Frenemies – Page 3 – Etiquette Hell

People Can Be Oh So Bad But How You React Can Make It Ten Times Worse

July 18, 2013July 18, 2013admin119 Comments

Last week my thirteen year old daughter, Ella, had to have her wisdom teeth removed. The procedure was difficult for her due to how impacted the teeth were and the surgeon wound up removing two molars as well. One day after her surgery, our neighbor, “Jennifer”, with whom I had been very close for some time, called and asked if she could come over to check on Ella and chat. I said, alright. I knew (or at least thought I knew) this woman very well and I knew my daughter would not mind.

When Jennifer came over, Ella had just taken a pain pill and was sleeping on the sofa in the family room. Jennifer walked up to her, and (it still makes me furious to think of this) SQUEEZED her cheeks, HARD! My daughter immediately woke up and burst into tears. Jennifer GIGGLED (yes, giggled!) and pranced away to my kitchen to get herself a drink. I stood there, furious and in total shock but managed to compose myself and comfort Ella, who was sobbing in pain and was totally confused as to what what happened to her. I got her a cold pack and got her back to sleep and went into the kitchen, nearly shaking with fury, to find Jennifer sipping away at a Mimosa. It took every thing I had not to break her jaw. I told her that Ella was unwell (thanks to you, you evil b****!) and Jennifer needed to leave immediately. She looked confused but downed the rest of her drink and left.

I called my husband and managed to tell him what happened through furious tears. He was livid and even said I should call the police on this woman. I didn’t want to go to that extreme but vowed that I would never, ever, ever speak to Jennifer again. Ella was in horrible pain for several hours after this and no amount of pain medication and ice helped. I was horribly upset, which made her three younger brothers upset, then their still-fuming father came home and disturbed the peace even more by calling both his and my parents and ranting to them about what happened. This might have been inappropriate on his part, but that is how he deals with anger and I suppose I should be thankful that’s all he did rather than marching over to Jennifer’s and dealing with her “old school”, as he would say.

Ella had a thumb-shaped bruise on either cheek and was in great pain for the next four days. We found out at her check-up that what Jennifer had done had pinched off the newly formed scabs on Ella’s gums, resulting in her developing dry sockets. We now have to get them packed on a daily basis, which, though it does not hurt us to pay for this, is a cost that could have been avoided if Jennifer had chosen to reign in her inner sadist. The oral surgeon could not believe what happened when I told him. Everyone I’ve told about this has been absolutely appalled at how horrible this woman was. What possesses a person to squeeze the cheeks of someone who’s just undergone dental surgery and then LAUGH at them as they cry in pain? I believe this goes beyond an etiquette faux pas and into plain cruelty, but I simply had to share this. I still feel like crying when I think of what happened. In the past few days, Jennifer has called and left messages asking if she’d “offended me” and if she could come over to “talk about it.” How clueless can you be?! 0710-13

You have Mimosas (orange juice and champagne) on tap in your kitchen? And she just helped herself to one?

It goes without saying that Jennifer has some serious boundary issues. Was she perhaps a little inebriated when this happened? It appears she was drinking alcohol at your house rather early in the day and her confused reaction and lack of understanding about why you are offended seems odd to me perhaps indicating she had been drinking before she came to your house. It appears that even you consider it out of character behavior for her to behave this way.

Jennifer aside, can you now see how the drama you and your husband kept fueling disturbed your family peace long after Jennifer had done her deed and left the house? How were the children served to witness their parents in a state of hyped up anger which only distressed them further? Sometimes there are occasions where you, as the parent, have to suck it up and behave calmly and rationally so that you set an example for the kids. What you say behind closed doors to each other and other family adults is one thing but you and hubby selfishly gave vent to your anger in front of the kids with little regard as to how this was upsetting them. I don’t know the ages of the three younger brothers but it’s probable they were young enough to not understand all the drama and instead of one child victim, there are four courtesy of yours and the hub’s lack of self control. Your job as a parent is to train up your children to react to other people’s horrid bad manners in a calm, civil, rational manner because they have to learn that they cannot change other people’s behavior but they sure can control how they react and behave. What they learned this week is that screaming, venting, ranting in anger regardless of how it affects those innocent bystanders is the appropriate drama response to any offense they happen to incur.

