POST MORTEM: How Do I Stop Destroying My Friendships?

John was there to provide at least a solid measure of emotional support and guidance while I was reeling from it all, until he wasn’t.

…which you weren’t taking.

In the meantime, there really wasn’t much else to be done.

Aside from an apology that was typed out and “sent”, no further contact was attempted with Annie…

…until several months later.

Because after being told over and over by several other friends that what Annie did and said was actually kind of shitty (not just by Betty, who just kind of disappeared after the John thing), I made the decision to confront her on a social media platform neither of us had used in a long time.

Dude. My dude. Duderino. Dude. This is the Kobyashi Maru. This is the no-win scenario. There is no hacking the simulation to win this. There is no way, in any way, shape or form, that this will result in anything good for you. This is, at best, the whipped topping on the shit sundae you’ve set up for yourself.

And at that point, I didn’t care about getting a response at all (assuming I would even get one).

Sorry, no, I’m calling bullshit on this. If you want to understand what happened, what you did wrong and how to avoid doing this in the future, you have to be honest with yourself, and this is a straight up lie. You may have convinced yourself in the moment that you were doing something else, but what you were aiming for is to avenge your hurt pride by hurting her instead and you absolutely were hoping that she would see it and respond.

And you were hoping that your words were going to hurt her in such a way that she would see that she’d done you wrong and, if she didn’t beg your forgiveness or ask to be taken back, she at least would regret her actions in a way that she didn’t before and you could take some satisfaction in that.

This turned out to not be a good idea when I went through with it.

It didn’t get to full-blown insults, but I did end up telling her the kinds of things that are virtually impossible to just take back.

The kinds of things I ended up regretting having ever said even to this day.

I didn’t bother to check for a response back then, and it was probably one of the few times I ever blew up at someone just like that.

OK, here’s the thing. I understand the impulse. I understand the desire to confront someone you feel wronged you and try to put them in their place, to rub their nose in the sins that they committed against you. 

It never works. Certainly not the way you hope it would. It only ever makes things worse, and you look like an asshole for doing it.

What you do with those feelings is to write them all down in a physical letter, on paper – ideally written longhand, which not only accesses a different part of the brain, but also ensures that you don’t “accidentally” send it.

Then you take that physical letter, and you set it on fire. Let it burn and take everything you wanted to say with it; as it burns away, you let that represent your getting the metaphorical last word and let it be the last you dwell on any of this.

Airing your grievances on a public forum, no matter how little you or your target may use it, is almost always a bad idea under the best of circumstances. And these were far from the best of circumstances.

After the confrontation, no further contact was attempted with Annie (for real this time).

OH THANK CHRIST.

Now go back and delete every social media account, phone number and address you have for her. You need to put as many barriers between you and being able to reach her as you possibly can because hoo boy, you have screwed this pooch but good.

Looking back, I’ve long since realized that while my logical brain saw Annie as an awesome person (before all of that went down), my lizard brain essentially saw her as a life raft (not even as a potential partner).

I hate to tell you this but no, you were wrong here. Logic wasn’t involved. There was no bicameral mind action going on here. This was straight emotion. You may have been telling yourself a different story in order to make it acceptable, but this wasn’t a duel between logic and emotion. This was an emotional connection and an emotional response and not recognizing it for what it is – even now – is part of how you ended up in this mess.

You were emotionally invested in someone who was a brief and sympathetic ear, rounded it up to a relationship that didn’t exist, behaved in a way that made her uncomfortable, missed the various times she tried to wave you off and it blew up in your face. And then you went back for another couple of passes in the hopes that you were going to salvage something out of this, if only soothing your wounded pride, and it just kept getting worse.

At that point in time, it really seemed like Annie had her life together whereas I was dealing with a life that had more or less fallen apart completely. A bevy of personal issues had gotten so bad for me at that time that it was not uncommon for me to stave off suicidal ideation.

Yeah, a note for next time: if you’re dealing with suicidal ideation, you need to talk to a professional, not random people online – folks who are actually trained to help you and talk you down. What you were doing was trauma dumping – unloading these deeply painful and complex issues on someone else, seemingly without invitation or so much as a warning. There’s a very real difference, and it’s important that you understand this.  

But none of it justifies what I did.

Explanation is *not* justification.

While I didn’t have the full knowledge of what women have to put up with on a regular basis like I do today (from online BS to interpersonal BS), I still had some semblance of an idea of how that feels. Everything from unsolicited pics, to friends of the opposite sex coming on to them, to legit stalking.

