{"id":3123,"date":"2020-01-09T07:38:25","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T12:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/?p=3123"},"modified":"2020-01-06T14:43:39","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T19:43:39","slug":"best-ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/2020\/01\/09\/best-ends\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Ends"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

-Dr. Lastname<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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,\u201d which I\u2019m pretty sure is nonsensical advice because it\u2019s a chair, not a table, and if I try there\u2019s a huge risk it will look like crap and be useless to both of us. The problem is that I know that she hasn\u2019t changed at all during our friendship\u2014she\u2019s always been a little flakey\u2014but my feelings towards her have, and I have no idea why. This has happened to me before with other people that I\u2019ve been close to and I\u2019m 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\u2019m tired of losing patience with her and losing friendships in general.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"\"
F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship<\/a>\"\"
\n\n\n\n

While it’s good that you acknowledge\nthat your irritation with your friend is both unreasonable and part of a larger\npattern, knowledge, in this case, isn’t power. At least when it comes to\nchanging your feelings with this friend or future ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only does knowing you have these\nfeelings not help, understanding why you have them is also useless. A better\ngoal then is to accept that you have a serious, painful problem with\nfriendships and see what you can do to manage them\u2014your friendships and your\nfeelings\u2014<\/strong>more successfully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, ask yourself whether you choose friends with certain qualities\nthat, in the long run, tend to drive you crazy. Often, we gravitate towards the\ntypes of people we’re familiar with, even if such people a<\/strong>re hard to respect or get along with. That’s why dating one type of loser often leads to future relationships\nwith like-losers, or being raised by someone with a negative, irritating\nquality draws you towards similar(ly irritating) people. In other words, your\nbad habits may go beyond how you treat friends to how you pick friends in the\nfirst place. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, with possible help from a coach or therapist, look for such a pattern in past relationships. If you find one, accept that you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you don’t see a common bad trait among your ex-friends, ask\nyourself whether you tend to share too much and get too close too fast when you\nmeet someone you really like. It\u2019s exciting to meet someone you want to spend\nall your time with and tell all your secrets to, but friendships built on\nstrong chemistry and rapid sharing are also prone to intense explosions when\nyou encounter differences. You might quickly tell each other all of your\nsecrets without ever sharing the obvious truths about the kind of people you\nare day-to-day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The remedy, in such cases, is to accept the fact that you can\u2019t\nfollow your friendship-making passions and instincts. Instead, force yourself to let the friendship develop\nslowly and carefully, and with lots of time for each of you to be\nindependent, exercise individual quirks, and get to know not just each other’s\nexciting secrets but the boring stuff, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, continue your efforts to be nice to your friend while\nsharing less, <\/strong>keeping things\nnon-personal, and creating a little\ndistance. Try to reset the relationship so that it requires less communication\nand contact while making sure that the contact that you do have is friendly and\npleasant. It won\u2019t bring you closer, but it may allow you to turn down the heat\nand preserve a friendship you don\u2019t want to blow up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019t work and let it be. Knowing what doesn\u2019t work for you will give you a much better chance of finding lasting friendships that won\u2019t leave you hating your friend, yourself, and friendship in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STATEMENT:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I hate feeling so angry at a close friend and not knowing why; but I\u2019m ready to accept the fact that my feelings sometimes have a life of their own and that I can\u2019t make certain relationships work unless I first accept what those feelings will and won\u2019t let me do.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t necessarily good for you. And if the need for friendship drives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,58,18,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acceptance","category-boundries","category-friendships","category-happiness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3125,"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123\/revisions\/3125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fxckfeelings.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}