A Tale of Two Friendships

Within the past few months, I’ve had two uncomfortable conversations with two very different friends. Both are women whom I care deeply for and treasure in my life. Because I’m human, and human beings are sometimes dumb, I’d inadvertently hurt their feelings by what I’d said/not said or done/not done. The reason and story behind the hurt isn’t the important thing here, their reaction to it is.

The first friend sat me down and said, “Listen. The other day you said _____________ and it really hurt me. I don’t think you were thinking about how it sounded, but it came across as really bitchy. If it were someone other than a close friend, I’d probably walk away and not look back, but it’s you, and I know that you probably didn’t mean that the way I heard it. Your friendship is too valuable for me to lose, so I wanted to be upfront with you about it.”

I was shocked at the way she had heard what I’d said. It wasn’t what all what I’d meant to say, and certainly not indicative of how I feel about her at all. I apologized profusely, grabbed the opportunity to explain what I’d really meant, and by the end of the day it was long forgotten as we laughed and gabbed and enjoyed each other’s company. It’s not the first time we’ve had this kind of conversation in the four and a half years of our friendship. It’s happened three or four times. Sometimes it’s her clearing the air, and sometimes it’s me. I’ve learned a lot from our friendship, one of the most significant being the importance of just being honest about where we are with each other.

The second friend didn’t respond in quite the same way. She took what was an quick brief text message and interpreted its brevity as snippy and condescending. What followed quickly was a torrent of condemnation about my tone and word choices, and then in the middle of the night an email about every transgression I’d committed in our almost four years of friendship, all bullet pointed for easy reference. I was stunned at the explosion, because there had never even been a hint that there was anything wrong. When I say that I was blindsided, I mean it. My attempts to apologize were met with further diatribes on the many ways I had fallen short as a friend, and there was truth in a lot of it. She was right, there were times that I had been wrong and had hurt her. I in no way fault her for the way that she felt.

I just wish that she had told me.

I wish that she had said something years before when I’d put my foot in my mouth the first time. I wish that she had let me know that sometimes I’d hurt her feelings by what I’d said. I would have chosen my words more carefully and made an effort not to hurt her again. Her friendship meant enough to me that I would have been more sensitive if I’d known what to watch out for.

But I didn’t, and our friendship exploded in a flood of text messages and emails from her as she enumerated my many shortcomings. Until there came a point where I stopped apologizing because I knew that the friendship was over. It had died in the heat of her anger and my own bewilderment about what the heck had just happened.

I know exactly where she was coming from, because I used to be an exploder too.

It feels like a grace to “forgive” and ignore the things our friends and loved ones do that hurt or irritate us. It feels like love and generosity to overlook them and set them aside. We smooth down our ruffled feathers for the sake of peace and harmony. We hope against hope that the other person will somehow catch on/grow up/knock it off without our having to say a single word, and it very rarely works. Instead of setting those minor transgressions aside and truly forgiving them, we end up storing them very close nearby. While we may not be looking at them, that painful history is still there ticking like a bomb just waiting to explode.

And it always does.

Sooner or later that bomb of anger and resentment always blows up in someone’s face. Sometimes it happens quietly and we decide the relationship isn’t worth the cost, and we quietly slink away, avoiding the other person and leaving them to wonder where we went. Other times, it’s loud and dramatic, ripping apart every shred of affection that you ever had for each other. Perhaps the saddest part is that it never solves anything. The one who exploded never truly lets go of that white hot anger, and the other never loses their state of shock and learns to trust again. Even if they find a way to remain friendly, I’ve never seen the damage done by this to be reparable. And so they’ve both lost someone they loved.

Once upon a time, I was the Exploder. I hated conflict so much that I would avoid it at all costs. I would ignore and deny that I was hurt right until the moment that I became a crazy woman and ripped my former friends apart. It’s not something I’m proud of, and is something for which I’ve searched out former friends and begged forgiveness for the unfair and unkind way that I had treated them.

Though it feels counter-intuitive, the charitable thing is not to sweep things away under the rug, but to be honest with our friends about the hurts that they cause us. It’s painful to do, and causes my stomach to knot up to even think about that kind of confrontation. Pretending to forgive and wearing a friendly face is so much easier in the short term, but dying to yourself a little (or a lot), and actually having an uncomfortable and honest talk is actually a gift. It gives you both the chance to truly forgive each other long before the hurts become permanent, and helps to build a solid foundation upon which your relationship can stand.

Photo credit: By greyloch (Our “Get Along” Shirt) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons