BG: I've probably mentioned my friend A before, well actually after yesterday I might refer to her as more of a 'frenemy'. Recently A had some quite major surgery and she's had a pretty rough trot - she was incapacitated and in significant pain so she hasn't been able to get out and then a few weeks after the surgery she got DVT and had to go home to her parents to be looked after full time. So she's had a rough time, and I think a lot of people (including myself) have not made the time available to go and see her while she is laid up. /End BG
Sunday was supposed to be a nice day so BF and I decided that since we needed to head out that way anyway, that we would ring A and see if she was feeling up to a short excursion out to have a coffee or a drink and sit in the sun for a while. A accepted enthusiastically and we made a time to collect her since she can't drive her car right now.
We got to A's house and she wasn't quite ready to go - A is a chatty soul by nature (one of the reasons why being so isolated was hard for her) and between her going off on tangents and having trouble getting dressed due to her stitches, it was nearly an hour before we made it out of her house (not a big deal, BF and I weren't on a schedule)
We got to the wine bar and found a table tucked away in the corner of the courtyard... a nice sunny spot. A was moving quite slowly, she was still in pain and not able to walk long distances, so we went to the bar and got her a drink and all settled in for a chat. Sometime later two guys walked into the courtyard looking for a seat and A quite literally broke off in midsentence to call out 'Hi! Hi! You can sit over here!' The two men (complete strangers) demurred because the table next to us was for five or six and they were only two, and there was a small table available on the other side of the courtyard, without missing a beat A said 'Oh, then you can join us!' BF and I weren't that keen to share our table with strangers, but since the invitation had been issued, we could hardly speak up and tell them to go away.
Once the men had sat down A was getting them to tell us their life story. They were both in the Army but looking to get into property development, they lived in the outer suburbs, they were flatmates and so on. They were dissecting the US property market in detail and A hadn't said a word to us in fifteen minutes when BF escaped to get another drink. When he didn't come back for some time I managed to find a break in the conversation and extract myself and as I had already guessed, BF was inside and he was livid, which was understandable, since we had taken the time out of our day to take her out, it was fairly galling to be casually disregarded when something better came along. Not to mention that one of the men kept making fairly blatant remarks about being attracted to BF, which was making him extremely uncomfortable.
I sent BF to get us a table at the restaurant we had agreed to go to for dinner and I went back to get A, telling her only that we were hungry and wanted to go to dinner and she agreed to leave (and thankfully didn't invite her new friends) Outside I had a private word with her about how upset we were that she would exclude us from the conversation, and that while we didn't feel that we were owed thanks or praise for taking her out because that's what friends do, treating us like we were merely a convenience was hurtful to us.
A's response was to storm off saying that she 'didn't have to put up with this' and wouldn't have dinner with us 'if this was how it was going to be'. I was concerned because she had said previously that she was feeling unwell and faint and now she wanted to take a taxi home, but she wouldn't accept a lift so I had to let her go. BF arrived in the middle of all this and A immediately accused him of 'sending me to do his dirty work' and that she had been making eye contact with BF the whole time even if she hadn't been talking to him. I maybe shouldn't have put myself in the middle, but I was hurt by her behavior too. A accepted no responsibility for the arrival of the two men saying that she never wanted to talk to them in the first place and they asked to sit with us (both untrue) and that she was waiting for one of us to pipe up and say we should go to the next bar so she could get rid of them.
A then hobbled away, leaving me feeling fairly rotten for saying anything, although as BF pointed out if she had wanted to get rid of them so badly she had shown no sign of it, talking to them enthusiastically from the time they sat down until we got up to leave. I sent her a text asking her to let me know when she got home safe and didn't receive an answer back until 10.30pm saying only that she was home and she hoped we 'enjoyed dinner' since she hadn't had any yet...
I'm a peacemaker by nature, I don't like conflict, I go out of my way to make people feel happy. But in this case I really felt that my good nature had been abused. Was I wrong to speak up? Should I have simply accepted that A's friendly and outgoing nature was part and parcel of being friends with her and made allowances for the fact that she had been sitting at home for weeks going stir-crazy, or should A have taken some responsibility for her own actions?