On Breakups and Betrayals

As any who read this blog will already know, I am very recently divorced. For all the gory details on that particular breakup, you can see this post here. This post is not about that. Well, at least not directly, anyway.

This particular post is about friendships. Throughout my life friendships have always been something that I've struggled with, both to acquire and maintain. It will probably come as quite a shock to anyone who knows me - both in real life and on the internet - that I'm actually pretty shy and get easily freaked out when I'm in a group of people I don't know.  I work to hide this by going overboard and being outgoing and social and gregarious, but it's all an act. Internally I'm usually pretty spazzed that I'm stuck in a place, talking to people I don't know anything about. This might become apparent to people at some point in the friendship, as once I begin to be comfortable with people I let down my guard and instead of being Ultra Social Butterfly Girl I revert to my more mundane personality. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, I just know that this is what happens.


Because of this internal social anxiety, and the difficulty I have of letting people in enough that I can feel comfortable not constantly putting on a show and trying to please them, I become quite attached to people I consider "friends". I attempt to maintain contact with them, even when our lives are pulling us in different directions. I go out of my way to call, or email, or text them on a regular basis just to maintain the friendship level that I have tried so hard to achieve with that particular person. This also means that when someone decides they don't want to be my friend anymore, it's a particularly heartbreaking occurrence for me. It's worse than when I have been dumped by a boyfriend because I usually invest more time and emotional energy into my friendships than I have to most boyfriends. It also serves to reinforce my own anxieties and self-image issues, since I obviously wasn't a good enough person for this "friend" to even want to still associate with me. Not wanting to be romantic with someone I can understand, but to feel that this person is so abhorrent that you can't even stomach allowing the relationship to fall off gradually into awkward run-ins at the grocery store? That you must immediately and forcefully eject this person from your life entirely? Am I really such a horrid person that this step is necessary?

So, yes, as you can see, I spiral down hill pretty quickly after such an episode. It has actually only happened three times in my entire life, and each time burns like acid whenever I think about it. One of those times, the person even came back into my life later and we are now, if not close friends, at least acquaintances. Yet still the day that he shunned me burns me like a brand to the heart just to think about it.

The first time this happened is the particular instance I mentioned in the last paragraph. The person and I had been more-or-less best friends for five years, spanning the time from when I was 12 to the time when I was 17. We had dated off and on during that time, but the friendship was always the important part to me. Unfortunately, his girlfriend at the time (who I privately think of - and not so privately, as I'm writing it here - as an evil, manipulative bitch) told him that if he didn't actually drive out to my house - with her in the car! - and tell me that he was going to live his life from this point on pretending that we had never met, she would break up with him. He did. I managed to not cry until they had gotten in the car and driven away. Many years later, when I was 22, this ex-friend contacted me and told me he had made a terrible mistake. We talk now, but no matter what I do I can't erase the pain that came with that one harsh betrayal of my trust and friendship.

The next instance was much less concrete but still just as hurtful. A girl I had known since elementary school, who had moved away when we were in High School, finally got herself a MySpace page. She and I had lost touch for a couple years, but I had always regretted it and had sought her from time to time on MySpace (I didn't use Facebook, back then) in an effort to reconnect. When I found her, I was excited and immediately sent her a message. I don't know what I was hoping for - certainly not one of those running down the beach into each others arms kind of scene - but whatever it was, I didn't get it. What I got back was a nasty reply about how much she despised me and never wanted to talk to me again. I was crushed. This was the girl that I had wanted so badly to reconnect with? The person who still featured in some of the stories that I told when recounting days in High School? What had I done to receive such vitriol from her? I still don't know. Strangely enough, she friended me on Facebook, but we still haven't really spoken.

And now the third, which is actually what prompted this post on the entire thing. At the moment, this one hurts terribly badly. Yet, strangely, remembering and recounting the other times that this has happened has made me realize that this one isn't so bad. It hurts, and I wish there was some way that I could fix things or make them go back to the way they were, but it isn't nearly as devastating as those I described above. Mostly the thing that hurts me about it the most is the timing.

I got divorced back in July. My husband had already moved out before then and we had been living more-or-less separate lives since he said he wanted a divorce back in March. As soon as word got out that we were getting a divorce, things started getting a bit strange for me in terms of friends. A lot of people stopped returning my calls. My house, normally chock full of people on any given night, rang silent and empty for weeks. I tried calling people and inviting them over, but it seemed that every always had something else to do.

As I said before, I don't really like to watch friendships die. This time it felt particularly important because I really needed friends to help see me through this very difficult time for myself and my kids. On top of that my kids had formed attachments with a lot of the people in our lives and now not only were they missing their father but also all of these other adult friends that they had come to rely on. They couldn't understand why all of a sudden none of their grown-up friends wanted to come play with them anymore, and seeing how upset they were with all of this, to have that extra stress on them just broke my heart.

I began attempting to repair whatever was going wrong. I called and pestered some people until they agreed to come to the house and hang out for an hour or so. I talked with them, openly and honestly, about how I would not expect anyone to choose sides - and I was fairly sure that my ex wasn't going to either - and how all I really wanted was for them to come over and play games or hang out again. I mentioned to some how the kids really wanted to see them. And most of all I tried to let them know how important they were to me, how much their friendship meant, and that I was more than willing to do whatever they needed to make them feel comfortable being my friend again.

For some this worked. I was able to repair a couple friendships and get things back to semi-normalcy. However, in one very notable instance this tactic did not work.

One of the friends that my husband and I had made since coming to Ohio had, as soon as the divorce was mentioned, immediately disappeared from my life. I thought that, like some of our other friends, he was just someone who didn't know exactly how to handle the situation with the two of us and was therefore avoiding us. I came to find out, however, that this was not true. This friend was spending copious amounts of time with my ex.

