Lisa Coppler met Karen* in a breathtakingly boring graduate school class in elementary education. Coppler slid a note bemoaning the tedious lecture to the woman in the desk next to her. Karen passed a commiserating message back. Over the weeks, they exchanged notes like a couple of high school girls. Coppler liked Karen’s wicked sense of humor. A fledgling friendship sparked.
Then the two women worked on a class project together. They liked each other so much they began studying together almost every day, discovering they both dunked Oreos into milk. At night they burned up the telephone wires, talking some evenings until 2 or 3 a.m. “We had so much in common and we felt so comfortable together. I never had a friendship like that that started off so intensely, so quickly,” Coppler says. They shared intimate details of their lives from their childhoods, their adolescence and even their marriages–“things you would tell a priest,” Coppler recalls.
Then, after five months of closeness, the wind shifted last spring. “All of a sudden things started to change,” says Coppler, who lives in Mt. Prospect.During one of their last conversations, Karen said she disliked Coppler’s habit of bringing gifts for Karen’s young children when visiting. Karen said it made her feel diminished as a mother.
Then she became inexplicably angry when Coppler bought her a set of flatware she had admired for her birthday.
After the birthday gift incident, Karen stopped calling and refused Coppler’s requests to get together. Coppler saw Karen again at a class test. As they walked back to their cars in silence, an anguished Coppler finally asked, “What happened to our friendship?” They had a brief, unsatisfactory conversation. “I don’t want you to call me anymore,” Karen said bluntly. Coppler stops here as she relates the story because she is crying.
“I have spent so much time thinking about this and trying to figure out what went wrong. . . . I don’t think I’ll ever know the truth,” says Coppler, who still has dreams about her friend.
Often we never know what went wrong when our friendships fracture, or, as is more common, slowly unravel. Usually there isn’t a big dramatic scene–it’s more as if a friend had quietly untied the mooring rope of her boat and drifted away without saying goodbye. It leaves us staring–hurt and confused–at the empty space she once occupied in our lives. But there’s usually an unspoken reason for the disconnection.
“Often the drifting away masks some disappointment or some grievance or unhappiness in the relationship,” says Ruthellen Josselson, a clinical psychologist and co-author of “Best Friends” (Crown Books, $23.) “Some conflict is buried because there seems to be a norm in female friendship that you don’t really talk about what’s troubling you between you and the friend. Instead of bringing up the problem, the injured friend will think `maybe this isn’t such a good friendship after all’ and will pull away.”
But conflict is inevitable in any intimate relationship. “None of us can be close to somebody and not have skirmishes along the way,” says Janice Wiley, a licensed clinical social worker at Family Service Although we tend to idealize our women friends, it’s natural that they will occasionally hurt and disappoint us. There also will be times when we’ll bruise their feelings or let them down. They’re not perfect and neither are we. What’s critical is the way we handle the problems that are bound to arise. Some are best tackled by a diplomatic airing of feelings. Other disputes simply should be dropped. And there are some friends that you must prune from your life, however painful.
Voicing dissonant feelings with a friend feels scary for several reasons. Women are afraid that if they express their anger or disappointment, they’ll kill the friendship. “It comes from the way girls are socialized about being nice. . . . If you aren’t nice, then you are a bitch and no one is going to want to be your friend. There is the tyranny of niceness,” Josselson says.
Our friendships also can feel fragile because “friendship is elective love,” Josselson adds. “There’s no legal bond. Friends are the only people in your life you care for because it’s what you choose to do.”
Some women worry that if they appear too needy, they may drive a friend away. It may be easier to voice conflicts with a boyfriend or husband because we expect to have problems with them.
“Women want to experience their women friends as the people that are safe and comfortable,” Josselson says.
But tensions may erupt when we enter a different life stage than our friend. For example, Stacy has a baby, and her close friend, Ann, who does not have children, feels neglected because Stacy now has little time for her. Or perhaps a friend is promoted to a demanding job and is no longer available to meet her girlfriend for lunch or a movie. Problems also surface when a good buddy forgets to call on a birthday or fails to phone after her friend’s father has had a serious operation. Maybe a friend is jealous when a chum becomes engaged, leading to sarcastic comments or criticism.
Cracks in a friendship usually occur around not feeling valued “and that’s all very subtle,” Josselson says. “That’s another reason it makes it hard to talk about. You end up feeling silly. It’s hard to say `My feelings are hurt because you didn’t call me on my birthday.’ That takes courage to bring that up. You feel kind of ashamed. . . . It’s hard to say to somebody, `I need you to love me more than you seem to be doing.’ “
But that’s what Kalynne Harvey said when her friend, Sheryl*, who had a new boyfriend, began forgetting to show up when the two women had plans. The clincher was when she failed to appear at Harvey’s 30th birthday party.
