What do you do when a friend demands more time and attention than you have to give? Read the advice of our resident sage Maddy Phillipps – and see the foot of the story for where to email Maddy with your own questions.
DEAR MADDY: I have a needy friend. If we have a quiet week of texting or she doesn’t think I’ve been “active” enough in asking about her life, I get sent a long missive about why I’m being a bad friend, which inevitably induces a huge amount of guilt in me… teamed with a certain helping of resentment because I shouldn’t have to apologise for living my life – should I?
For years, she was married and I was single – and in the past year I have gotten married, and naturally I want to spend time with my husband. We all get busy. Am I being a bad friend or should my friend adjust their expectations?
Cadence
MADDY WRITES: Cadence, as is mostly the case when relationships start to crumble around the edges, no one person is to blame, or in the wrong, or the “bad friend” here. Everyone has different preferences for how, and how often, they communicate with friends. Some over-achievers are impossibly hyper-responsive, warping the space-time continuum to reply fulsomely and instantly to messages around the clock while working full-time, raising twin toddlers, and bottling their own preserves. Other advanced linguists have long ago abandoned their native tongue, and now communicate only in the dialects of Meme, Gif, and Sticker. Personally, I have ADHD and struggle to focus on texts, so my messaging style is wildly inconsistent: I either reply promptly, or become so overwhelmed with guilt and anxiety about not replying that I avoid messaging apps altogether for weeks, making me feel ten times worse. Result!
None of these individual communication styles is inherently right or wrong, they’re just different (well, mine obviously needs some work, but this column very much operates on the time-honoured principle of “Do as I say, not as I do.”) That means you’re allowed to want the kind of friendship where your comms ebb and flow between feverish messaging all day, and sending nary a meme for a full fortnight, depending on what else you have going on. And your friend is allowed to want the kind of friendship where you message consistently throughout the week, and regularly check in on how the other person is doing. But these are divergent preferences, and you and your friend are responding to the differences in a way that isn’t working. Instead of collaborating to bridge the gap, you’ve ended up trapped in a vicious cycle that’s damaging your friendship.
How to break the cycle
Here's how I think the cycle goes. For your friend, regular communication and actively asking how she’s going are central to feeling good in the relationship, because this makes her feel loved and appreciated by you, and confident that the friendship is solid as a rock. And reading between the lines of your letter, it sounds like you enjoyed more frequent comms with her before you met your husband, but haven’t explained to her that this preference has changed now that you’re married. So your friend’s need for regular comms to feel secure in the relationship, together with the recent – and, from her perspective, unexplained – reduction in contact, are leading her to interpret lulls as signs that something is wrong, leaving her feeling insecure, vulnerable, needy, and unloved.
Why isn’t she communicating those feelings to you? Because she already feels powerless, and she fears that exposing that soft inner self to you would only exacerbate those uncomfortable feelings. What if you respond to her needs with the same contempt with which she treats them? What if you confirm her worst fear – that you’re not talking to her because she’s not only a bad friend, but a bad, needy, succubus of a person? So instead, she tries to wrest back the power by asserting the moral high ground – guilt-tripping you and angrily labelling you the bad friend, so she doesn’t have to be. Ironically, however, it’s those very actions that make you see her as needy and resent her for it, making you want to talk to her less, not more – and so, the cycle begins anew.
So far, so insidious, but the good news is that even long-established cycles can be stopped in their tracks if starved of their usual fuel. Your cycle is driven by an absence of open and honest communication and vulnerability between the two of you, so starting a genuine dialogue with your friend is the way to break it. Meet up with your friend in person, setting aside lots of time for an unhurried tête-à-tête. Open by explaining that an issue about how often/actively you communicate keeps recurring, and her friendship and happiness are really important to you, so you want to address it. After that, set out your perspective. Emphasise that you’ve been communicating less because you’re wanting to spend more time with your husband, not because of anything bad about her. Then acknowledge that she wants more communication, and that the lulls upset her, but be clear that responding with long messages calling you a bad friend is not ok – instead, you’d love her to tell you more about how she feels and why in these situations, so the two of you can figure out some new communication ground rules that work for both of you. Hopefully, you’ll be able to settle on a middle ground that works, like scheduling regular catch-ups and check-ins, or promising that if you can’t reply properly straight away, you’ll text her back and let her know when you’ll be able to send a fuller response.
Cadence, one caveat. For this conversation to go well, you need to go in seeking to reconnect, not to upbraid. Yes, you can and should tell your friend her behaviour has been hurtful, but if your words are imbued with a desire for payback or punishment, there’s no way she’ll feel safe enough to open up. Instead, she’ll revert to her usual coping mechanism of anger and blame, reaffirming the well-worn ground of the existing cycle and closing off the possibility of breaking a new trail. Of course, you can’t control her behaviour. Even if you conduct yourself with all the steady serenity of an elderly manatee cow, she could still react badly, but at least then you’ll know you did everything within your power to set things right.
Maddy Phillipps is a barrister, freelance writer and clinical psychology student. EMAIL your life problems to dearmaddy@tvnz.co.nz.
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