to be cross with chronically late, attention/reassurance-seeking friend?

[MoleOfKingTyre]

Usually meet up with friend on my own. She's always late so I bring book to restaurant and wait. Don't mind as have young children at home and happy for peace and quiet. Met up with her plus my DH and DC for walking tour, lunch and theatre in another town 1 hour away. Her idea, but I bought theatre tickets. Plan was to have picnic lunch in between. Night before she rings (waking me up as I had fallen asleep) to say "I am bringing a packed lunch. Do you think that is selfish?" Non-plussed, I said no. Being sleepy, I did not gush "of course not", just sounded non-plussed (as we had agreed to bring packed lunches). She sounded put out that I hadn't spent a lot of time reassuring her, but I was too woozy to care, having just woken up. Next day, she arrives 20 minutes late. We had arrived 30 minutes early, as we set out the time she had said she would set up (9am). She rocks up at 10.50am. We have to run to venue for 11am start. Don't have time to listen to her excuses/apology (which would be in fact an invitation to tell her that we really don't mind!). She seems put out that her "grand entrance" has been ignored and we are more concerned about giving the kids a snack/going to the loo before 11am! Walking tour overruns, kids get hungry, but DH and I manage to distract them. After things are calm, she starts going on "Oh, I feel so terrible, the kids are so bored and hate this, and it was all my idea". I try to "shush" her discretely as I do not want to wind the kids up. She looks very put out at being shushed as this was obviously my opportunity to tell her that of course we don't mind and her needs come before the kids. At lunchtime - which is a quick chance to eat our packed lunch before the show begins - she announces that she has not brought any packed lunch and she will need to buy some sandwiches. I say this is fine and there are lots of sandwich shops close to where we are picnicking. She ignores these and goes on a ten minute trek to buy some rank sandwiches in a petrol station. Then proceeds to eat these sulkily, enviously eyeing our nice picnic. I am busy feeding kids and taking them to the nearest loos (the museum). We are packing up and she announces "I shall have to go to the toilets at the theatre". I say "Why not use the museum loos, they are just over there". She says "Oh, I couldn't use the museum loos". So we queue up in the packed theatre for the four ladies loos with her, and then wait outside. When we are seated she wants to sit in the aisle seat (that I have booked in case the kids need the loo during the performance). I ask her to sit down where she is (not on the aisle) as we are trying to get everyone seated and there is a queue of people behind us. She does not come out during the interval and "hogs" the aisle seat saying that she will have to leave during the performance as "they have brought the soundcheck forward to 6.30pm" for her concert (1.5-2 hours away). Realistically, she will be lucky to make the 7.30pm performance start. I spent £200 on the theatre tickets for us all and hoped it would be a special occasion rather than something she just dropped into. I don't think I'll bother arranging a day out with her again. AIBU?

I'm not saying you should have to cater but you know this friend is flaky and disorganised and you profess to like otherwise why are you friends? Under those circumstances I would have thought you would have thought to pack a bit extra in the picnic just in case. I do find it a bit odd and rude to eat in front of your friend even though it was her own fault she had nothing, she is meant to be a friend someone you share things with, forgive the foibles of and know well enough to pre-empt this kind of situation.

I think your friendship has gone past its sell-by date.

OP, sounds exactly like someone I know! Drives me nuts, but she's a close family member and what I love her, she's a nightmare!! Constantly late, always needed reassurance about everything and I get what you mean re the email! She needs you to tell her what to do but then, of course, it's your fault because you told her to do it!!! I feel your pain, I really do!

I'm guessing there's a long backstory of flakiness and reassurance seeking behaviour (that alone would grind my gears, she sounds quite infantilised) of which this latest example is perhaps the last straw?

It's OK to let a friendship slide when you no longer find yourself enjoying someone's company. She sounds hard work.

I didn't "insist" anything. She made arrangements and we agreed them with her. She then changed her mind afterwards, whereas we kept our part of the bargain.

If she had said "I'll meet you at the venue" (rather than "I don't know where it is, meet me at the car park and we'll walk there"), we would have made our own arrangements and met her there without her lateness being an issue, for us at least. She specifically made the arrangements and I bought the tickets for the theatre even though it is pretty obvious that she couldn't attend the whole thing.

