Friendly Drama

This is one of many columns I wrote a few years ago for an online magazine. I had just started online dating and was asked to write a column around being single, searching and finally finding who we are and what matters.

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When the relationship is over, some people stumble away with extreme sorrow and bitter memories. The ground upon which the two once stood is now scorched and cursed. The former object of desire is declared an enemy. Lines are drawn and mutual friends, now in the midst of a war they didn't wage, realize there is no neutral ground and are forced to choose sides.

For the more evolved, "friendship" is offered as a consolation prize. To ensure the demotion is clear, cleanly separating friendship from relationship, we use the phrase: "We're just (only, merely) friends." This sly, clever new relationship keeps your ex- close, within your circle, but paradoxically at arms length, stripped of any significance.

When you meet someone else, this new person will have trouble absorbing the friendship between you and your ex-. You cannot expect your ex- to be helpful in this regard. That would require genuine interest and well wishes from the former partner, which is not very likely in this codependent friendship. For one of you in this friendship, it's a win-win situation. For the other, who may be less prepared to let go, the setup keeps the river of denial flowing.

Serena, a galpal with a steady boyfriend (as well as a married friend she met and strings along), is constantly tripping over the remnants of her boyfriend's prior relationships. One unseasonably warm evening, he asked her to get a pair of shorts for him from his bureau. What she found among the shorts was a thong that did not belong to her. He insisted the underwear had been there since his last girlfriend. A later clandestine search revealed more thongs. Because he is a slob with items in his bedroom dating back to eighth grade, she believed his explanation that he simply never got around to throwing the underwear out. He told her that not every relationship ended badly so he has no hard feelings towards his exes.

His house is a graveyard, haunted by the ghosts of his past. The ghosts lurk in drawers and cabinets, waiting to spring out at her at any moment. He tells her that she reads too much into these items. "I don't spring clean after a relationship ends," he told her. "I'm not keeping them, I just never threw them out. Doesn't mean I don't love you." This sore spot in her relationship led her to pick at it like a scab until she began to ask the point of no return questions ("Do I not turn you on? Am I too fat? Am I not attractive enough? Why do you not enjoy sex with me?"). Her boyfriend answered her questions with such brute force and cruelty that she fled his house and wandered the streets of New York, emotionally shattered at 3A.M.

She knows that the friendship with her hot married guy is Avoidance 101. She tells me they are just friends and that they have not slept together but what they have done would make her guilty in any courtroom of cheating but she can't seem to break things off with either him or her boyfriend. The only thing about which she is certain is that she doesn't want her boyfriend
as a friend when it's over. Searing emotional and psychic pain can sometimes run too deep for social niceties.

Bob and I were just friends. I was not sexually attracted to him and had never seen him as a potential partner. We were the poster children for platonic relationships. He's positive about life and the future and he's hysterically funny. He's also an intellectual snob with a love of language and a penchant for writing pornography. He's married with two teen-aged
daughters. We had a perfectly safe relationship, playing off each other supremely well. He was the master of the double entendre and I would foil him neatly, redirecting the game back to safe and neutral territory.

He was the perfect straight gay companion. We were a less neurotic Will & Grace. He was my first base coach during the initial stages of my online dating adventures. He helped me to understand male behavior and his translations of manspeak into Modern Women's English should be a manual for women everywhere. For someone so enamored of language and communication, words have suddenly failed him.

Anita has an obsessive personality and is deeply insecure. She is one of those people both madly jealous and deeply resentful of the fortunes and earned successes of others. It's as though she feels there is only so much happiness to go around and every person who has it leaves less for her. She takes personally compliments given to others, as if those compliments are a message to her, "And you're NOT," e.g. "Wow, she's really talented. (… and you're NOT!)" I've come to understand that Anita sees the joys of life as a pie, with a set number of slices. She's bought into a belief system of negativity and scarcity while I see the joys of life as an ocean, endless and infinite.

Now unhappily married again, she has more than once expressed her wish that she could be single and childless with the choices I have: the opportunity to start a new life in a new place with little baggage. She longed for the opportunity to correct all of her past mistakes, the chance to start all over and make better choices. She wanted what she saw as one last chance at a pie slice.

Our friendship was quite complex and largely revolved around me building her up against the rest of the world, yet tearing each other down. She had no male friends and three female friends. She could never quite understand my platonic relationships with men and would go to great lengths to point out to me how each man she'd ever met wanted to possess her so that being just friends was never a possibility. I understood her passive aggressiveness.

Years ago, she insinuated herself into one of my platonic friendships, creating a sexual relationship with the man. Oddly, his name was Rob, rhyming with Bob and basically being from the same root: Robert (the name of another man I later became involved with and she desperately wanted to insinuate herself between us, begging for his e-mail address so she could find out from him what his intentions were with me. Yeah. Here you go: here's his e-mail. Eff off, dudette)

She obsessed over Rob years and years ago, called him incessantly, finally driving him to beg me to call her off, help him escape her. He extricated himself from her but our friendship was never the same, a casualty of her supreme and unmatched self-involvement.

