The recipe for messin' with me

[nayad]

It's probably not the best idea I've ever had, to post the One True Way to put me into obsessive mental spinning about things I don't understand, but I guess I like to live on the edge. Are you ready? Here it is. To completely mess my mind up:

Disappear from my life very gradually, with no explanation, acting all the while as if you're not really

Comments

[urlgirl]

I'm going to be the devil's advocate for a minute here. I can tell that you all are rational people who demand clear closure and to know where they stand with respect to people. I totally respect that

[nicolle]

What if she comes from a culture where this kind of confrontation is severely frowned upon, and the correct thing to do is to be unfailingly polite, but let your actions speak for themselves?

Reason number one that I will never live in England, because as far as I can tell they value politeness over straight communication over there and I just cannot take it. (This from someone whose best friend from college is British.)

I'm in the camp of ask her a straight question, and take what you get. Of course, I'm likely to shrug stuff like that off as 'growing apart' so it's not as emotionally triggering a situation for me...

Just don't make it mean anything about you, okay? You are fabulous just like you are, whether she wants to be your friend or not.

[bibliofile]

I will never live in England, because as far as I can tell they value politeness over straight communication over there and I just cannot take it.

Don't forget Minnesota Nice, where people get stop talking to friends who forgot a dinner engagement -- but they're too polite to bring it up. D'oh!

On the other hand, politeness can sure beat some of the self-absorbed people I've known, who can talk about general subjects or themselves but never seem to think about you except as an audience.

re: closure
I hate not having closure too (though it's gotten a lot easier since I started taking antidepressants). Clearly this woman doesn't want to be friends any more, preferring to let you go rather than try to resolve any issues she might have had. Good riddance, I say -- that's not what a real friend does. Real friendships need a little maintenance occasionally, but people get through it.

Doesn't mean it doesn't suck, though.

[nayad]

I agree that she doesn't want to be friends, and had pretty much accepted that before learning that she was back in town. The information that she moved back here without contacting us is basically the sound of the door slamming behind her, so I think I'm going to leave it alone--why put more energy into pursuing the matter?

[nayad]

But is there a possibility that Niko's behavior might be caused by something else? Is she depressed and unable to commit one way or another to anything social? Is she going through a tough time otherwise and doesn't want to share it? Or is it possible that she is communicating with you, but your styles difer so much that you don't recognize what she's trying to say?I wouldn't know about her current mental state. She wasn't depressed when she moved, but she moved there mostly to be closer to her boyfriend, so it's possible that if that didn't work out, she could have felt like it would be easier to start over with new friends than to explain it to her old friends. I feel like it probably didn't work out, since he didn't seem likely to move away from his location and she's back in town, but I don't know for a fact that they broke up or that her relationship situation had anything to do with her thought process about me