Breaking up is hard to do

Today has been one of those days – lots of reminders of all the things I can't do anymore, and the things that are hard that used to be easy. I haven't had one of these days for a while, which is good I suppose. I do feel better this evening that I did this afternoon, and I know that this is a temporary state, but one that pops up fairly regularly. I expect that it will be different next week, probably tomorrow, and really most likely even by the time I'm finished writing this blog post. Sometimes redirecting attention to something else really is the answer.

So I've decided to write a post about a failed friendship that was probably doomed from the start, but which we let go on entirely too long, and recently had to end by formally breaking up. It felt a bit like junior high all over again, but fortunately with greater maturity and restraint. It is not often at our age that a friendship gets to the point where a formal breakup is required, but this was one of those unusual and extreme situations.

Just about exactly one year ago, we met someone who is a psychologist in the business department – he studies decision-making and other aspects of social psychology that are relevant to business. He was hired at around the same time that we were, and is a few years younger than us, and has a wife who is a few years younger than him. When he found out that we did not have kids and enjoy playing board games, we very quickly became that their "new best friends," though we very conspicuously never reciprocated by calling them our new best friends.

It was a bit complicated from the very beginning. We didn't know many people in town, we had a number of things in common, and we were actively looking for friends. At the same time, we knew from the start that these individuals had a different way of interacting socially than we enjoyed. There was always lots of talk about work, constantly making social comparisons, being very competitive with everything from board games to work-related things to whose house is better, clear statements that there is a best way to do everything – just do what research says is best when it comes to everything from eating to interacting with students, lots of self-focused talk, and a general lack of being able to read and understand others' perspectives. You would think that we would just have bolted from this situation immediately, but it was a bit hard when we really did want people to socialize with. Getting lots of invitations and being told what great friends we were had the dual effect of making it impossible to just let the friendship fizzle out, and providing enough reward to put up with the stuff we didn't like.

However, we would often come home from spending time with these individuals feeling angry, drained, and just generally not good. Compare that with how it feels to spend time with actual friends, and we generally feel better when we come home than we did when we arrived. We knew it had to end, but weren't sure how to do it. We hoped that the fact that we would both be taking long vacations that did not overlap over the summer (and therefore would not see each other for almost 3 months) would allow for a natural end to the social relationship. However, as soon as they got back into town they called us up and want to make plans.

It all came to a head a little over a month ago when there was a confluence of events. The first included them bringing their cat to our house and the cat peeing on our basement carpet (this is kind of a long story, and probably not worth telling, except to note that they were unaware that their cat actually peed in our basement but told us as they were leaving that he has a tendency to spray so we should do a good check).  The second was an incident in which this "friend" gave a short talk at a psychology students event in which he disparaged psychology, and made some remarks that amounted essentially to the fact that he is better than everyone in the psychology department, and better than all of his colleagues in the business department.

After all this, and numerous other events that I will not enumerate here, we decided we just had to end it. We started out with not-so-subtle hints, but none of these were noticed. In the end, I wrote an email explaining our position, and Jeff thinks it was great – we had been talking for some time about the fact that it was important to make statements that were not something that could be argued with and this is what I did. I told them that we just have different personalities and different values and that we don't want to continue to spend time in an environment that is not consistent with these personalities and values.

So that was that. It seems to have worked, though it took some time to fully sink in I think. This is something that you never think you're going to have to do (or in my case it's something I never really considered as something people have to do in general), so if you find yourself in this position, now that I've been through it I might have some advice :-)