(I mean, I myself went through an incident long before all of this in which a girl I barely knew ended up sending me weirdly sexual messages which left me deeply uncomfortable.)

Yet I did what I did with Annie anyway, and as you can see, I want to make sure I never do this again.

Alright, I’m going to be real with you here: I understand what you’re going for with this, but in the context of everything else that you’ve written, this is coming off more as self-aggrandizing and not fully recognizing or owning what you’ve done.

This has been a trend in your letter, and your next few paragraphs don’t seem to indicate that there’s going to be a sudden change or moment of understanding.

To wit:

On top of that, I still hurt someone who I openly called a friend. And regardless of whatever she did, I still made her distrustful of others (based off of what I had seen for myself, even before she took the Nuclear Option).

(Yes, in this case, even saying “I may have or have had romantic feelings for you” was enough for Annie to start distrusting others.
And that’s still on me, especially since those kinds of words carry a certain power and gravity to them.)

I’m deeply afraid that it might happen again with a *different* person, despite the progress I’ve already made in the years after this entire shitshow. I’m afraid that I’ll somehow be doomed to repeat this cycle, and I know for a fact I want to break it.

I was deeply hurt and experienced things I wouldn’t wish upon anyone, but I lashed out.

Now I have to contend with what I did and all the resulting fallout, end of story.

So here’s the thing. If you’re sincere in this, you’re going to have to stop what you’re doing and actually pay attention. Because right now, you’re trying to walk a line between minimization and self-flagellation, and trust me when I say that I recognize the “I’m so sorry and upset about this, please be moved by my being upset about this” part very well. In my bad old days, I’ve done that myself and I can tell you from experience: it never works. It’s a way of trying to get the credit for taking responsibility without actually doing so, because part of what you’re doing is trying to sound so sorry and remorseful that people will take pity and not be as angry as they could be.

But that doesn’t actually work, not if you’re sincere about not wanting to do this again. You have to be bluntly, coldly honest with yourself. That means not just taking full ownership of what you did and why, but also not making it more than it actually is. You don’t make it better by making yourself out to be history’s greatest monster. But neither do you make it better by not taking actual ownership of what happened and why.

Since then, I’ve been putting in active work to make sure I never repeat this behavior ever again. And of course, it’s been a process that’s taken several years thus far.

Obviously, it wasn’t as simple as “just move halfway across the country and all your problems will be over”. 

Yes because no matter where you go, there you are. That is: you’re not going to run away from yourself, no matter how fast or how far you go. Your issue isn’t “I need to go some place where people don’t know me or know my shame”, it’s “I need to understand how and why I fucked this up”. 

I’ve made it a point to take good care of myself on a physical and emotional level, I’ve not only joined entire new circles of friends but also surrounded myself with people willing to call me out in case I step out of line (in a positive but assertive manner).

Have you? Because if you’re giving them the same story you’ve been giving me, I’m going to guess that they still think that Annie was more at fault here than she actually was.

I’ve exercised much more restraint in messaging people and applying more patience, since I know that not everyone within my proximity is going to be able to immediately respond.

That. Is. Not. The. Lesson. To. Take. From. This.

And in the event of the news being too much to handle, I can even just go cold turkey from social media and just keep in touch with friends.

I was even able to finally seek out professional help.

I hope you’ve been clearer and more honest with them than you have been here…  

I’m not really there yet, but I know for sure I’m much farther along than I used to be. I don’t think I’ll ever be back to where I once was, but that’s ok.

After all of this time, am I ready to finally jump back into a new relationship? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, I know I’ve always been of the opinion that “if it happens, that’s good, and if not, that’s ok too.”

See, this is what I mean when I say you haven’t taken full ownership and understanding. Clearly it isn’t cool. If nothing happened and that had been cool, you wouldn’t have been making burner accounts to get the “inside scoop”, reaching out to her friends to try to get access to her (and hope that he’d plead your case for you) or blow up at her online because you were pissed that you got things wrong.

If it really was a “if nothing happens, that’s cool too” kind of vibe, you would have accepted her ‘go away’ at face value and left it. You did not.

Now, you mentioned that you’re autistic, and it certainly would’ve helped if Annie had been blunter with some of her wave-offs. It sounds like she was doing more soft-nos and socially polite excuses that were really “I’m not interested and please stop asking”, because either she didn’t realize that you weren’t going to take them the way she meant or because she was trying to minimize the likelihood of drama erupting if she were as blunt as she likely should have been. That was likely a mistake on her part.