Addendum as of 8:55 am EST:

There is always a subset of people reading Ehell who believe in their inherent right to react to grave offenses committed against them with high drama and reciprocal retaliation regardless of what impact that behavior has on innocent people in their sphere of relationships (children, pets, family, co-workers). I delete comments quite frequently from people who advocate reciprocal rudeness as their entitled right of response since I have no interest in promoting their twisted brand of etiquette or giving them a platform to justify their own right to exercise out of control behavior just because someone offended them.

Reread the story again and note the following: “I was horribly upset, which made her three younger brothers upset, then their still-fuming father came home and disturbed the peace even more by calling both his and my parents and ranting to them about what happened. This might have been inappropriate on his part, but that is how he deals with anger.….” Jennifer’s cruel act was a one time deal (so far) but Dad’s way of displaying his anger is “how he deals with it”, i.e. meaning he routinely “disturbs the peace” of his family with his rather selfish lack of self control in front of his wife and children. Rather than the drama ending with Jennifer’s departure from the house, it just keeps going on and on for hours thus giving Jennifer enormous power to have ruined an entire day in this family’s lives. How many times has this site discussed the concept of not giving power to the rude, ugly, mean boors of this world by moderating our own reactions in a way that rises above the drama and takes control of the situation? Yeah, lots. “No power to the boors” should be this site’s mission statement.

And Jennifer has yet to be confronted on this matter so instead of directing their ire at her, the kids get the brunt of it. The kids became the unwitting audience upon which Dad rehearsed his anger. (Hint: If you cannot muster the self control or courage to confront your offender, no fair taking it out on the innocent parties of your immediate acquaintance.)

And then there is always some readers who take hyperbole to new heights by interpreting phrases or words like “self control”, “rational”,”civil” to mean “act like a doormat”, “be a wimp” or to declare that anger under control is to show no anger at all. It’s as if anger is either an “on” or “off” emotion and there is no concept of how one can express anger in a firm yet rational and civil manner. If you are one of those readers who thinks anger is best expressed in frothing displays of emotions, you haven’t grasped the basic premise of this site and your comments will continue to be deleted lest you influence others with your limited understanding of how to behave.

Frenemies Have Overrun The House And Relationship

April 2, 2013April 2, 2013admin81 Comments

My fiance and I have just moved back to his hometown, and formerly he used to complain a lot about having a lack of friends and being very lonely. So it was great for me when so many people in his town decided that they enjoyed his company and wanted to be around him a lot. This was all fine and dandy for me, except I wasn’t used to the idea of guests dropping by with nary a notice. This makes me uncomfortable as I like to plan for when guest come over and don’t like them stopping by if I work the next morning and have to go to bed early.

The problem started to arise when these friends of his decided to invite themselves over everyday. Especially because most of the time it was because they wanted to drink and play video games (as loud as possible). They would often stay until three in the morning and even if they lowered the volume I couldn’t sleep because of the voices. They also stop by every single day, which is straining my relationship with my soon-to-be husband as we have no alone time and are always expecting any activity to be interrupted by a surprise guest.

I spoke to my fiance about this once in the past, and he thought I was being selfish because he’s never had many friends and I shouldn’t try to keep him from them. I was appalled at this response, but chalked it up to the fact he was drinking.

Is there anything I can do to get rid of unwanted guests without being impolite? Or am I honestly being selfish? 0401-13

You think your primary problem is the uninvited guests but it is actually your fiance. He has prioritized his alleged friends over what should be his primary relationship with you. He invests more time with them than you, he values their opinions above yours and he seeks their comfort at the expense of yours. There is nothing wrong with fiance having friends and getting together with them once a week but as you report it, he has no balance or restraint in pursuing his friendships. Someone is being selfish in this relationship and it isn’t you.

I refer to your guests as fiance’s “alleged” friends because their behavior is not that of people truly committed to caring for others. Good friends look to do you good, to serve you and edify you. They care for you, don’t exploit you, they have your back in difficult times. In contrast, your fiance’s friends are using him and the home you have to serve their own needs for entertainment regardless of how it negatively impacts their hosts. There is almost a symbiotic relationship occurring where fiance willingly gets used by “friends” who in turn feed his selfish ego to belong to some group of people, even if they happen to be selfish themselves.

