I have a friend of five years who is causing me daily anxiety. She has, admittedly, not been in the best place over the last two years. She is struggling financially, is still living with her parents (who she doesn’t get on with) at 32 and desperately wants a relationship but has never had a boyfriend. She is in a pattern of meeting people, they sleep together, and she somehow turns into the OW or a booty call. Bad choices, bad reactions and not enough emotional experience of relationships to tell what is good and what is bad. I sometimes feel like she behaves like a 15 year old. She gets flattered into doing things and gets easily bullshitted by men. Stuff I can tell is bullshit from a mile off – but the kind of things I would’ve (and did) fall for as a teenager.
In contrast I am married and have a comfortable (but by no means perfect) life. She seems to have decided that this means I have no problems at all and therefore need to focus most of my attention on making her life better. She started by becoming devastated at the way she was treated by her parents/men she slept with/other friends/employers. Because she asked me for help, I started to offer her advice on how to deal with it. This has evolved into her forwarding me nearly every bit of her correspondence, and asking me how she should respond or asking me to draft replies for her. She acted so helpless in so many areas of her life that I had to tell her to stop asking me for advice on the most basic things. She responded by telling me that I of all people know how awful her life is, and knowing that, I had just made her feel so much worse.
I have also started to help her frequently with money. I know for sure that every time we meet, I will pay. Whether it’s a meal, drinks, travel, service or treatments. My DH and I have spent thousands on her over the last two years. While she is always very grateful, it became expected every single time. I decided to draw back and other friends advised me to only meet her in places she could afford and that she would at least pay half for. The trouble is, there are SO many other things she takes from me when we’re together (energy, time, advice favours) that I didn’t feel like meeting at all – and especially not trekking over town to meet her somewhere else . It has become easier, almost, for her to come to me at my house so I don't have to move and so there is no money exchanged.
She used to expect to see me every day, but I have cut it down now to about once every two weeks, even though she still sends me about ten emails a day and almost 20 or more texts. When I initially stopped seeing her every day, giving various excuses and even getting to the point where I told her that obligation is not how normal friendship’s work, she decided to “punish” me by not speaking to me for 5 days. It was bliss for me to be out of contact, but apparently awful for her, leading her to a total breakdown and feeling suicidal. It was pathetic and awful.
Now in our every two week meetings she comes to the house (I am fed up of paying for her at restaurants/bars.) The problem is, it is very difficult to get her to leave. She would stay the night if she could. But DH and I literally have to head off to bed and leave the room, for her to eventually start packing up to leave (sometimes in the early hours of the morning.) Even then she mutters things like “oh it’s okay for you two, going to sleep next to someone else each night.”
She is very inappropriate with DH’s friends. She treats every dinner or event we have invited her to over the years, as an opportunity for her. She thinks only of getting a boyfriend, or getting money for herself. Even if it is mine or DH’s birthday or a celebration for someone else. Sure, she acts the part “happy birthday,” or “how are you?” or “thank you so much” but the ways she says these things is so ingenuine. All she is thinking about is herself. She also acts like every man she meets is an opportunity, even the married ones. The story is that they “always come on to her,” and she can’t help it. Sometimes I challenge her when she accuses DH’s friends of being obsessed with her, and a couple of times she has proved herself right by showing me texts and correspondence from them which is indeed exactly as she says it is.
She thinks that men get obsessed with her sexually because they see her as an easy target - a vulnerable person due to all the problems in her life. She sees this as another unfairness – that she is a walking target for “abusers” ie men who pursue her madly for sex, but then when they get what they want, they don’t call back. But for me it’s very obvious. She acts very available, she dresses very provocatively – and even though she doesn’t acknowledge it, she does half of the chasing (eg adds people on facebook after 5 mins of knowing them, brazenly ignores their wife, “hangs around” in the same places that she knows they’ll be.) She couches this behavior as “politeness,” or “showing interest in others.”
There are countless other things. I know that I am enabling her. Over the last 6 months, I have massively managed down her expectations and all my enabling and have sort of been waiting for her to get annoyed at the lack of energy coming her way from me. But all I am getting is huge guilt trips. Email after email of how awful her life is, how she hates X or hates Y, and saying the reason they are all treating her the same is because she is one of life’s sensitive people, one of life’s “givers” (!) that people can smell out her generosity and that makes her a walking target for abuse and for being taken advantage of.
My mother is a narc. My mother is also this combination of attention seeking and vulnerable – the brazen, charming seductress and fragile, hyper-sensitive child. They both can change moods as quick as lightening. She can be sobbing on my shoulder in the kitchen, only to see a good looking man with a Rolex walk in, wipe her tears, ask me to bring her a drink and saunter into the living room with a Cheshire cat grin. When I am baffled by the change she says things like “but I thought you wanted me to be happy?” “You have everything you want. Why are you denying me what I need?” Or “It’s allright for some…”
Is she also a narc? What do I do about her now without getting a tirade of revenge (which my mother does also.)