It's ironic that, as a result of my online dating adventures, an online relationship developed between Bob and Anita, which led to a physical relationship, effectively ending my friendship with both.

Looking back with the clarity of 20/20 vision, I should have seen the pattern emerging once again when she began asking how Bob and I could have a friendship in which we could discuss sex but not have it. She was wildly curious about the sexual bantering and wanted to know everything about our friendship. When she began working at Bob's company, forty miles separated their offices but the immediacy of e-mail closed the distance.

She began to quiz me about Bob's relationship with his wife and his views about sex. She wanted to know everything he had ever told me. His wife was diagnosed with a malignant tumor and had chosen a radical course of surgery and treatment. Bob naturally retreated, asking for time to cope and regroup. Anita bombarded me with e-mails, demanding to know what Bob had told me about his wife's condition and when he'd told me. I wondered if she even cared about his wife's cancer. I was willing to trade my kingdom for a mallet big enough to knock some sense into Anita. I made it clear to both of them I wanted to remain neutral and that being
in the middle was not an option. I reiterated this desire many times.

What about the coupling bothered me so much? Was it because Anita declared open season on Bob when his wife has a life threatening illness? Or was it because Bob was taking moments away from his wife to be with Anita? Was it the fact that Anita glommed onto the friendship in the way she had done previously? Or was it that she lied to me, used me in order to collect information about Bob? Was I so angry with Bob because his provocative e-mails weren't intended as banter but signals to me that he was open for more?

The internet offers the power of instant communication and instant familiarity. We can chat online for hours with people we've never met, believing we're getting to know them so well. Bob and Anita and I chatted through e-mail and IM daily. I began to notice that whenever I visited Anita at her home, she would stand guard over me while I checked my Yahoo e-mail account. It was how I discovered her affair with Bob: I realized she was hovering over me because she was obviously waiting for something and what else could it be but an IM?

She knew I would recognize his screen name. Neither of them saw any reason to create a new screen name while carrying on their affair. One night, I saw that Bob was online and I IM him. No response. I emailed Bob then I saw that Anita was online, too and had been on for as long as Bob. So they were meeting, cloak and dagger style, on AIM.

Bob e-mailed me at my office the next day to tell me he hadn't been online the night before and he was sorry he'd missed me. Lies. I e-mailed him back, informing him that I'd seen his AIM screen name actively online. There was silence from his end. The silence of unanswered e-mails and unreturned phone calls are a testament to his resentment and the knowledge that he really is an ass.

Had it not been for the connection between Anita and I, he would not have been so forward. He certainly would not have approached her at work since he is a corporate trainer and she is in a field office. The relationship would have remained professional. But the e-mails he and I exchanged gave Anita a feeling of connectedness with him. It wasn't long before the e-mails progressed to IM and from there to a real life, real time affair.

Sex changes the dynamics of a friendship, even indirectly. It was tricky with Bob since we were never "involved" but in re-reading his e-mails to me, I can see that he would not have been resistant had I suggested a more intimate connection. He could very well have been waiting for just that suggestion.

He once asked me years after we took a business trip together if I would have been open for a romantic entanglement if he weren't married. I was shocked. I'd never thought of him in that way ever and could not imagine such a thing.

But what could I have answered? The truth? A horrified, "Are you insane? I don't even find you remotely attractive!" I looked back at him, blinked and while closing my eyes in that split second, nodded and gulped while saying "Sure" and he walked away, happy and satisfied that it could have happened ... if only.

Eve, my therapist friend, explains the codependent theorists' steps to reducing drama: first (and easiest) is to stop throwing bombs. The second (and far more difficult) is not responding when they're thrown at us. So, at the core, we stay on our side of the street and take responsibility when we screw up. Resist digging in our heels. This much we owe ourselves, not just our friends and lovers.

It's tempting to analyze what makes people do things, but in the end, what do the reasons matter? The reasons won't help me to have a better life. There comes a point at which the very analysis becomes what is holding me back and victimizing me - not Bob, not Anita. Their actions are not my fault but my responses to them are my responsibility. So there is a need to stop wallowing in what happened, make up my mind to accept it and make peace with them or accept it and move on.

The simple questions remain: are the friendships worth the effort and do I want to continue making that effort?

We know that it's deeply unacceptable socially to discard people - especially those with whom we have a history - but letting go may be the only way to have peace, to permanently close the door on unnecessary drama. Even when you've done the right things, it often just doesn't work.

But sometimes things do work and things just fall together in the most satisfying and amazing way. It works for reasons you do not understand and you are touched in ways you never thought possible. When it works and you have a happy and fulfilling relationship with someone who is a friend, then you're supremely blessed and not just lucky.