I know it's not her fault that the walking tour over-ran. No-one could have known, but it's something that we all had to deal with. It curtailed the time available for lunch before the theatre began, and meant that it complicated issues when one of the party announced that they didn't have any lunch.

I see why you find some of the things he did a bit annoying, yes. Lateness and flappiness can get annoying. Although it sounds like she is quite insecure and anxious, which being single and childfree can result in, so it's not a big deal to reassure someone when they are like that. It's a bit cold not too really.

TBH, the soundcheck thing sounds like she felt uncomfortable and was just trying to make an excuse to leave- like she felt like an outsider. Her mind was probably thinking "I've suggested we do this nice family day so friend can bring her kids and husband too and I thought that was taking note of what's important in her life and now she's totally ignoring me/acting like she's my mum... I feel really uncomfortable and out numbered I'd better go".

There do seem to be plenty of ways in which you've made choices to suit your own needs/preferences without considering her i.e. where the children need to sit during the performance, what your dh needs to eat. Everyone does that, but it's a bit much to pull her up on her shortcomings so badly when you have your own in the same area.

I also see that you could be a considered a bit harsh/preoccupied, for things like not including her in the picnic, telling her where to sit/go to the loo. If you act like her mum, she will expect the full service i.e. a packed lunch. You're either equal or you're not. So if it's her responsibility to bring her own lunch, it's her choice where she sits/goes to the loo/buys her sandwich.

I think really, that you have incompatible lifestyles- she is single, childfree, running a business in slightly shaky circumstances it sounds, you are married, with kids, much more settled and secure. She s probably quite insecure and anxious from the sounds of it, has to look after every aspect of her won life with no-one to discuss decisions with. You have some little people and a dh with a medical condition tot look after. So the dynamics of those types of lives are very different. It's little wonder the gears clash a bit.

So if you want to still be friends, keep it simple in a setting where the different dynamics of your lives don't clash too much. ad cut her a bit of slack for the things that don't fit into your world- there are probably things about your way of life that don't fit easily into hers.

I think there is a long history of flakiness and DH and I can usually be relied upon to give the right answer, be wonderfully reassuring.

I think there were just a few too many straws on the camel's back this time.

I think the lesson to learn is to make separate arrangements (arrive at venue independently, buy own tickets, make own lunch arrangements) rather than risk someone's lateness jeopardising arrangements if it is important to be at x at a given time.

That way if the latecomer is late she wont have the mortifying experience of having to apologise because only she will be inconvenienced and there will be no-one around to apologise to.

If she had said to me when I was booking the tickets "I must have an aisle seat", I would have accommodated it. However, she said nothing I selected the aisle seat for the children knowing that they sometimes need to go to the loo during a performance.

The "soundcheck" thing, I think was nonsense. She couldn't have done a two hour drive in one hour. I think she simply didn't think about the time when she would need to drive before she made the arrangements for the theatre. She only needed the aisle seat because of this. It's a shame that she didn't realise her error earlier so I could cancel the ticket or take someone else who would have stayed to the end.

I am pissed off that she organised a complicated timetable and then expected me and DH to take responsibility for implementing it and yet did not want to stick to it herself.

I don't really care where she goes to the toilet. I think I more objected to the fact that I had very obviously spent a lot of time taking DC to the loo at the museum and she rather rudely said that she "couldn't" go there, as if it would be committing some major faux pas.

Why couldn't she go in the Museum? At first I thought it must be because she thought it would be dirty/crowded/full of kids or so ring, but you seem to be saying that she thought she shouldn't go because you hadn't visited the museum? Is that right?

The trouble is that a lot of the things she said or did don't seem too terrible in the grand scheme of things... It seems more like you were objecting to her tone or some subtext you identified, which we obviously can't really read as we weren't there.

The flakiness is forgivable, it doesn't seem to bother you that much anyway.

The constant need for reassurance is odd and annoying, it's like thin people pointing out imaginary fat bits to moan about to their not as thin friend. You have actual children, why on earth would you want a less reliable, more needy extra one?

The museum is free. You can "visit" it very quickly and then go to the loos. That is what I did with the kids. We were eating our packed lunches outside. If it had been raining, we would have been eating them in the museum's "picnic room".