“I said that I was really hurt. . . . I told her what I expected out of a friendship, someone who would not cancel on me all the time. If she didn’t value the friendship, then maybe we didn’t need to be friends,” Harvey, 31, an attorney in Austin, Texas, recalled.
Sheryl apologized and affirmed that Harvey was important to her.
“We are really close now. I think the reason . . . is we have learned how to resolve conflict and learned we’re important to each other,” Harvey says.
They’ve also figured out how to balance their romantic relationships and their friendship, which Harvey calls “a juggling act.” She points out that while men come and go, “your girlfriend is going to be around hopefully for a really long time. . . . You have to nurture that friendship.”
Negotiating through conflicts only succeeds if “you have two people who care about their relationship and want to maintain and improve it,” says Florence Isaacs, author of “Toxic Friends/True Friends: How Your Friends Can Make or Break Your Health, Happiness, Family and Career” (William Morrow and Co., $23.) “The other person has to want to make it work as much as you do. The other person has to be willing to look at herself.”
Isaacs herself had to look within when a friend went into the hospital for a breast biopsy. Isaacs didn’t call before the procedure to wish her luck or after to inquire about the results. She hadn’t thought the biopsy was a big deal because the friend had had several before and all were benign. She thought wrong.
“I really would have appreciated it if the night before I went in for the biopsy you would have called and wished me good luck,” the friend said.
“I thought, `Oh my God, I was really thoughtless about this,’ ” Isaacs says. “I apologized up and down and I thanked her for bringing it up. I’m sure if she didn’t, it would have been one of these things that festered. It also frees me up so if there is anything that comes up (on my side) I can bring it up. I now know that if she’s sick again, I put her on my calendar. You try to be responsive to what your friend tells you she needs.”
It helped that Isaac’s friend took a tactful, non-attacking approach. This strategy can determine a conversation’s success or failure at mending a rift. Apology also can be a powerful healer.
“It’s a great way to deepen a friendship,” Isaacs stresses. “The other person feels she has been understood and cared about.”
If you think you have hurt a chum, don’t wait for her to bring it up before you say, “I’m sorry.”
But if a friend is not willing to face her role in a conflict, and if it’s serious enough, the injured party might have to downgrade or even end the relationship.
Debbie Rudy, 43, of Flossmoor called it quits after being disappointed by her once close friend, Laurie*, too many times. When a thrilled Rudy became pregnant after a miscarriage, Laurie brushed off Rudy’s excitement, sighing that everyone was pregnant. Then one of Rudy’s phone calls to Laurie went unreturned.
Several months later, though, Laurie phoned to have lunch. “She had just gotten a promotion. She was really nervous and she wanted to talk about it,” Rudy says. The day they were supposed to meet, however, Rudy’s father, who had been ill with cancer, had a relapse and was rushed to the hospital. Rudy left a message for her friend, explaining that she was in the emergency room. Laurie didn’t respond.
Laurie eventually phoned 1 1/2 years later, months after Rudy’s father died. “I said, `Where have you been for the last year and a half?’ ” Laurie said she was sorry, but for Rudy it was too late. “At that point I had distanced myself from her emotionally. I didn’t want to be hurt anymore.”
Rudy recognized that the friendship had become what Isaacs calls “toxic.” In her book, Isaacs describes a toxic friendship as one that is unsupportive, unrewarding, unsatisfying, draining, stifling and/or unequal. Still, ending a friendship, even an unhealthy one, can be wrenching. Some women continue to dream about their former friends for years after the breakup. “It’s a lot like a death,” Rudy says.
But there are no rituals to mourn the loss of a friend, nor is there a formula for finding a new one.
“With a boyfriend you know exactly what to do. You do your grieving and you eat your ice cream and move on and start circulating again. You ask your friends, `Do you know anybody for me?’ ” Rudy says. “It isn’t that way with a friend. You can’t put a personal ad in the paper. . . . You can’t go to your parents’ friends and say, `Do you have any daughters who might make a friend?’ “
Before you dismiss someone for disappointing you, be clear on who really is a close friend. “We have best friends, good friends, casual friends,” Isaacs says. “You may have a great time with your doubles tennis partner . . . (but) don’t expect her to be there to help out when you’re sick . . . Too often when people say `so-and-so let me down,’ it’s not really that they let you down, but that you were expecting too much.”
Not every conflict calls for a heart-to-heart. Not every problem can be resolved. “Sometimes you just have to accept certain things and live with them,” says social worker Wiley. “Especially in a good, close relationship there’s a certain amount of cutting some slack for a person and knowing you can be close and love somebody–warts and all.”
