My sad friend is ruining my hobby and I feel an absolute bitch!

[Firefly45]

I have a hobby..let's say it's fishing.

I go with a friend once a week fishing and we chat on text through the week. I used to love fishing with her because it was a few hours escape where we had deep conversations about life, space, society and I felt like it was an escape from real life.
(I am in a caring profession and spend all day with vulnerable people listening to problems. I also have other friends and family who I support).

For the last 8mths my friend is having terrible problems at home in her family. It's awful. So sorry for her. It's ongoing and I don't know what she is going to do. I do genuinely feel for her so much.

My problem is that she unloads to me while we are finishing. Every session we spend talking about her situation at home. I think I'm only outlet for her to talk to. We also talk about it all week on text.

I've started dreading going fishing. I come back not relaxed just exhausted and sad. I used to love that fishing session.

I feel so bad tho. She's a good friend and having an awful time but I don't think it's going to resolve anytime soon.

I'm at the point now of wanting to make an excuse not to go fishing.

She's been a wonderful friend to me but I need my hobby for my own peace and relaxation.

Don't know what to do?

That's desperately upsetting for her if there's genuinely no likely end in sight. I think you need to suggest an additional, structured form of support - therapy, support groups for others in similar situations. In the best case scenario, this would help her find other ways of dealing with the mental load and she wouldn't need to unload on you, because it surely can't be healthy for her to be constantly talking about it. If she's talking about it in a way that's causing you stress it doesn't sound like this is constructive chat where she's working through it at all, so it likely isn't doing her much good.

Maybe you could focus on supporting your friend to deal with the bit she can control, so her reactions and her own mental health, rather than the wider issues out of her control?

You are going to have to make time somewhere else in your life for her and say that you want Fishing to be a trouble free zone. there is no other way.

i get that she needs a vent, but its clouding the one time YOU have to decompress.

You should try swimming... taking and swimming don't work 😁

@Firefly45 It's not fair on you to be having your ear bent like this.
You are going to have to tell her it's just too much.

You aren't being paid £50 an hour, and it's spoiling your downtime.

I don’t think OP is saying she wants to listen to her friend’s problems, not just during the hobby. I think OP is saying she’s had enough. So these suggestions to separate talking time and fishing time are not actually solving OP’s problem.

I’ve been there with a friend of mine in the past. We’d been casual friends for a few years and then she started offloading on me. All the time. For six months. She wanted to call every week and texted me most days. Worst of all, she didn’t reciprocate any of the listening or care - when I tried to talk about my stuff, she said she didn’t know what to say and then kept talking about herself. She had a therapist and a partner by the way.

I eventually told her that it was difficult for me to be the outlet and that I’d like to keep the friendship more fun and light-hearted. She wasn’t my best friend or anything, we didn’t have that deep of a bond. She didn’t take it well at all. We are no longer friends.

So this could end badly. But crucially it will also end badly if you don’t say anything. You will resent her and your friendship might end because of that anyway. This is a great opportunity to stand up for yourself and set boundaries.

I do think that you should say to her that you can't help other than to listen, but that you're not the solution. suggest therapy sessions as a private space for her to decompress and get more constructive guidance/coping strategies as you're finding it all a bit overwhelming.

if you don't speak up, you will end up losing the fishing, losing the friend, so try to find a diplomatic way through this

@Firefly45 She probably gets pip benefits that she can pay for therapy out of?

It's not going to be a problem that improves, until the child leaves home. {Supported living?}
I

I love my two closest friends. We're in our fifties now and have been friends since mid teens. As you can imagine we've all been to hell and back in that time.
I have a life limiting condition and obviously it's a struggle just to be here at times.
I keep my two friends briefly up to date on emergent diagnosis, things like joking about a recent transfusion being lunch the other week too. I purposely keep our meeting together as a time of normality. It's my respite from the doom of day to day. The last thing I want to do is give them compassion fatigue.
I also tell them to climb that mountain, take the trip, etc. so I can live vicariously through their adventures. I treasure their friendship and the positive boost it provides to my life, just visiting for a few hours every couple of weeks.
I think you should tell your friend she can have a few minutes to get the misery (you can be more polite) out of the way then on to positive subjects. Even my crappy life has lovely things to look forward to and I want to show I share their joy too.

Reduce the fishing to once a month so you can connect then, and for the other three weeks do something else to find your much needed down time.

I don't think asking her to change her mindset is supportive. She's entitled to feel down. The issue is just not constantly offloading on OP.

@Cheeseandcrackers40 That sounds so much like my friend! She was sending me 40 minute+ voice notes that I barely had time to listen to, let alone reply to. Also telling me all the horrible things her boyfriend did but never listening to my advice (dump him, obviously, totally toxic relationship). She ended up marrying him.

She was living abroad at various points and once she basically invited herself to stay with me in the UK for several days uninvited. Which was bad enough but at the time, DH and I were living with my parents so it really was not my place to have people staying over! I ended up having to fork out for an AirBnB for the two of us to spend some quality time together. But all she wanted to do was get drunk and proceeded to slag off my DH for reasons she had literally made up (since she’s never made the effort so didn’t really know him or what our relationship was like). Like she wanted me to be as miserable as her.

It was a shame as we’d been inseparable BFFs from the age of about 12-32 and I still miss our friendship 😔

NO! It's not fair on OP.

''Misery loves company''.

