and not knowing why; but I’m ready to accept the fact that my feelings sometimes have a life of their own and that I can’t make certain relationships work unless I first accept what those feelings will and won’t let me do.”