The museum loos were very convenient and used by many people in town. They were more convenient than using the crowded theatre loos which were packed due to it being just prior to the performance. But of course we could have just left her in the loos on her own rather than waiting outside for her and showing her to her seat. We obviously had the idea that she was a bit "helpless" and couldn't go to the loo on her own(!), rightly or wrongly.

Maybe she did think using the Museum loos was the sign of the worst kind of person. The fact that she voiced her disdain for the museum loos when I suggested it, having just taken the kids there, didn't endear me to her. It implied that she considered herself too well mannered to inconvenience the museum staff by using their loos, yet it was fine to turn up late without lunch etc and expected us to accommodate that, give her lunch, etc, even though we had young kids to look after.

NOTMENOTYOUNOTANYONE

I think you've hit the nail on the head. If someone is flaky and their attitude is "I'm a cnut, take me or leave me I don't care", one can do just that.

It's the extra need for reassurance/lunch that is concerning. It's the "I don't care about your feelings, but I need you to care about mine" thing.

If I hadn't been with the kids though, I wouldn't bothered with an aisle seat. If I hadn't booked those particular seats she would have had to just lump it. I didn't stop her taking the seat. I was just taken aback that she felt that she was entitled to it and that we should be inconvenienced for her bad planning.

With regard to the "shush", that was rather more to do with the fact that DH and I had just pacified the kids and I didn't want someone going on and on about how awful it was for them and how bored they were, in case it started them off. And what was I supposed to say "To be honest they are more upset about being kept waiting in the street when we told them you would turn up at 10.30am and we were going to be late" in response to her apology. Or would it have been polite to say "that's alright, don't worry".

Do you have any mutual friends? Is she attention seeking with them?

Sounds like she's seeking reassurances that her behaviour doesn't offend you in some way (phoning up to ask about bringing a sandwich being perceived as "selfish").

You don't seem to like/approve of this "friend" much. Is it possible she's picked up on how she (seems to) irritate you?

I actually felt rather sorry for her reading your initial and subsequent posts, OP.

I don't think you can really feel resentment for waiting for her outside the theatre loos if she didn't ask you to do it.

And maybe she really did feel bad - if I was apologising for something and my friend "shush"ed me, I'd be quite taken aback.

Yeah, I'm afraid with the recent flurry of posts, I have also been pushed over into YABU territory! OP, I think you despise her and everything she says and does winds you up! End the friendship! (I kind of doubt she's going to be asking you to do stuff again in anycase...)

Anyone of those things is annoying but forgivable. The combination is most definitely unreasonable.

She sounds like a pain in the neck, and rather a lot of the responses in this thread look very like the typical MN AIBU compulsion to pick apart OP's posts to find something to attack her with.

We have some mutual friends and she has been very upset about them in the past.

For instance, a friend of ours got married, acquired stepchildren and had a massive work promotion that meant that she didn't have much time for anyone else and I spent a lot of time reassuring this woman that it was natural that the mutual friend didn't have much time for anyone else.

She has also been hurt that people don't share the same views on politics/religion as her. She often "angles" for the "right answer" from you to check that you "agree" with her (often politely ignored/subject changed).

She was hurt when I said that I was writing stuff under a pen-name and wouldn't tell her my pen-name (as it would defeat the whole purpose).

She does sounds very insecure and perhaps quite unhappy. It's up to you if you don't want to deal with that any more though.

I think YANBU - she sounds really childlike and irritating. It sounds like somewhere along the way you've ended up being cast into parent/child roles, which doesn't suit any of you now.

I can't bear people who are all "Oh I'm so sorry, I'm just so flaky, you know what I'm like." The behaviour is usually forgiveable, but the attention seeking apology is irritating. It always makes me want to say "That's fine, but if it bothers you, don't BE like that then."

I might have shared my sarnie with her though.

I can see that people would think "shushing" someone who was trying to apologise was out of order.

A genuine apology that shows contrition and a resolve to change things in a way that inspires confidence that the thing wont happen again is pretty hard to resist.

On the other hand, an "apology" from a repeat offender which smells like it's someone angling for reassurance that you really don't mind their behaviour and they can carry on with impunity is different.

For whatever reason, I must have concluded that the "apologies" fell into the latter category.