Sandra Murphy, 50, a Chicago attorney specializing in family law, agrees. She often finds the best approach with her friends is “letting some stuff roll off your back, not being too prickly. That’s in contrast to getting it off your chest right away. It’s a delicate balance.” If a potential conflict arises, Murphy asks herself, “How important is this to me? Is this the hill to die on?” If it’s not, she lets it go. She allows her friends their foibles–which she often finds endearing–as they tolerate hers.
The payoff is ultimately accruing lifetime friends. “People who grow together and mature together become irreplaceable,” Josselson says. “They are memory banks for each other. They hold each other’s lives.”
MENDING A RIFT OR LETTING IT GO
Has a friend done or said something that upset you? Here are some tips on how to handle it:
1. Count to 10.
2. Before confronting another person, confront yourself, says Janice Wiley, licensed clinical social worker with Family Service of Winnetka-Northfield. First determine whether your reaction may be triggered by other things–you’re upset about something else in your life; you’re particularly sensitive about a certain issue; you’re having PMS.
3. Ask yourself whether the friendship is a close and open relationship that lends itself to an intimate conversation.
4. Pick your spots. Select issues “that are truly damaging to the friendship,” notes Florence Isaacs in her book “Toxic Friends/True Friends.” If you feel that a friend has been disloyal or unsupportive, talk early, advises Isaacs. ” . . . it’s possible that there has been a misunderstanding or that the offense is unintentional.”
5. If something is bothering you, don’t let it fester. “Little things, if you don’t discuss them, can become very big things,” Isaacs warns.
6. Talk about the problem in terms of how you felt or perceived it. Use the word “I.” For example, “I felt really hurt and angry when you couldn’t go out to lunch with me again this week.” Or, “Our friendship is very important to me. I feel hurt that you don’t seem to have any time for me since the baby was born. I feel like I’m losing you as a friend.” Don’t begin by telling another person what they did to you. They will feel like they are being attacked.
7. If you are on the receiving side of a grievance, have the courage to look honestly at your behavior and make amends if necessary. “We are all thoughtless at times. Sometimes we’re selfish. We all have our little dark sides. If we can just admit it and say, `I am really sorry, and what can I do to make up for it?’ it makes all the difference,” Isaacs says.
FRIENDS
The pair: Melinda Lawrence, 29, a certified public accountant at Arthur Andersen LLP, and Amy Barber, 26, a physical therapist at Evanston Hospital.
How they met: Melinda and Amy moved into the same two-flat in Evanston as their husbands began course work at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Melinda lives on the second floor; Amy on the first.
The bond: Melinda: “Amy and I connected as friends because we were both in new situations. All of a sudden we were both the breadwinners for the family, in a new town, working at new jobs and adjusting to our husbands being in school. Her easygoing attitude complements my not-so-laid-back attitude.”
“Melinda is very kind and easy to get to know,” Amy says. “I realized that we had a lot of the same interests and enjoyed a lot of the same things. We’re both dog lovers and like to work out.”
The blooming of friendship: Amy: “Our friendship grew slowly due to the fact that we were trying to absorb so many changes around us. It deepened this spring. Two things happened: First we decided to start exercising more frequently, so we would go work out together. Secondly, our husbands went away for summer internships, so we started hanging out to keep each other company. We decided to train for a triathlon to keep ourselves busy. We trained for three months together. We weren’t competitive; we were excited for each other.”
The frequency: They talk on the phone every day and usually see each other every other day. “We really value each other’s privacy and don’t visit the other one first without calling,” Melinda says.
What’s to like: “I really value Amy’s dependability,” Melinda says. “I can always count on her to be there and just listen to me when I need an ear. She is also very honest with me and shares her opinion.”
Says Amy: “I value Melinda’s maturity. She always is available to listen and usually has some words of wisdom to impart. She is always lending something to me or sending me cards for different occasions. Melinda also has a strong spiritual background, which is refreshing to me. Melinda is fun to be with and we usually laugh together once a day.”
How do they make their friend feel valued in little ways? Melinda: “We both really like the farmers market and will buy flowers, fruits or vegetables for the other if one of us can’t make it to the market. We also take out each other’s dogs if one of us is going to be home late.”
What keeps your friendship healthy? “We are very honest with one another,” Melinda says. “We respect each other’s time to be alone or with a spouse. We encourage one another, whether it’s related to our job or another situation.”
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Have you established a good friendship? Please write to us about it and we may feature you in “Friends.” Write to Marla Paul, c/o WomanNews, 435 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611, or e-mail Marla444@aol.com.
Our next feature will focus on how to nurture a friendship. Please share your experiences and ideas. E-mail Marla444@aol.com or write to Marla Paul, c/o WomanNews, 435 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611.
