Oct. 14, 2016 "Unfriended": Today I found this article by Zosia Bielski in the Globe and Mail. It's more about female friendships:
Breaking up can be as devastating – and often more unexpected – in a platonic friendship as it is in a romance. Zosia Bielski reports
It was the last year of high school and she was new and weird: a ballerina in dingy clothes who made dark jokes and threw her feet up on her desk during French, where she was the most fluent student. I desperately wanted to be her best friend.
When we’d arrive to her family’s big Forest Hill house for lunch, she’d alternately squeal at her little white dog, glare at her older sister, sift through fashion magazines and stare blankly at the TV, worrying about what her injured knee would mean for her dance career.
In hindsight, it’s clear that my new friend was a brassy but depressed teenager. At 17, all I could see was that she was way cooler than me. I hoped to keep her attention for as long as possible.
The first sign of trouble came at the movie theatre where we’d gone to see the syrupy 1996 romance The English Patient. My friend asked if we could sit a seat apart so she could “concentrate”; it seemed unusually cruel. After that her interest waned. As we headed off for different universities, our contact evaporated.
As far as friend breakups go, it was a cakewalk: my friend had given me the slow fadeout.
Other options include ghosting – disappearing without so much as a word – or the hard cutoff, enumerating all the wrongs that you have been silently stewing over for years in a letter or a text or Facebook message.
Sometimes initiating a friend breakup is part of a larger editing process in your adult life, of deciding you won’t take crap from anyone anymore.
No matter how women go about “breaking up,” what’s clear is how bad we are at it. Women are often stunned by how drastically communication can break down between friends who have been talking deeply about everything for years.
“It’s a hard thing for me to grapple with,” said Melana Roberts, a Toronto policy strategist who had a close friend of a decade go AWOL on her.
Roberts, 27, and her friend had been in a rich but sometimes competitive relationship. Then, two years ago, after a night out, a disagreement about the best route home escalated, followed by another spat a week later. When they met in person a few days later to talk, Roberts said the friend declared, “I don’t want to do this any more.”
“She was obviously very hurt by something I’d done, by some element of our relationship. Instead of being able to convey that, all she had was anger,” Roberts said.
“It made me reflect on a tendency that I find in a lot of women: It’s so much easier for them to express anger than it is to be vulnerable. They want to be strong.”
“It made me reflect on a tendency that I find in a lot of women: It’s so much easier for them to express anger than it is to be vulnerable. They want to be strong.”
Roberts is frustrated that the experience left her little opportunity for self-improvement since she still has no real sense of what brought about the dissolution.
But it did force her to rethink how she hopes to interact with friends in the future should things ever go south: with honesty.
But it did force her to rethink how she hopes to interact with friends in the future should things ever go south: with honesty.
There isn’t a template for friend breakups the way there is with romantic splits. Most of us still put substantially more effort into our romances than we do into our friendships, which we expect to magically hum along.
It often seems harder, riskier and more out-of-line, somehow, to confront a friend and ask her to work on something than it does to voice expectations with a spouse. That doesn’t mean women don’t hold high standards for their friends.
It often seems harder, riskier and more out-of-line, somehow, to confront a friend and ask her to work on something than it does to voice expectations with a spouse. That doesn’t mean women don’t hold high standards for their friends.
Women are much more likely to forgive their opposite-sex friends than their girlfriends, says Mahzad Hojjat, senior editor of the forthcoming anthology The Psychology of Friendship.
She has also found that men are much more likely to forgive their same-sex friends than female friends.
She has also found that men are much more likely to forgive their same-sex friends than female friends.
“Everybody is less forgiving of women,” said Hojjat, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Women have much higher expectations of each other in friendship. They are more critical of each other and they penalize each other more.”
Teenage girls are far more likely than boys to block their former friends and delete their photos together on social media, according to a 2015 study from the Pew Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization.
Hojjat says the stakes are so high in female friend breakups because women disclose so much to each other: “The closer you are to someone, the more it hurts.”
Even so, many of us don’t fight as hard for failing friendships as we do when our romantic relationships are in trouble. “Somehow, a lot of friendships just fade away if there are problems,” said Hojjat.