However, there were plenty of times where she was very firm and up front about the fact that she wanted to have no contact with you, no matter how indirect, and you very pointedly ignored it. That you don’t seem to recognize that’s what you were doing and that it was unacceptable then and now, is what makes me wonder if you’ve actually processed this correctly, or if there’s going to be another chapter to this story in the future, either with Annie or someone else.

One might think this is a storybook ending, but this is where the request for advice comes in.

The one thing that remains from the ashes of that friendship is the guilt over my past actions, as well as concerns over making sure that this truly never happens again.

While I’m already making headway with my therapist on where exactly to go from here, I would like an outside perspective on what’s recommended.

So with all of that, I would like some advice on how to make sure that I never carry that kind of behavior with me into the future especially if I’m to ultimately start seeking out relationships again. Preferably, I’d like to make sure that whatever I need to do isn’t sugarcoated.

If the Chair Leg of Truth must be applied, then so be it.

Well, you asked for it…

As you can surmise, any chance at forgiveness from Annie has long since passed. The next best thing I can hope for is redemption, and everything I do is in the hope that I can become a better person for my friends and family.

And hopefully, a future partner-in-crime.

Regards,

On A Redemption Quest

Here’s the thing: Based on what you’ve told me, I still have to wonder if you’ve fully accepted what you’ve done.  

What you need to do is stop using the distancing language, the tu-quoque of how Annie “really” was, the seemingly deliberate missing of the point of what John was saying and why he blocked you, the weird investment of Betty in all of this and just take it in plain terms, without the salves and balms for the ego or the little things you told yourself to make it all ok in the moment.

You had feelings for Annie. You wanted a relationship with her and lied to yourself about what you actually wanted, because you knew to one degree or another what you were doing wasn’t cool. By saying that it was more about being friends or not knowing why you said X, you were giving yourself a permission structure that let you ignore just how you were acting and how it was coming off to others. Not being honest with yourself made it much easier to ignore the signs of what was going on and to believe that how you were acting wasn’t out of pocket.

I understand all of that. I have been there and done that, and I know from whence I speak. And it took me a long goddamn time to come to terms with the fact that I knew I wasn’t being honest with myself about it but still chose to believe it anyway. Until I accepted that I was lying to myself in the past and in that present, I wasn’t able to move forward in ways that actually helped.

And so it is here. You went way overboard trying to make something happen with her, missed her repeated attempts to get you to back off, kept pushing despite her stated discomfort, repeatedly ignored her plainly stated requests not to contact her in any way, shape or form or to be involved in her life in any way and basically acted like an asshole on all of it.

You aren’t doing yourself any favors by, say, repeating minimizing things about trying to see her over and over again when she clearly didn’t want to or rules-lawyering about whether you were actually stalking her and so on. You’ve been trying to walk a line between admitting you fucked up but also make yourself more sympathetic in this than your behavior warrants, and I’ve had to cut a lot of the justification from your letter because most of it wasn’t relevant and didn’t actually help.

If you want to do better, you have to be honest. You don’t make yourself out to be a martyr or a devil, you don’t diminish or minimize or distance. You accept the embarrassing, ugly parts that are uncomfortable to admit to and recognize that they’re why you made the choices – and they were choices – that you did. While there may be reasons for them and while the intent may have been different from the outcome, intent doesn’t change how they affected others. And the intent means less when you haven’t accepted and taken the rest on board.

I’m not saying all of this to beat up on you, to make you feel worse about yourself or to say “here we go boys, it’s open season!” It’s to point out that while you may feel bad about what you did, you’re still holding much of it at bay and things aren’t going to improve until you’re willing to face it head on.

Now, it’s good that you’re talking to a therapist, but it’s going to be important that you’re real with them. And hopefully they’re going to be real with you and call you out when you’re engaging in this sort of distancing behavior.

You’re going to need to recognize these sorts of behavior for what they are and make the deliberate and conscious choice to stop, and you’re going to have to keep consciously recognizing and choosing to stop until not doing those behaviors becomes muscle memory. Until then, it’s going to be very easy to slide back into old behavior, and every time you excuse it the way you did before, the easier it becomes to excuse the next step too.

If you want to do better, you have to recognize the cycle and break the cycle.

And to start that process, you have to get real with yourself. Asking for help was a step. Now its on you to take the next one.