If there were limitations placed on their visitations such as the party ends at 11 pm or the nights spent gaming and drinking restricted to once, maybe twice a week, the question is how these “friends” would respond. Would they honor that request or would that become the impetus to terminate their friendship with your fiance? Often dilemmas such as this are a defining point in a relationship where we get to see the true nature of people who claim to be friends. Entitled, selfish people will move on to find another willing sucker to accommodate their wants whereas a true, good friend will recognize and honor a reasonable request. Perhaps your fiance needs a wake up call that his “friends” are quite willing to destroy his primary relationship with his future wife solely in the pursuit of their immediate and entitled want to be entertained.

You need to step back and evaluate whether you want a lifetime of this because if you think it’s bad now, marriage will only make it worse. Your fiance has a mistress and her name is “my friends”. Are you willing to be lonely? To have a disrupted household on a routine basis? Would you want children raised in this relationship environment?

I Like You, You Like Me, I Don’t Like Him

January 8, 2013admin46 Comments

I recently ran into a situation in which I was left at a loss for proper etiquette, and I hope to solicit assistance in case such an unsettling interaction comes up again.

My partner and I have been together for several years and, under the law in our country of residence, have a legally recognized partnership (which is tantamount to being married). We are quite happy and (I believe) present ourselves as stable and mature to our friends and family.

However, I had my confidence badly shaken a few days ago when a former colleague and good friend of mine invited me for a coffee. In the course of conversation, we discussed the recent New Year’s Eve party that my partner and I had hosted at our apartment. Then she presented this gem.

“You know, while I had a good time at your party, I just don’t like your partner.”

How am I to respond to that?

While my immediate reaction was to simply ignore the comment, I feel a sense of obligation to defend the man to whom I am attached. Indeed, I have far more loyalty to him than I do to the friend and am quite willing to engage in an argument to defend him. However, I feel that I should not have to extol upon his attributes (if she had criticized something in particular) or, even worse, give her some sort of affirmation with a half-hearted, “I know he can be difficult but…”

By staying silent though, I have to ask: why should she be able to get away with rebuking someone I care about so that we avoid a confrontation? On the other hand, if she’s willing to make such a careless and hurtful comment in the first place, is it worth the time and effort to set her right?

Further, is there a different kind of etiquette for those who are more casually dating? While it’s never happened to me personally, I’ve had friends who have been quite straightforward in their criticisms of the new man or women in someone’s life – and their criticisms were well received.

I hope there is some sort of middle ground that I can take in the future if this situation presents itself again. For now, though, I think I’ll avoid coffee with this “friend”. 0105-13

First, your situation is universal to everyone regardless of gender or marital status. You noted that your other friends have freely given their critical review of other people’s choices of mate and their criticism well received so I gather that it is not criticism of partners, in general, you object to, but rather that it has now hit home for you. In other words,what was good for those other gooses is not now good for this gander. One question to be raised is why you cannot receive it as well as others have previously.

Everyone, and I do mean *everyone*, dislikes someone else. It is not uncommon to like one half of a couple and have varying degrees of tolerance, acceptance, or affection for the “better half”. I believe it is unrealistic to expect friends to bond closely with both partners of a relationship. It can and does happen but often relationships with a couple is weighted more to one person than the other, particularly if there is a friendship history that predates the new partner.

Good friends may express concern that the new person in your life is not who they would have chosen for you or they see character traits that do not result in building you up. My best friend did not like my now husband back when he and I were dating. I listened, took her comments under consideration and married him anyway. Twenty six years later, she and I are still best friends and will always be close but I don’t expect her to have warm fuzzies for my husband. They mutually respect each other and are quite congenial when together but that is as far as it goes. Conversely, I have expressed concerns to friends about new relationships where I see looming troubles. I’ve watched in sadness a friend disregard that counsel and marry a man many of us knew would abuse her and he did. The difference between this kind of “criticism” and what your friend did is that she was expressing an opinion based on her selfishness rather than from a concern for you. She may be inarticulate in expressing a concern for you and if so, she needs to work on that. A good question for her to ask is, “Are you happy?,” or, “Does he/she make you happy?” If two people are happy in their relationship, it is not any of my business to be meddling further.

