I have a friend who I’ve known for almost ten years. For the first few years of our friendship, we were going to school together and worked at some of the same places and spent a lot of time together on a day-to-day basis and would go out together frequently. One of the reasons we hit it off is we both grew up in extremely dysfunctional households and while our individual traumas were different, we shared a similar background. Now, for a good portion of our friendship since then we’ve been long distance friends. I really care about this person and enjoy texting with her and want to keep her in my life, but increasingly feel uncertain because I really don’t enjoy seeing her in person. I could never tell her this, but I feel really drained anytime we spend time together. We took a day trip a few years ago and I had an awful time and felt exhausted. Now she’s talking about wanting to visit and I don’t know how to handle it. I would love to just be pen pals but I can’t imagine any tactful way to tell someone you don’t want to share oxygen with them.
2 comments
What about being in person bothers you so much? Is it something you can tell her maybe to tone down a bit?
If not maybe drink when ya gotta hang out. Like for real, I had a friend like this except I saw him every weekend. It was like him at 25 was stuck in a high school mentality. He’d stir up so much drama tell me stories that *sounded* like bullshit but I couldn’t even verify, threaten to kill himself because his *girlfriend* threatened to kill *herself* fucking nuts shit. The thing was, he was a *really* good friend, like ride or die, follow you into hell and back, take a fucking bullet for you, always on your side would bury a fucking body for you, he was just too fucking tiring. I literally would just take a few shots of vodka before I walked into his house and that worked pretty well for bullshit tolerance. Of course that wasn’t sustainable so I ended up just cutting him out but if you only have to see this person a couple times a year, maybe that’ll work lol.
Hi OP, I think it’s perfectly fine to set “conditions” on a relationship–say you only converse once a month, or only meet in public–and so limiting yourself to texting would seem to fit with that.
That said, making this work, so the other person feels comfortable and OK with it, will probably be the harder part. But there are various ways to discourage over-interest like this: perhaps if you are always busy, or obviously un-enthusiastic (re: a visit) she’ll get the message.