“In romantic relationships, we tend to confront our partners and ask for explanations.”
“In romantic relationships, we tend to confront our partners and ask for explanations.”
Psychologists are now looking at how we behave with our friends over a lifetime. A recent European study of college freshmen found that even though socially alluring narcissists were able to make friends quickly, the sheen wore off. Narcissists had trouble keeping friends – unlike quieter people with “emotional intelligence.”
Loren Abell, a British lecturer in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, recently helmed two studies on women’s friendships and Machiavellianism.
Abell’s studies of more than 400 women age 18 to 69, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, found that Machiavellian women make the worst girlfriends: they confessed that they had embarrassed their besties, made them feel guilty by sulking and consciously undermined their confidence in the past.
“We go into friendships and relationships for the support and the emotional closeness,” said Abell. “But for women who are higher in Machiavellianism, relationships are basically: ‘What can I get out of it for me?’ ”
Abell discovered that some women actually take pleasure in their friends’ misfortunes – they don’t deserve friends, really – and yet managed to maintain long friendships, with the average union spanning a decade.
My opinion: Men do that too.
My opinion: Men do that too.
Why do people put up with it? Because they have shared history, or they fear conflict.
“A lot of the women reported that they just got used to it: It became routine,” said Abell. “Or they would defend the friend and say, ‘It’s just who they are.’ ”
Abell hopes her research will help women reflect on their friendships.
“We don’t want women to sit back and take it,” she said. “It’s emotionally damaging to be in a relationship like that. If a friend is making you feel embarrassed or guilty or playing on your feelings, you might have a think on that.”
“We don’t want women to sit back and take it,” she said. “It’s emotionally damaging to be in a relationship like that. If a friend is making you feel embarrassed or guilty or playing on your feelings, you might have a think on that.”
Having grown tired of thoughtless and ungrateful behaviour, Toronto image consultant Vanessa Dawe cut ties with a friend last year. “We would get together for four hours,” said Dawe, 26. “Three hours of it would be her complaining about her job, her agent, her health, her family, her landlord. Three hours would go by and she’d say, ‘Oh my god! How are you?’ Then I would give my Cliffs-Notes version.”
The nail in the coffin, said Dawe, was an elaborate party she threw at her friend’s request. With just hours to spare (and after Dawe had run around shopping for $300 worth of food, booze and supplies) her friend phoned to cancel because she was “tired,” Dawe said.
“I was in the middle of making meatloaf,” she recalled. “I washed my hands and picked up the phone again and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ ”
“I was in the middle of making meatloaf,” she recalled. “I washed my hands and picked up the phone again and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ ”
Dawe let her feelings cool down and “broke up” with the friend via Facebook messenger a week later. She waited for a response but none ever came.
My own long-lost friend reconnected with me in 2008 with some help from the Internet. The friendship was again brief as we got pulled into our own orbits of careers and boyfriends – low drama, all around. For many former friends, though, there is painfully little chance for closure. They can haunt us in the city, the way some exes can.
In the end, we often take the loyalty of our friends for granted – hence the shock when they get fed up and bail. The surprise factor is one reason friend breakups sting so hard.
“With a romantic breakup, usually there’s a buildup. People aren’t happy,” Dawe observed. “When it’s a platonic breakup, someone is usually blindsided.”
In her own life, Dawe lost the convenience of having a local friend who was always down for “mojitos and manicures,” but she got over it.
“Now no one’s pretending,” she said. “There’s no pressure to keep up false pretenses: ‘Oh! My bestie!’
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Feb. 27, 2018 "Did our friendship have to fall apart?": Today I found this life essay by Carissa Duenas in the Globe and Mail:
When my phone rang that early April morning, I instinctively knew that it was the call.
"I'm ENGAGED!" shrieked the voice on the line.
I couldn't help but smile. It was Caitlin, my confidante and partner of inane crimes. After a near decade of anticipation, her college sweetheart had popped the question.
"Finally!" I thought to myself, relieved for her sake and mine. I was thrilled.
"I wanted you to be the first to know! I know it's early so I'll fill you in on the details later. I'm putting my maid-of-honour straight to work!"
