Most of our interactions with other people are non-romantic. Here’s a place to discuss relationships that belong to that usually silent majority.
Continued from Just Friends, v. 2011.
Patience, Please
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I’m trying to compose a message to a friend who sent me a lot of passive-agressive messages last week. I’ve been putting off responding but it’s something I really need to do before I go home so. Yep.
Today… i feel kinda good.
I told Lisa (Non-mother) that i didn’t want to go with her!
Lately the only reason i’ve been going with Lisa is so i could get some stuff done in town. But dad bought a new car last week and got it registered yesterday, so we have a means of transportation so i can get stuff done in town without Lisa!
Now, what do you guys think? Should i dump the old bag without a conscience < :?:) because she dumped us without one… or do you think i should give her another chance? Because i wanna dump her but im at that age where i guess i don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. What do you think?
Woah! GAPAS can move comments?! holy eff!
Aren’t we amazing?
Wait, I’m confused. Is empathy something you grow out of? How dreadful.
In response to your question, I’m in favor of second chances. I don’t know the details of your situation, but even if she was entirely in the wrong, she seems to be trying to make it up to you. If someone’s putting time and effort towards being forgiven, I think it’s worth giving them at least a chance.
(Sorry for the length; please read the whole thing.)
Catwings, I highly recommend not hurting anyone’s feelings. At all, not even by not going places with your mother. That’s not to say I don’t think you should express your feelings- you should! Don’t bottle! But adults tend to take your feelings a lot more seriously when you lay them out calmly, in my experience. If you yell at someone, or insult them, or try to make them feel unwanted, they won’t want to listen. Or they’ll put it all down to juvenility, which doesn’t help at all.
It’s my best guess that your mother does have a conscience, and the fact that she wants to spend time with you means she doesn’t want to dump you.
My suggestions:
1) Think about what you want in the future, and what repercussions the actions you make could have. If you continue to send signals that you don’t want her around, you’ll likely alienate her. Maybe long-term. Maybe forever. If you don’t send those signals and behave civilly toward her, even when you don’t want to, you’ll be able to maintain a relationship with her, and it won’t be as hard to reach out to her in the future, when you actually want to.
I honestly don’t expect maintaining a relationship with her will be as strenuous as actively being mean to her. In my experience, positive emotions tend to triumph over negative ones eventually, and if you start feeling less angry at her (which I think you will- and I know that sounds as though I don’t understand how deeply angry and hurt you are, but hear me out, please).
2) Write down everything you feel about this in a list, and then change each item into an “I statement.” (They sounded ineffectual to me, too, but they really do help.) You’ll have to get the hang of them first, probably. An I statement rewords a kind of blaming statement to be less accusatory, and they really help in having a rational conversation. You do this by starting the sentence with “I feel…” and then stating what it is they did to offend you.
So (for this example, we’re dealing with a mean friend), you might write something like, “You’re really mean because you keep calling me stupid and I hate you now.” But you would change that, in an I statement, to “I feel hurt when you call me stupid, even as a joke.” That way, the statement is about you, not about the person you’re talking to, so it won’t sound like you’re just throwing accusations at them and you two can have a rational and calmer conversation.
(“You’re an old bag who dumped us without a conscience” -> “I feel really angry because you left, and I feel that shows you don’t care about me” or something similar. Whatever expresses your feelings fully, but doesn’t sound like you’re blaming the other person for it.)
3) Basically read out the list to your mother. Wait until she has time to talk, sit her down, and tell her you need to explain how you feel, because you want her to understand how what she does affects you.
4) You can ask to have time away from her, and you can do it without being mean. If you know that if you spend time together right now, it’ll be unpleasant and you cant help it, still do the above and explain that all the feelings you’ve described in step 3 make it really uncomfortable for you to be around her, and that you think it’ll be better for both of you if you can have a bit of time by yourself. Then come back to step 1 in a few days/weeks/months and reevaluate.
I can’t promise that this will solve your problems or make your life a lot easier, but I can tell you that the things you’re doing right now- calling your mother an old bag, avoiding her, and wanting to dump her- definitely won’t. What will “dumping” your mother really accomplish? I feel like in the end, and I do say this from personal experience, you’ll feel horrible about having done it. You probably won’t feel horrible about having maintained a relationship, even when it was really hard to do.
I’m sorry this turned into an essay. Good luck.
Choklit Orange– Didn’t Catwings say that Lisa is not her mother?
Lisa disagrees. It’s a long story.
So I was thinking about stuff I want to accomplish this year and my relationships with my friends, and the last few times I’ve seen my friends I’ve noticed that I can never disagree with them. Whenever they say something I have a different opinion about I pretend to agree with them, sometimes about stuff they think is racist and sexist, people they don’t like, or even something like whether a movie is good or not. Most of the time I can pull it off without suspicion, but a few times one of my friends has noticed from my facial expressions that I feel uncomfortable, or we say two conflicting things at the same time and I have to retract my opinion. All my friends always seem to be in agreement about everything, so I don’t like to contradict them because it seems hostile, ruining the calm mood of the conversation and the feeling that we have something in common. Is that my problem or theirs? Or does this happen in all friend groups? Is this what being considerate of people’s feelings feels like?
Welp… I’d say that never disagreeing with a friend group goes a little beyond being considerate about people’s feelings. You should be able to (respectfully) disagree about things instead of pretending to like them, and they should accept that not everyone has the same opinion on everything.
Saying something like “I just didn’t like that movie that much” shouldn’t be interpreted as hostile. It’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it.
tl;dr You don’t have to agree with everyone.
I tend to have the same problem. It’s kind of a weird thing to skirt around. I’ve been trying to stop agreeing with people all the time lately, and it has often been successful–we have some interesting debates–but depending on which friends you do it to, it can turn bad v fast. I actually got into a full-on fight with Friend A because Friend B and I tried to gently tell her not to use the r word because it’s an ableist slur, at which point she flipped out, had a minor panic attack and started crying and then we were up until 3 AM on a school night trying to calm her down and repair the friendship. It turned out that she was very stressed and it seemed like I was yelling at her or something, but I’m still not a fan of how she handled herself in that situation. I think there’s a balance between standing up for yourself/calling out problematic behavior and not picking fights, you know? And to some extent not starting a debate about whether you thought Movie X was good or not is being considerate of your friends’ feelings, but there are also some racist/sexist/xyz-ist things that should be discussed, and if you don’t have the kind of friends that you can have a rational discussion about stuff like that with, it’s their problem, not yours. Being considerate is like, not starting a debate about whether someone’s favorite movie is actually terrible because you know it will upset them and they’re in a bad place right now. Having a discussion about whether the movie you just saw is good or not and disagreeing with everyone else is perfectly acceptable and you should be able to feel comfortable doing it.
I agree with what Bookgirl and RoseQuartz said – feeling pressured to agree with people, especially about things that you’re morally against (racist, sexist, gossiping about people they don’t like) goes far beyond considerate. It’s nice to have things in common with your friends, but you also don’t want to base a friendship off false commonalities. I’ll also add that, though you mention that all your friends always seem to be in agreement about everything, is it possible that others feel the same way as you and are only agreeing because everyone else (including you) seems to be agreeing?
I highly recommend reading about groupthink, group cohesiveness, and other group dynamics on Wikipedia. Those are really interesting subjects and some of it might resonate with you and help you think through your situation.