Between Friends
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who has been upset that she might have lost a very dear friend of hers. Not to death, but to an act that made her friend feel as if she was second or third on her list.
It seemed that my friend and her friend were on the phone talking when a second call came through on my friend’s phone. My friend took the call and then went back and told her friend that she’d call her back. What my friend’s friend found upsetting about this was that it wasn’t an emergency of any kind or even another friend that had needed to talk at that moment. No, the call had been from a man that my friend hadn’t even met yet and hadn’t even spoken to before.
He was someone who had responded to her personal ad on an adult dating site and was now calling. To say that my friend’s friend felt put out, pushed aside and cast away is to put it mildly, since she hasn’t spoken to my friend since.
While I sympathize with my friend’s pain, I find the dynamics of this interesting. Shouldn’t all us girls know by now that putting a male before our friendships is a way of straining our relationships with our girl friends? I’m not saying that the guy has to come last-that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that maybe he shouldn’t always be coming first.
I don’t know a single female, I really don’t, who hasn’t brushed aside her girl friends in order to accommodate a boy friend. This includes changing plans with her girlfriends that she made ahead of time. No matter that the boy friend had had plans of his own and had been busy: the plans fell through and he was “free to see her now.” It’s like as soon as a male comes around, we get stupid in our heads. And just to let you know-this includes women of all ages, from teens to women in their sixties and up.
Not long ago, three of my friends and I went out together. Our intent was to dance and just hang out as a group. One of these girls (okay, she’s 49) spoke up and said to the rest of us: “I’m looking to get laid tonight, so if I find someone, I’m off.” The rest of us were a bit quiet after that announcement because we’d all driven down together and we didn’t know how we were supposed to handle this situation. Stay? Leave? We were more than an hour from home and she had no car. What were we to do?
But that thought had never crossed the mind of this friend. It seemed that she had forgotten that it was the being with one another that had been our intent in the first place. The rest of us remembered that. We feel so should she have.