Today's topic: female friendships. Part 1.
What makes a healthy female friendship? What makes a toxic one? How do we tell the difference?
Before we begin, a big thank you to everyone who shared & submitted their stories & opinions on this topic via Twitter & e-mail.
______________________
In order to understand what a healthy friendship is, we need to figure out what a toxic one looks like.
In Part 1 of this topic we're looking at toxic relationships. You know the type. You get this unpleasant feeling in your gut, something feels off, or you feel like you're punishing yourself every time you guys catch up. There's no sense of joy or contentment - no connection.
I could go on forever about what those friendships feel like. But the point is...often, we stay in them. We trick ourselves into believing that a bad friend is better than having no friend at all.
But we deserve better.
We deserve female friends who will help us to grow as women, who will support us and allow us to support them in return.
Which is exactly what Jess realized. And here is her story:
"I had a toxic friendship once.
It got very one sided towards the end. If things didn't go her way she would get very annoyed. My parents would happily have her along for New Years Eve events but we rarely got thanks out of it. She was a difficult person to be around. She was the type of friend who would want to catch up (and I would get really excited for it) but cancel at the last minute due to lack of funds or "having to work". I wouldn't have questioned her, except it happened all the time.
It happened so much that towards the end of the friendship I was over it. The defining end to our friendship was when she wanted to hang out but I couldn't - for once. I was semi grounded and had to prepare for a friends 21st birthday party the night after. I couldn't even make it to the funeral of a former work colleague! All I got back in a text was "ok" and soon after I was deleted on Facebook.
That hurt.
After all the times I'd accepted her excuses, put up with her running late or cancelling on me, she couldn't even do the same for me once. One cancellation - totally out of my control - and I was officially off the friend list.
She had a lot of problems, I guess - she pushed a lot of her other friends away too. She's now engaged. I wish her the best." ~ submitted by Jess
Jess' story holds a lot of important points that I'm going to now cover. Those are in bold.