I thought this was weird for a number of reasons. For one, said friend and I had always gotten on better than said friend and my ex. Whenever this friend would come over, I was the one who would just sit with him talking for hours at a time. Two, my ex had actually denounced all the friends we had here when he told me he wanted to move back to California - saying that everyone here was by far more my friend than his (something I found to be a rather annoying accusation, since we had lived for quite a number of years in the place where all of "our" friends were actually his). And three, I knew that this friend and my ex had much less in common than said friend and I had. Not that this friend and my ex had nothing in common, but I couldn't imagine them sitting around and talking about the things that they did for very long before exhausting their mutual interests.

Still, I chalked it up to a misguided brotherhood solidarity bid and began attempting to reconnect with this friend. I felt that, if he could just see that neither my ex nor myself needed him to choose sides - that, indeed, it would probably be better if he did not and remained friends with both of us since we were attempting to part on decent terms - that he would forgo his show of solidarity and return to being my friend as well. This did not work. I called him, I texted, I invited him over. All of this met with vague excuses and me being ignored. When I saw him in the real world and attempted to strike up a conversation, he ignored me and swiftly left the location I was in. Still, I held out hope. Perhaps when my ex moved to California, this friend would realize that what he should do is accept my overtures and go back to being my friend!

My hopes of this were dashed a couple months before my ex even left. I was out at a LARP, having a good time, when my phone rang. My ex had the children for the weekend, so I had kept my phone on me for emergencies and immediately checked it. I saw that it was a text message, so I checked it. It was from my friend. When he started out, I didn't know exactly where he was going, but I thought maybe he was just talking to me - and was ecstatic about it - so I continued reading. He was telling me about how he went over to his ex-girlfriend's house (a girl that I hadn't really thought good for him since they had had very dissimilar life views and he had lied to her - repeatedly - about both having other girlfriends and his other activities that were completely innocuous - like going to a play with me). He told me he had just gone to talk to her and not to get back together with her. I actually didn't care if he chose to start seeing this girl again, even though I thought it was a poor choice, since he's a freaking grownup and can make his own decisions.

Apparently, when he went to try to repair the friendship with this ex-girlfriend, she had revealed to him that she knew about his cheating on her with various other girls. This, naturally, ruined his chances of becoming friends with her again. I don't know exactly how that conversation went because I didn't even know what all had happened until another friend of ours (a girl that he had, ironically, cheated on the ex-girlfriend with) gave me the entire story. At the time, all I knew was that he was telling me that somehow I had talked about him behind his back to this ex-girlfriend, ruining his chances to be her friend. Due to this supposed behavior, he no longer wanted to be my friend and he was swinging by my house (where I was not, remember, I was LARPing) to pick up some things he had left there. He had, for all intents and purposes, friend-broke-up with me.

I was shocked. This actually made the entire rest of the game that I was playing less fun (although shooting people with airsoft guns when you're angry can be pretty therapeutic). I still didn't know the whole story at the time, but I knew enough to know that this was all bullshit. I replied to him, telling him that I didn't even have any method of contacting this ex-girlfriend (I didn't have any telephone number nor any electronic communication with her) and therefore did not understand how he could say that I had been talking to her about anything. He ignored that text and hasn't talked to me since. It has now been months.

Now, if I had actually talked to this girl and told her what was only the truth - that this guy had cheated on her while they were together - I could at least see some justification for his anger. I still think that he brought the situation on himself by not being honest with her in the first place, but regardless of my personal opinion on his behavior I also felt it wasn't my place to get into the middle of it. If he had any possible reason to assume that it was me, beyond base conjecture with absolutely no supporting facts, I could even then have some measure of acceptance about the entire situation. But the truth is there's none of that. I had absolutely no possible way of doing the thing he was and still is accusing me of.

If he just didn't want to be my friend, that would have hurt. This cut deeper because he was falsely accusing me of being a terrible person and not giving me any opportunity to absolve myself of the supposed wrong-doing.

It also hurt a lot worse because of his timing. Right at this time I was not only dealing with a divorce but also with a lot of other friend-drama. One of my friends had left the state and, at the time, had said they weren't moving back. Another of my friends had left the state, again, to move in with their girlfriend and wouldn't be moving back for at least a year. Previous drama had meant that a lot of the friends I made when we first moved here were no longer people I could or would associate with. And due to the situation surrounding my divorce, my husband's ex-girlfriend was also someone that I was not and am still not on completely solid ground with.

So here I was, dealing with all of this and thinking "well, at least I've got this one friend!" and it turns out that I don't even have that. To rub salt in that wound, my girls had become rather attached to this guy as a fixture in their lives since our move here. They treated him, more-or-less, like an Uncle. So now, at this point, my kids' world has been completely upended and everything has changed. And it is made even worse by the fact that this person has left too, making their life that much more unstable and that much harder to deal with.

I'm thinking about all this right now because this person hasn't taken me off of their FaceBook and I just saw a post pop up from them today about how they want more players in their role playing game. I feel an extra little dig about the whole thing because a) I attempted to contact this friend again just a little while ago to repair the friendship and b) this guy is a really, really good gm for the system he's running. I frequently reminisce about the game that we were playing before everything went all to pot in my life. I would really like to be able to join his game, repair the friendship and be able to have a chance to play under an awesome gm again. But all of that is lost, for the want of one conversation that he just refuses to have with me to get it all straightened out.

Or, you know, in the perfect world in my head that's all it would take to fix things. Just one cup of coffee for each of us, we honestly lay our cards on the table and then manage to figure out that there was no reason to fight in the first place. Problem solved, everyone is happy.

The world in my head is a nice place.