to let this friendship go?

[featherbag]

I've been friends with 'Sally' for half my life - since I was 15. She's 6/7 years older than me, and I met her in a nightclub. We got on brilliantly, and she was my best friend up until she moved abroad when I was 23. We (mis)spent the first 6 or 7 years of our friendship behaving in a generally outrageous fashion - drinking ridiculous amounts and going home with men whose names we couldn't remember, working only so we could afford to play, taking silly drugs (nothing too hardcore), going clubbing on Thursday night and coming home on Tuesday, that sort of thing. Silly, dangerous, unnhealthy behaviour, but thankfully we lived through it.

Then I grew up. I've now got a university education, a professional career, a fantastic (also professional) husband, first baby on the way, still enjoy partying (when not pregnant), but in moderation and all legal. 'Sally' hasn't grown up. Every few years she makes a younger set of friends and recommences the partying. I've been out to dinner with her tonight during one of her rare visits to the city I live in, and have been subjected to several hours of tales of snorting unknown substances to get high, taking ketamine, sambuca for breakfast before work, going home with men who don't even speak the same language then going to work in their clothes while still high, etc. etc. etc. She makes constant snipes about how boring my life is now, how I must wish I could still 'have fun', and so on. Her 'conversation' tonight bored me rigid.

How can I let go of my oldest friendship? I'm not judging her, she's knocking 40 and old enough to make her own decisions, but our lives are so very different now that I really don't know what we have in common. I love my life more than I ever have - I love my work, love my DH, love that we're starting a family, love our home. I don't want to sit and listen to all of that being dismissed as 'boring'. I only see her 2 or 3 times a year, but am finding even that intolerable. AIBU to just quietly let the friendship die? I can't help a sense of guilt, as I have a horrible suspicion that she's going to need her 'boring' old friends when she eventually crashes.......

I've never assumed she's jealous of my life at all! Thinking with a clearer head, once baby arrives I probably will be genuinely busy next time she visits. Maybe a gap of a year or two is no bad thing, I guess if the friendship is meant to continue it will, I'm going to stop worrying about it now. I was just upset last night as it was hard realising how much my friend and I have changed in opposite directions, especially when we'd been such good friends once!

I assumed she was jealous. I assumed that cos she continually slates your life off whenever you see her. If she was happy about it, I don't think she'd behave like that.

Yes I was a bit at the heteronormative mundane crap ie any woman who doesn't have a hubby, a mortgage and DC must be jealous of those who do, because that's complete bullshit.
I carried on partying till my late 30s and had loads of fun, and though I had times of being miserable about something or other, it was never envy of suburban heteromonogamy.

I have a very good friend who is in her late 40's. Devoted to her career, dates when she wants, travels, has luxuries I envy. She's a success in areas I wish I was but our lives took differing paths.

We don't sit there on met-ups slating each others lifestyles. Or having to defend our lives. I often walk away with a little sigh of envy that lasts until I open the front door.

wherestheparty write that novel!!

I also partied into my late 30s, it was pretty fab actually. No Peter Pan syndrome, or not wanting to grow up, I was just having loads of fun and so why not? I never envied my more settled friends. If your friend really envied you, wouldn't she stop partying and settle down?

I think it's a bit unfair of you to focus on how she 'hasn't grown up' and how on the other hand you have done well and are happy, instead of the fact that clearly she has a major drugs problem and needs support. I mean, poor you, getting bored by someone's self-destructive behaviour! If you really care about her, then instead of slipping away quietly, I think you owe her a frank talk. Tell her that you will always be there for her if she really needs help, but you can't sit back and watch her destroy herself.

She's doing that thing smokers do when a fellow smoker tries to give up: trying to sabotage a fellow addict's escape in case it weakens their own justification for staying addicted.

You've shown up her stupid, reckless, substance abusing behaviour by moving on and it's making her uncomfortable. So she's trying to force the discomfort onto her by calling you 'boring'.

Your life IS boring to her... same as hers is beyond you now. At least accord her the dignity of seeing her life is as valid and as important as yours before you move on and cut the strings (and if I was on the other side of it I'd have long since ended a friendship where my life was viewed as selfish, unimpotant and inferior).

You're slating her life as much as she's slating yours. The pair of you either deserve each other or you BOTH need to grow up and move on.

'Growing up' in the sense of becoming just another fucking heteromomogamous mundane really isn't compulsory. There is nothing at all wrong with a life spent having fun, staying up all night and having dozens of different sexual partners - as long as you can afford it, and as long as you tread a bit carefully with the intoxicants so you don't actually wreck your body completely. I still party from time to time despite being in my 40s, it's just that I have to make sure DS is being looked after before I can really let rip.

Thank you to the people who understood what I was trying to say in the OP and offered constructive advice, much appreciated x

Not going to bother attempting to explain to the others why they're flaming me for entirely non-existent 'offenses' as I don't really care that much x