WHEN FRIENDS ACT LIKE FOES

We've all been there:

The BFF who doesn't come to your holiday party, and when you call her on it, rebuffs you because she says she's sick of your "wallowing" in anxiety and depression after your husband abruptly left you two weeks before the previous Christmas. 

The friend who invites you over to dinner, but only because the date she was cooking for cancelled.

The best bud who really wants to read the screenplay that you've spent a year and a half working on, but admits to having skimmed it late at night, then tells you he was confused by a number of things and had basically skipped over the stage directions.

Hurtful and/or insulting, right?

The group of friends who choose your ex over you.  (That's a common one.)

The group of friends who ostracize you because they all went to college together and one of them has a beef with you because you made the mistake of hiring him and it didn't work out.  Juvenile, but it's happened.  Apparently blood is thicker than water applies to college cliques as well.

I'm sure there must have been episodes of Friends in which they got pissed off at each other, but what stays with one and why we watch the re-runs are for their ties that bind, at least on the telly, forever. 

Sometimes we can move beyond these slights...unless they're more than slights, unless they deeply wound, unless the friend has become truly toxic or simply isn't someone you recognize anymore, or perhaps is more of an acquaintance whom you decide isn't a very nice person.

But for the slighted or hurt party, nothing can move forward without the Apology from the other.

But then there are the BFFs who respond to being told they've hurt you by becoming defensive and attacking, listing all of your sins and grievances going back to who knows when.  And then you understand their recent instances of passive aggression.

William Blake wrote a poem about this called "A Poison Tree."  The gist of it is that unspoken wrath grows until it kills.

But we don't want our deep friendships to be killed.  What we want is connection.  What we want, what we always want, is to love and be loved.  Take it from Jack White's latest song, "Connected by Love."  Its wonderful video is below:

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