Once Bitten, Forever Shy: Part 2

Part 2: It was Tough Loving Bess

I'm not writing about these people in any particular order - just as their stories come to me.


For a while, Bess and I were joined-at-the-hips-finish-each-other's-sentences kind of best friends.  Until I befriended her, it had been a few years since I had a bosom buddy that was female; the majority of my close friends had always been male.  So when Bess and I met and became fast friends, it was like I had found the Carrie to my Miranda.  Bess was interesting in all the best ways; she did fascinating things with her time and never shied away from any adventure or new experience.  Spending time with her was like walking around a movie set and being the star of a music video.  She gave off this magnetic aura and I was so happy she wanted to be my friend.  She was the kind of girl that every guy wanted and every girl wanted to be.

But our friendship was never punctuated by jealousy.  I never actually wanted to be her (sometimes it's more fun to hear the stories of a wild life, than to actually live it); what I cherished was how understood I felt when I was around her.  We were on the same wavelength.  Here was a girl with whom I could talk about every topic from shoes to the ethics of New Age religions.

I'm not really sure where things went wrong but they went wrong in a rather colossal sense.  It wasn't like our friendship skidded into a ditch; it ended up being a 15 car pile-up on the freeway with casualties on both sides.  I feel sorry for all of our mutual friends, because the implosion of our friendship tore a closely knit group of comrades apart.

We had had minor tiffs before and the usual disagreements between friends, and at first it seemed like all could be forgiven and forgotten.  Bess and her boyfriend split up after 5 years of living together and I was there with her every step of the way through her break-up: when she was thinking of getting back together with him, when she was looking for a new apartment, when she moved, when she started dating again. 

But it was impossible to deny that she had gotten a touch meaner after her split.  Understandable yes; but was she justified in taking it out on me, I'm not entirely certain.  Suddenly everything I was doing was not quite good enough for her.  She became the master of 'negging', or giving backhanded compliments, all wrapped up in a joke or sarcasm, so I could never actually call her on it.

I bought a winter hat that I really liked - just a simple black floppy beret. If you've seen me the past 2 years, you've probably seen me wear it.   I told Bess about my purchase and her immediate response was, "Ugh I hate those hats.  It's so trendy, all those girls in the magazines are wearing them."

Uhhh thanks?

She always looked down on my modeling, saying that I wasn't an artist like her and that a model had no input into the creative process - after all, all I had to do was stand there and look pretty for the camera.

Excusemewhatthefuck?

I would change my profile photo on Facebook and she would respond with some kind of jokingly scathing comment, about how my clothes made me look cute but like I was 12, or how the angle of my face made it look like I had been gorging on potato chips haha lol j/k.  She hated all the art I put up in my apartment because it was either popular, made me look like a poser, made me look like I was just jumping on the bandwagon, or it wasn't made by a real artist.

What really ended the friendship for me however, was after the Ex announced he wanted a separation.  I tearfully went to her, to try to talk it out - to try to glean answers.  Why was he leaving me?  Why was my marriage ending? Was it my fault?  Bess gave me some dodgy answers about my behaviour; she claimed I was just a child playing house and I was not very mature so it was no surprise that my marriage was ending.  Her comments gave me pause; and then I very calmly asked her if she respected me.  I suppose it had been building up to this point all along. Bess responded very simply that she didn't respect me.

I'm not certain what was hurting more at that moment: the impending divorce or losing a best friend in your hour of need. People expect divorces; people don't expect best friends to jump ship on them so suddenly.  You know what to do when a boyfriend leaves you but who do you go to when a best friend breaks up with you?  I suddenly could not stand to be talking to her anymore so I told her we should take a break from our friendship until I got my life sorted out.  Even after she had hurt me so much, I still took the onus for ending the friendship.

Bess was incredibly upset by this, which surprised me.  Why would you want to be friends with a person you did not respect?

We attempted a few times to reconcile our friendship.  Bess explained to me that she felt I was a child because I had never lived alone before and I hadn't moved out of my parents house until I was 26, whereas she had moved out at 18.  Because of this, she was of the opinion that I was a weak, needy and dependent person.  She had the gall to tell me it was all right and she would still love me even if I was weak, needy and dependent so long as I would stop selling myself as a strong, independent woman and be true to who I was.  Bess further explained that she felt I was not committed to our friendship because I was unwilling to do the hard things, like be tough on her and tell her to suck it up, princess.

It was almost amusing sitting there and defending my notion of what made a person strong, if my blood wasn't boiling over.  I told her about being with my father through out his battle with cancer and staying by his side when he died.  I explained to her there were different methods of being a listener: some people were problem solvers, others were empathisers.   I never told her what to do because I have faith people know what is the best course of action for themselves, deep down and that my role as a friend was to be there no matter what a person decides.  I explained that my decision to live at home was a smart one economically as I was able to save on 8 years worth of rent and move out completely debt free.

I was on trial and she was my judge, jury and executioner.

This was when I realized that Bess' framework of what an appropriate life was fairly narrow. It was her way or the highway.  When we were in sync with one another, it was easy to get along with her.  All my decisions mirrored her philosophies.  But whenever I struck out on my own, I was wrong.  I was vastly unhappy in this relationship; it was bordering on abusive by now.  For the sake of my own sense of self-worth, I had to walk away.  It had to be a clean break with no further communications.  After all, any explanation to her would continue to treat her like she was a parole officer who deserved a reason for seemingly truant behaviour.  I could never win with her and I knew it.  If I told her I felt she was being cruel to me, her response would have simply been that she was being honest and it was my fault for not having a thick enough skin.  It never occurred to her that there could be different 'right' ways to live a life.

Bess attempted to contact me a few additional times, once apologizing for how she treated me. She explained that she held all of her friends to the same standard that she held herself and that she couldn't blame her friends for failing to live up to her perfect standards.  Then she berated me for not responding to her Facebook messages, saying she was sure I would find some twisted way to justify my behaviour to make it seem like I was right for ignoring her.

I laughed. Then I deleted the email and did not respond.