Friendships are tough relationships to navigate because they are not monogamous. We tend to have more than one friend at a time; that is usually how life works. When we are young, we enter school, and we are surrounded by other children in our age group. We are taught to play nicely and that if we didn't have anything nice to say, not to say it at all. I remember being young and enjoyed playing with all my friends on a lunch break or outside on the block. I considered myself lucky because my block was filled with so many kids my age that played well together. We spent our time playing manhunt, football, tag, red light green light, having water balloon fights, making igloos, and having snowball fights.
The kids on my block were my first friends; we were always at each other's birthday parties and spent many holidays together. Somewhere along the line (middle school if I remember correctly), a shift happened, and people who we had been friends with and played with every day had new friends, and the time we had spent together reduced drastically. We all kind of found our cliques and grew apart. Once we entered high school, it seemed like a whole new issue. I remember girls being so catty and jealous. I remember certain girls would tell other girls they couldn't be friends with so and so if they were friends with them within our clique. Every other week someone wasn't my friend because one of our other friends was jealous of the time and friendship. This was always very weird to me; I never understood why people couldn't just be friends and be happy. I thought that once we were adults, it was supposed to end, I was hoping at least. To my dismay, adults are still acting like this. Some people feel like friendship is a competition; we are adults, and that's just not how adults' are supposed to conduct themselves. If you are still living like this, it's time to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself if this is the behavior of a grown woman? How are we supposed to teach our kids better when we are supposed to be leading by example? We should be teaching our kids to encourage friendships and showing them how to be good friends, not teaching them jealousy and confrontation.
Suppose you have a friend like this, and you are letting them get in the middle of the relationships you have with other people. In that case, it's time to reevaluate that friendship and decide if it is worth losing other friendships and relationships over. If you allow your other friendships to go south because you have a person like this in your life, you are losing friends of substance for a friend who doesn't even care enough about you to put their jealousy and insecurities aside to let you have other friends. I spent a long time on the sidelines pretending things didn't bother me because I didn't want to stir the pot and cause more stress, I never want to feel like I'm hurting anyone or putting them in a bad situation, so I usually just keep my mouth shut. However, what that does is make all of your feelings build up until it hits a breaking point; this makes you feel unimportant, and it will make you resent the friendship. It's so much better to be honest about your feelings once you start feeling them, don't wait until your anger takes control. Your friend might be so used to you not caring they don't even realize that you are hurting; if they didn't know it, then maybe you weren't as close as you had thought.
"A friend to all is a friend to none" is probably one of my favorite lines by Taylor Swift. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. If you are friends with everyone, are you being a true friend, especially to the friends who genuinely care about you? The best thing we could do is to stop treating our acquaintances like best friends, stop expecting so much from people who don't have the same mindset as you because, in the end, you will only be left hurt and disappointed.