Your reaction to this is, “Thank you for your comments. I will take them under consideration.” And then change the subject. If she has been a valuable friend through the years, keep up the relationship but with visits between you two alone. She can choose to not interact with your partner since she is choosing to have the friendship with you and not him. The onus falls upon her to be civil and courteous when she chooses to be a guest in your house and accepts the hospitality of both of you. And it should go without saying that you will never gossip about your partner to her in any way lest you fuel her further.

Those Friendship Epiphanies Are A Good Thing

August 28, 2012August 25, 2012admin57 Comments

This story is partly a plea for advise, as I had no idea how to handle the situation when it was occurring.

In my first year at university, I naturally gravitated towards a group of girls in my seminar group. This group consisted of most of the girls in the seminar group (there were three seminar groups in the year). Since we were all about the same age and studying the same subject, we got on pretty well and had quite few things in common. We sat together in lectures (several degrees shared units and lecturers) and often ate lunch together. We hadn’t known each other very long, but I was under the impression that we all got on well enough.

Then, one day at the beginning of a lecture, one of the girls asked the rest of the group, “So, what time are we meeting up tonight?”

It turned out that the other girls had arranged to go out for the evening at some point. This was the first I had heard of it, so it had obviously been discussed while I wasn’t present. I was a little hurt at not being invited, but the last thing I wanted to do was demand an invitation to an event I wasn’t wanted at, so I didn’t say anything.

This proceeded to continue on a quite regular basis. The other girls in the group would make plans to meet up or go out together, often talking right over my head to debate meeting times and what clubs/restaurants/bars to go to. Another thing they would often do is discuss what a great time they had all had the night/weekend before, seemingly oblivious to my dismay at being excluded yet again. The thing that made it worse was that there was no obviously overt maliciousness in their actions – they just seemed completely clueless that discussing an event that a member of the conversation hadn’t been invited to might be hurtful.

I eventually took the hint and withdrew from the group, but it caused a real knock to my confidence. Even then, there was one final twist of the knife. At the end of the year, having completed our final exam and now being able to relax somewhat, our seminar group were discussing how we thought it had gone, when a member of the group declared (right in the middle of the conversation) that they should all go to her place to relax and celebrate the exams being over. With that, they left, leaving me standing there.

The story does fortunately have a happy ending. After going back for the summer and spending time with the friends I’d known for years, I realized I’d put up with being excluded because I was afraid of not making any other friends at university. A group of students from another seminar group in the same year kept in touch with me throughout the summer, and on the first lecture after returning, asked me if I’d like to join them to go out for dinner. I now spend a great deal of time with them, both in and out of university. I also became heavily involved in several clubs and societies and made a great deal of friends there, regularly meeting up for drinks and coffee and all the things the other group of girls used to plan over my head.

In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time with the group before deciding I’d had enough. I never confronted them on their exclusion of me, as I still have seminars and team projects with them, and they even declare sometimes how we “Never see each other anymore!”. To my knowledge, they still have no idea why I stopped hanging around with them. 0824-12

Your experience isn’t that uncommon. Everyone, til the day they die, will miscalculate the level of relationship intimacy among friends and have an epiphany realization that they have invested in a relationship that just wasn’t worth the time and emotional expenditure. My most recent one was when I had cancer three years ago. Get cancer and you will discover real fast who your true friends are. People I thought I was very close with abandoned me with no solace, no cards, no further contact as if my cancer was like leprosy. On the other hand, people I had minimal acquaintance with came out of the woodwork and invested weekly to see how I was doing. So I’m not entirely sure such trials and revelations into the character of one’s friends is all that bad of a thing to happen. It’s like relationship closet cleaning..out with the bad, in with the new and good.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

November 17, 2011admin89 Comments

I have a ‘friend’ who, despite being 30 years old, lives with her parents and continues to act, at all times, like a melodramatic child. I will call her Mary.

Mary and I met at university. She was a bit batty but she could be jolly good fun. However, as the years passed and her frustrations at her ailing career and love life grew, she became increasingly histrionic and volatile, lashing out easily over what she perceived as any slights against her, which in turn resulted in my cutting our contact down to a bare minimum.

We broke off our youthful friendship, rather dramatically, in our early 20s, after I found a very expensive make-up compact of mine sitting, totally unconcealed, on the sink in the bathroom of her parent’s home. Mary had been with me when I discovered it was lost, and she had seen me turn my place totally upside down looking for it. It was a gift from a dear friend who lived interstate and I was gutted to have lost it.

