Here is Queen Bee’s side of the story, as written by ChatGPT:
To be accused of “Wendying” someone 15 years ago when actually the friendship had run its course
I’m wondering how people would feel if they discovered that someone they used to be friends with 15 years ago still believed they had deliberately orchestrated an entire friendship group to ostracise them.
Years ago DH and I became friendly with a group of couples in our village. Some of them had known each other for years before I came along. Our children were all roughly the same age and naturally there were parties, school things, barbecues etc.
One woman in the group — I’ll call her A — was married to one of the men who’d been part of the friendship group for years.
A always seemed slightly uncomfortable with the group dynamic. She regularly made it clear that she and her husband “preferred doing their own thing” and weren’t interested in the sort of holidays, weekends away and activities some of us enjoyed together. Which was absolutely fine, but over time it inevitably meant the rest of us became closer because we were actually spending more time together.
Around the same period, another friend started working at the local primary school.
A then became extremely unhappy with something happening at the school involving her child and several other children. I’m deliberately being vague because it involved children.
She was perfectly entitled to complain.
The problem, from our point of view, wasn’t that she complained.
It was that she became absolutely consumed by it.
Every conversation seemed to come back to how badly the school was behaving, how unfair the head was, how certain children were being discriminated against and how other parents apparently didn’t understand what was going on.
She describes herself now as having been “principled and outspoken”. I suspect other people might remember it as angry, relentless and increasingly difficult to be around.
It also became incredibly awkward because one of our friends actually worked at the school.
A seemed convinced that this friend was somehow part of the establishment she was fighting against, despite the complaint not actually being about her. There was a strange undertone whenever they were together. A has subsequently said she deliberately refused to “fawn” over the teacher like everyone else supposedly did.
That comment probably illustrates the problem better than anything.
Nobody was fawning over anybody.
We were friends.
Eventually people simply stopped inviting A to things.
There wasn’t a meeting.
There wasn’t some dramatic conversation where I announced that A was to be expelled from the village.
Nobody was instructed to delete her from Facebook.
Different people reached the same conclusion independently: spending time with her had become uncomfortable.
I suspect from her perspective it happened suddenly because she didn’t realise how strained things had become.
From ours it had been building for months.
The other slightly awkward part is that A has always assumed I was the “Queen Bee” because DH and I had more money than some of the others and because people sometimes did similar things to us.
Apparently we bought a caravan and then several friends bought caravans.
Yes.
Because we all had young children, somebody suggested caravanning, we enjoyed going away together and some of the others decided it looked fun.
It wasn’t a cult.
Nobody was required to purchase a Bailey Unicorn to retain membership.
Over the years the friendships naturally became very close. We holidayed together, our children grew up together and we supported each other through various things.
A apparently regards that as “enmeshed”.
We regarded it as friendship.
Her husband still chats perfectly happily to the men when he sees them, which perhaps ought to suggest that this wasn’t some coordinated vendetta against their entire family.
I also gather she believes the teacher “dragged her name through the mud”.
I genuinely don’t remember her doing that.
What I do remember is A repeatedly telling people that the teacher was up herself, that other parents fawned over her and that she herself was too principled to behave like that.
She may not realise how contemptuous she sometimes sounded.
Fifteen years later, if I passed A in the village I probably wouldn’t stop for a conversation.
Not because I’m still furious about a school complaint from 2011.
Because we haven’t been friends for fifteen years.
If she suddenly confronted me in the street demanding to know “what my problem is after all these years”, I’d probably be completely taken aback.
There isn’t a problem.
There’s just a friendship that ended a very long time ago.
And if I’m completely truthful, the idea that I’ve spent fifteen years controlling several grown women, arranging their holidays, influencing their purchases and instructing them whom they’re allowed to speak to is rather more flattering to my organisational abilities than reality deserves.