That, in essence, is how the new chapter of our friendship began: she as the bride and I as her maid-of-honour. I wasn't exactly sure what this role entailed, but I couldn't say no. Caitlin and I were nearly sisters. Despite having only four years tucked under our friendship belt, we were inseparable.
It helped that we were of the same mould. Both in our 20s, we were ambitious spirits who discovered each other while enduring long hours and ruthless competition in the work place. The demands of our 12-hour days revealed the best and worst in us, making friendships such as ours a rarity.
In a sea of black authoritative suits, we were the pink in each other's days – a refreshing reminder that there was more to life than the everyday challenges that otherwise overwhelmed us. Whenever we were together, we remembered to exhale, to breathe.
In a sea of black authoritative suits, we were the pink in each other's days – a refreshing reminder that there was more to life than the everyday challenges that otherwise overwhelmed us. Whenever we were together, we remembered to exhale, to breathe.
Our lunch hours became the midday escape that truly established us as allies. After a meal at our go-to restaurant, a mandatory stop at a shoe store became part of a silly ritual.
In between slipping our feet into gold sandals or wobbling on five-inch stilettos, we'd attempt to make sense of our world. While assessing shoe colours and heels, we figured out our lives.
When one of us fell into an Unjustifiable Shopping Purchase, then the other was obligated to ask "No regrets?" If those two words were uttered back without hesitation, then all was good in our world. All was right.
After Caitlin's engagement, it was a natural for these lunch hours to morph into wedding-planning sessions. She wasn't kidding about immediately putting me to work. I accompanied her to appointments with designers and obsessed about everything, from the colour motif of the wedding to the verbiage on invites.
While not entirely stress-free, it was a joyous time. Unable to contain my excitement, I already had my gift for the bride a mere two weeks after the engagement: I commissioned a shoemaker to craft Caitlin's version of the perfect pair of wedding shoes.
The flurry of activity was surreal to me as it must have been for Caitlin. Here we were suddenly scripting this fairy-tale ending. It was the biggest day of my friend's life – one that I felt was, if only for a moment, also mine.
When the frenzy of wedding planning had settled, it seemed the reality of marriage descended on us more fully, with both of us silently wondering how it would impact our lives. In the stillness of those days, we suddenly noticed the "what now?" cloud hovering above us, the looming shadow of change.
Change, at the onset, crept in kindly. Our conversations were merely peppered with banter on Caitlin's non-existent homemaking abilities or the marriage-imposed curfew that would shorten our cocktail hours. While all very trite and shallow, maybe it was our way of recognizing that the ground we both stood on was shifting.
Eventually, tackling issues on parenting, family life and career sacrifices found its way into our conversations, consuming us in ways we had never imagined. Life became about figuring out how to run a household given our current income levels. In a blink of an eye, the trip to the shoe store was stripped from our daily agenda, having lost its place in life's new order of priorities.
Over our get-togethers, I listened to Caitlin. I sympathized with her on her new worries and cheered her on for new dreams – but not entirely without feeling as if I had lost my place in this new world of hers. As the wedding date drew nearer, this dissonance between us became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Whenever I expressed my own hopes and fears, or dwelt on familiar matters that once bound our friendship, I couldn't help but feel dismissed by Caitlin. I sensed an impatience that neither her words nor actions could hide.
In turn, perhaps I, too, could no longer mask my growing disinterest in the responsibilities Caitlin had to contend with.
We tried to get past these shortcomings. The polite accommodation of our differences only seemed patronizing and disingenuous. There was no meeting halfway. If there was, I no longer knew how to get there.
Over time, our friendship slowly degenerated into hallway run-ins and uncomfortable phone conversations.
When Caitlin's wedding invite arrived in the mail, enclosed was a card bearing the names of the wedding party. I discovered sadly, but with little surprise, that I was no longer her maid-of-honour.
In my hand was an invitation to a quiet exit, a gentle farewell from her life. We no longer had a role in each other's future. That was now clear to me. That, too, was what my tears were for.