OP is in a caring profession and gets her ear bent at work.

She needs peace and lighthearted relief.

Listening to endless moaning about someone else's problematic child isn't anything that @Firefly45 can practically help with.

It's just the same old same old moaning- and won't get better as it sounds like the friend is stuck in this situation for the foreseeable future.

Friend needs active, professional therapy.

Some people are so self obsessed with their problems that they can bang on and on and on without end, getting nowhere, it;s just an exhausting barrage of complaints.

This is what a therapist is paid for.

To actively listen.

It's not OP's job.

That’s why I prefer cycling on my own 🚴‍♀️😉

i would try this^ approach first. Your friends stuck in this pattern and she might actually enjoy to break it as well. While she’s talking to you she’s not relaxing. Of course she might be one of these people who only relaxed once they spoke it out. In this case I would try : Let’s not talk about X,Y, Z and just enjoy ourselves approach ( and include one of your problematic topics on the list )

There is a charity that provides support to parents and siblings of children with additional needs local to me that does sessions so the parents and siblings can talk things through. Is there anything like that near to you? It might actually help her as there might be people who are willing to exchange 'teen sitting' to give your friend a break or have ideas on things that will make her life and the life of her child easier.

I think if she could join a support group of people in a similar situation she wouldn't need to unload on you.

I think your issue is the frequency which is draining. I think the only solution is to reduce the hobby time with your friend to once a month - make up an excuse, busy with work, doing something else with husband. Then you can be her quasi therapist one session a month which should be manageable. Then see if you an do your hobby on your own on the other weeks, or think of a new activity for yourself to get the downtime you need. I really don't see how some of the solutions like a timer for discussing issues would really work in practice. I think you'll just need to reduce frequency for a while.

I completely agree about the time at the start to talk about problems and then ban it as a subject after that. I was having hour+ long conversations almost every night with a friend who was having an awful time, but it was not only heavy going, but also tedious because she would go over the same elements over and over (understandable because it was consuming her every thought).

I suggested she could have 20 minutes to talk about it, and the rest of the time we would talk about books, films, friends etc and we stuck to it. A few months later she said it had really helped because it gave her time to switch off and gave her permission to stop thinking about it without feeling guilty. This made me feel a bit better because it massively improved our friendship and I’d been on the verge of pulling back.

Friend, I get the feeling that you’re becoming trapped in a 24/7 of worrying about what’s going on at home, so let’s use this hour of hobby to practice some mindfulness and temporarily escape from your situation - I honestly think that it will do you so much good to concentrate on something outside of your current troubles… often taking a break is the best thing to do…

there was a time in my life when I was going through a particularly shit time at work and two friends in particular were very supportive. Looking back now, I can see that I probably acted like OPs friend and I cringe a bit at how draining I must have been to be around.

however, if one of them had turned around and said something like “I’m sorry you’re going through this, but it’s all getting a bit much for me to keep listening to it” I would not have held it against them at all, even then I recognised how lucky I was to have them. It might even have prodded me to dig myself out of the situation quicker than I eventually did, rather than wallowing.

OP, you're not required to set yourself on fire to give anyone else warmth or light. You're also under no obligation to pick up any burden she tries to hand to you, be that emotional or in real life. I'd suggest to her that she really needed professional help and that you're struggling to find your own balance at the moment, so could you please just focus on the fishing.

Don’t make it about her. Just tell her you are going through a few issues and want to go fishing on your own next year. It’s your 2025 resolution to fish solo for your personal development.

You are sure she will understand, given the problems she is coping with so admirably.

Then you can hopefully make the shift over the next few weeks, with it being more bearable because you know it’s coming to an end.

This could be a good approach.

Could you do the hobby with your friend every other week with no change but keep doing the hobby every week with the alternate weeks you doing it alone?

Maybe at a different time, different river?

I've been the sad friend! My fishing friend gently but firmly told me that I was very obviously struggling and she would be there for me as much as possible, but I needed to get therapy.

I did.

Lasted two years!

That probably tells you how much I was struggling and how right my friend was to be honest with me. I valued her opinion, so as she told me I needed help, I believed her.

I'm in a much better place now, and we're still really good friends.

This is an excellent example of why setting a limit is the best idea, it is not just best for you, it is best for your friend. Everyone needs to offload sometimes and a good friend will be willing to listen to that BUT if that moaning/offloading goes on too much it just leaves everyone feeling worse in the long run.

Actually having a proper break away from her problems and not ruminating on them can make it more bearable for your friend in the short term, and might even give her some perspective to see a way forward, when she goes back home and had to deal with the problems she has. It is always more difficult to see a way forward from the depths of panic, sadness and anger that probably underly your friend's offloading. Once she takes a step back, out of that fog of emotion, she might be able to see things more clearly. She justs needs a 'time limited' opportunity to express those emotions/frustrations first and you need to know you don't have to listen to her forever (which I imagine it feels like at the moment to you).

I hope you can find a way to get through this by setting limits you are happy with, If you don't set those limits now, the risk is that you may end up withdrawing and losing a friendship that may just be going through a difficult patch due to your friend's circumstances and you may feel quite guilty.

I am not saying you should feel guilty if you just distance yourself with no explanation or chance for you friend to change, just that you might and that is a price you may pay for not trying to set boundaries now. Whether you are willing to pay that price is up to you as you may think the guilt will be easier than having the courage to speak up now. Good luck with it