And yet there it was, several months later, obviously heavily used, in Mary’s bathroom. It was a collector’s item and I knew for a fact she did not have the same one. I confronted her about it, with the compact in hand, and can you imagine what she said?

Without a beat or an inch of shame: “Well I’m glad you took it back, I thought the colours looked cheap on me anyway.”

I was livid. And worst of all I was stuck overnight with this thieving loon as her parents lived a few hours away from my home. I left the next day, vowed not to see her again, and didn’t, for years.

Eventually we both got older and, putting down that incident to a wild time in both our pasts – we did tend to party a lot in those days – I started to chat to Mary again as we had mutual friends.

Boy, I did I regret it. I quickly learned she had zero manners – zero – where my newly-purchased apartment was concerned. At first it was small things, like dropping food over the couch and on the floor and leaving it there, staring at it, but not picking it up, and ashing her cigarettes all over my house. And then it got worse.

She’d pick up ornamental jars of vintage candy I had placed in my kitchen and, despite being told to put them down, shake them repeatedly like a kid at Christmas. I pleadingly explained that I had spent some time arranging the candy wrappers inside the jars just so, but she became obsessed with shaking them the second I turned away, and would just do it again and again. Once, she even quickly ate some of the candy, which was over sixty years old.

On one particularly irritating day, against my better judgement I had Mary over to dinner. She insisted on making dessert and so brought over some chocolate, custard and cake to make into a quick trifle. However she cut the chocolate and cake into pieces on my bench top, with no chopping board, leaving long, chocolate-y cuts all through the wood, and then she’d thrown the chocolate encrusted knife straight back in the drawer. She’d also made a wild mess by pulling a bag of crushed nuts upside down from pantry and just leaving the trail behind her. Naturally she served this dessert in my antique champagne glasses even though I’d left out dessert bowls.

After that experience I was rather lax in inviting Mary over again, but one day I sadly relented, having fallen for her wailed excuses of feeling down following a break up.

We got to talking, light heartedly, about our failings in relationships, and she listed some of mine. It was a harsh but true comment, so I laughed and agreed. I then told Mary that her main failing was a lack of self-awareness – she often didn’t notice she’d pushed people a little too far.

Suddenly, she turned ice cold, got up, spun on her heel, slammed the door, and left.

Obviously, I had offended her. As she’d said something just as candid to me, I let it go and decided my relationship with this woman was truly, truly was done.

The next day my buzzer rang and there was Mary at the door, calmly telling me she’d left her sunglasses behind the night before.

She hadn’t, but I let her in to look, and what followed I can only describe as lunacy.

Mary stalked around my house for a time, then settled at my sunroom window and lit a cigarette. She began talking, her voice etched with barely held-back rage, growing ever louder, about what a sick and cruel person I was. She raved that by pointing out her failings the night before, I had done what she compared to “poking a cancer patient over and over and screaming: ‘You’re sick! You’re sick! You’re dying!’”

Now she was screaming. I told her she was being melodramatic, but that was the last word I got in. For the next hour, I was treated to wailing, screaming and stamping as she recounted every last thing I ever said or did in our history that she considered cruelty I’d inflicted against her. That was the best of it – the rant soon descended into gibberish, and at one point she pulled her own hair and slapped her own face while screaming about various people that were apparently conspiring against her.

At this point my housemate arrive home and he could not believe what he was seeing – this blubbering, screaming lunatic taking over our home. He immediately suggested I call the police but I truly didn’t want to get my crazy old friend arrested. So, with a big hoist, he pushed my friend out the door and threw her bag after her.

She banged on the front door screaming obscenities along the lines of, “How could you do this to me?”, and actually asking, “Why have you thrown me out?” Then she suddenly stopped.

The next day, we realized she had stolen our doormat.

Needless to say, I never spoke to Mary again, though here is the kicker – she still texts me from time to time wanting to catch up, just like nothing happened. 1115-11

I am a very tenacious and loyal friend who will overlook immaturity, odd behavior and eccentricities in the hopes the person will eventually grow out of them. You seem to be the same in that you don’t give up on friends easily. Unfortunately we discover that some people aren’t worth the investment we make in them and that the time has come to starve the relationship into withering away.