I chose to miss Caitlin's wedding, deciding that my absence would spare us both from the awkwardness of it all. She did write to tell me, however, that her wedding shoes turned out lovely. "Thank you," she wrote. "I danced all night!" It made me smile.
Even now, a decade later, I struggle with the fact that a friendship as treasured as ours had managed to unravel. We were confronted with life evolving and sometimes – oftentimes – that entails loss. Perhaps one can only hope to handle such change with compassion and with honesty, if not with grace.
Although I miss her, there is complete contentment in the years we celebrated together. No regrets whatsoever. None at all.
Carissa Duenas lives in Toronto.
My week:
Sat. Nov. 2, 2019 Halloween party: I didn't go to my 1st restaurant job Halloween lunch because I had to work at my 2nd restaurant job. So I went to my Self Development Book Club Halloween party. It was a potluck. I ate some Shepherd's pie (mashed potatoes on ground beef), pasta, a rib, salad, and some chips. I met some new people.
Elizabeth Fry Society: I met this man P who works at this charity:
We advance the dignity and worth of all women and
girls who are or may be at risk of becoming criminalized.
girls who are or may be at risk of becoming criminalized.
Our office provides a safe community
that supports, respects, and empowers.
that supports, respects, and empowers.
P talked a lot about psychology. We also talked about AI and how there is a low chance that AI can do surgeries on it's own. It will still need a human to operate the machine. We also talked about the movie Ex Machina, which I haven't seen.
A is Asian and is working at the department of Science at the U of A. It turns out you/ or the lab has to pay a medical journal like $2000 to publish your essay or report. I find that the magazine/ journal should be paying the writer who wrote the story.
B is Asian and she has a degree in Business and is now in law school. She says it's a struggle to be in law school with all the reading.
S is Asian and has a masters degree in Agriculture. She worked with like dairy cows. She is a certified yoga instructor and did work in car sales.
T held the party. I always ask people what TV shows they watch. He subscribes to Netflix for a month a yr, because if he watches some TV shows. If he has more access, then he will watch a lot of shows that he doesn't like.
Taxi ride: It was kind of funny on the way to the party. First I took a bus, and then I took a short taxi ride because I didn't know how to get there at night. The driver was wearing this bandanna with pot leaves on it.
Tracy: So you like pot?
Driver: No, I bought it because I like the design. I only tried pot once.
Tracy: Then maybe you shouldn't be wearing it because it gives people the wrong impression.
Driver: When I first bought it, I didn't know what the leaves were. Then I came to Canada, and then they told me it was pot.
Indoor skydiving: I was listening to Colette Baron- Reid and she showed a part about indoor skydiving. It seems fun and not as scary as outdoor skydiving where you jump off a plane.
https://www.facebook.com/cbr.psychic/videos/464297927525657/
Here's one in Edmonton, but it's not open yet:
https://www.indoorskydivingsource.com/tunnels/ifly-edmonton/
Mon. Nov. 4, 2019 Living an Intuitive Life meetup: I was going to attend this meetup tonight, but then I see it got cancelled.
https://www.meetup.com/Living-An-Intutive-Life/
Tues. Nov. 5, 2019 Daylight savings time: This reminds me of The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob is running for mayor.
Homer: I didn't like it when Sideshow Bob tried to kill Bart, but I did like it when he tried to kill Aunt Selma.
My opinion: I don't like it when we have to spring forward and lose an hour of sleep, but I do like it when we fall back and get an hour of sleep.
Technology has improved. The TV, computer, and my cellphone automatically change the time for me. I do have to manually change my alarm clock, the stove, and the microwave.
Winter: This is the big snow fall of the year. I was wearing my winter jacket and boots all last month.
Wed. Nov. 6, 2019: I had signed up for this social event, and then it got cancelled. That's good because it's winter. I rarely go out and wait for the bus (and at night) if it's winter. I go out if I have to like work, school, or something I really want to go to.
There is a Screenwriter's Meetup next week, but I don't know if I want to go to it because it's cold outside.
"Why Rainer Hoess is making sure the atrocities his Nazi grandfather perpetrated are never forgotten": This is in time for Remembrance Day:
Rainer Hoess was 15 years old when he realized his family had secrets — enormous, dark secrets.
