Advice on ending friendship

[Letsbakecake]

Hi All,

I have NC for this. I have had a friendship for over 20 years. The woman in question is from a different culture and she has opinions originating from that culture that would not tie into western values. However she also can be very kind, sensitive and thoughtful. She is not afraid to share her unpalatable opinions and it can make her very marmite here and she struggles with some social isolation as she is here alone with no family and no partner.

Our friendship was always good but over the last two years she has been very hurtful and insensitive with sharing her views on some very traumatic experiences I have had which really changed the friendship for me. She has also struggled enormously with covid and the social isolation it brought so I ended up supporting her a lot with that experience honestly willingly until she was so judgemental towards my difficulties.

The friendship has gotten to the point where I feel completely drained by it. There is no fun, the support tends to go in one way (although I think if you asked her she would say she has been supportive) and now I just don’t feel that I can offer her support in the same way any longer.

I had decided to put in boundaries but I am just finding I am not really interested in doing the things with her we have always done, generally going for long walks and chats, because I no longer want to share things with her from my life.

I want to phase out the friendship and in my mind it is already phased out a lot but I don’t want to hurt her or at the very least I want to minimise the hurt. I would love some thoughts.

You don't owe her a friendship and friendships need to work in both directions, and from what you've described this one doesn't.

She's likely going to be hurt however it plays out, if I were you I'd just become more and more unavailable, no check-ins, just allow it to fizzle out. She'll either get the message and stop contacting you or she'll ask you outright what's up.

You seem to be worried about hurting her, but it sounds like she hasn’t been so concerned about hurting you. I’m not sure you owe her a long explanation. It’s ok to say you’re just heading in a different direction and you no longer feel you have much in common with her, or something like that.

After 20 years, there's bound to be changes in your friendship, sadly it looks like you really can't be friends with her anymore. Don't feel bad about distancing yourself. Just continue being true to yourself and that includes not being able to give her as much time as you used to. It's ok. Maybe it is happening for her too? If she asks you what's happened, I think it's reasonable to tell her that you simply don't have much in common anymore and that your life has moved in a different direction to hers or something like that to show that the friendship has/is ended on your side. I would prefer to know rather than have a 'friend' suffer me.

Be less available and let it drift.

You seem to be worried about hurting her, but it sounds like she hasn’t been so concerned about hurting you. I’m not sure you owe her a long explanation. It’s ok to say you’re just heading in a different direction and you no longer feel you have much in common with her, or something like that.

She is a very direct person by nature but she also is not a person who can take any feedback and integrate it easily, it is a very tricky combination. I tried to talk to her after she said some very direct things commenting on my parenting which in her opinion was lacking at the time. Culturally she is all about family but my own family were highly dysfunctional and growing up and there was significant abuse in the family. During a serious final family rift she shared her opinion that me holding back relationships between my children and their family is wrong and she told me I wasn’t thinking about my children. I haven’t really been able to be a proper friend to her since because I really needed support at the time and she went for my vulnerabilities. She really has never fully understood my perspective on what she did at that time and I have found that I had to explain things in detail to her to stop her from being so judgmental of me. I genuinely don’t think I can recover the friendship but I genuinely don’t like this letting go bit.