A young boy in Germany at the time, he was on a school trip to the Dachau Concentration Camp when he stumbled across informational placards talking about a Nazi officer with the same last name as his.
The officer wasn't just a rank-and-file Nazi. He was Rudolf Hoess, commandant of the Auschwitz death camp for five years.
"He was a million-mass-murderer in the Second World War, without regret or remorse in any way," says Hoess, who was in Toronto speaking to high school students as part of Holocaust Education Week.
"I think it's so strong and powerful for him to speak to so many people about such a sad experience," says Sibyl Martasna, a student who heard Hoess' presentation at Northern Secondary School in Toronto.
It was Hoess' grandfather who ordered the use of Zyklon B gas to increase the number of people who could be executed at Auschwitz, with that number reaching as high as 2,000 killed each day.
In all, more than one million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz during Rudolf Hoess' tenure.
He eventually was captured and admitted to his crimes at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War, and was hanged at Auschwitz.
As a teen, after confronting his father with the stark discovery about his grandfather, Rainer Hoess says he was met with more denials. He did his own research, and eventually understood the truth.
He left home and cut all ties with his family.
Since then, he has dedicated his adult life to talking about his family's past, and supporting holocaust survivors in an attempt to combat hate in all its forms.
"Right now, I'm 54 years old and I'm still in the process of separating myself from the family, it's a long-lasting process," says Rainer Hoess, who has no idea if his father is even still alive.
"These are the steps in my life I took to get out of the shadow of my grandfather … I found my way to deal with it is to go to schools and talk, around 80 to 100 schools a year."
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/why-rainer-hoess-making-sure-153212781.html
Fri. Nov. 8, 2019: Today I went to work at my 2nd restaurant job and it was quiet. We're closed on the weekend, and the 3 other workers got some leftovers. I then got a cardboard box filled with salads and fruit. It was really heavy as I had to walk 2 blocks to my bus stop.
I will be bringing my big bowl of fruit salad and a big bowl of veggie salad to the party. After the party, one guy D got the rest of the leftover fruit salad and put it in the KFC bucket, and a woman H got the leftover veggie salad.
Potluck/ game night: It was fun. I played a few rounds of the game Cover Your Assets with 4 guys Ma, B, Me, and D.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/121193/cover-your-assets
We then played this game where there is a word like "lightbulb" and we have to write a word similar to it and we have to guess what the word is. If 2 or more people write the same word, then it can't be a clue.
Ma and Me said "idea" and are canceled out. I wrote "lamp." D guessed "flashlight."
Ma picked word "Dinosaur" (without looking). I wrote "fossils." D wrote "Jurassic" and I forgot what Me wrote. Ma guessed correctly it was "dinosaur."
D says that I look like his niece who lives in Kelowna, BC.
Nov. 9, 2019 A good deed happened: My grandma, brother and I washed the kitchen cabinets, windows, and the living room windows for 1 hr in the morning.
At 11:45 am, my brother and I went to shovel snow. My front walkway and sidewalk were already shoveled. I see the whole front sidewalk and my neighbor's walkways were also shoveled. So that's good because less shoveling for me.
Potluck/ game night: It was fun. I played a few rounds of the game Cover Your Assets with 4 guys Ma, B, Me, and D.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/121193/cover-your-assets
We then played this game where there is a word like "lightbulb" and we have to write a word similar to it and we have to guess what the word is. If 2 or more people write the same word, then it can't be a clue.
Ma and Me said "idea" and are canceled out. I wrote "lamp." D guessed "flashlight."
Ma picked word "Dinosaur" (without looking). I wrote "fossils." D wrote "Jurassic" and I forgot what Me wrote. Ma guessed correctly it was "dinosaur."
D says that I look like his niece who lives in Kelowna, BC.
Nov. 9, 2019 A good deed happened: My grandma, brother and I washed the kitchen cabinets, windows, and the living room windows for 1 hr in the morning.
At 11:45 am, my brother and I went to shovel snow. My front walkway and sidewalk were already shoveled. I see the whole front sidewalk and my neighbor's walkways were also shoveled. So that's good because less shoveling for me.
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