I (26F) have been good friends with with someone I will call Sally (30F) for the purpose of this post. Sally and I have been on and off acquaintances for about 7 years, but only recently became very good friends within the past 8 months. We had an altercation about 2 days ago and I have since had mixed feelings about what happened and if I want to continue being as close of a friend. We have only kept communications through text since then.
For context, we were on the phone having a conversation about a video game that I will simplify as much as I can. Sally was essentially telling me about a boss raid she had been running, and I asked her what type of character classes were in her raid party. She said that it was interesting question since she didn’t think that information was important and asked me why I wanted to know. I said that it helped me imagine the boss raid in my head and made the off-handed comment, “why wouldn’t I want to know?”. I had made that comment as something rhetorical and it felt insignificant to me that I even said this (this is an important part in the story).
This prompted Sally to start explaining about how certain character classes are favored in the game since they’re just better. I am not very knowledgable about this game and am a new player so I was listening to her explanation and asking many questions in an effort to understand. Unfortunately, I was having difficulty following everything which is why I was asking questions in the first place. Now Sally believes she has undiagnosed ADHD or something that affects her ability to focus and also has poor mental health – and she has shared this with me in the past. As her explanation continued and I still hadn’t been able to fully understand it, she began to become more and more fustrated and hyperfixated on explaning things to me. By about 45mins of this, I asked if we could talk about this tomorrow because I was tired (I verbalized my tiredness). I knew that as the night went on and I grew more tired, my ability to understand would decrease. This was seemingly ignored all 3 times I asked.
She finally just outright asked me what I wasn’t understanding and I, in an effort to lay out my whole thought process, started from the beginning. The first thing I said was, “I don’t fully understand how we started talking about this in the first place” and then I didn’t even get to continue because Sally interupted to explain the whole conversation that led to her talking about this. Mainly she brought up the rhetorical question I asked that she took literally. I let her talk because at this point, everytime I said something she just kept talking over it and didn’t respond to what I was saying for the most part. She then asked me again what I was confused about, so I tried to start from the beginning again. I said something along the lines of, “well I was confused about how we started talking about this in the first place” and then was cut off again for her to explain how the conversation started.
At this point, I was extremely tired and irritated that I wasn’t being given a chance to talk. So the next time she checked to see what didn’t understand, I said “nevermind goodnight”. Sally then said that this whole thing has made her extremely frustrated. I didn’t want her to feel both ignored and fustrated so I continued the conversation with her and again tried to explain what I wasn’t understanding, only to get cut off again. This time Sally said she was feeling even more frustrated because she was answering a question that I didn’t even remember asking and therefore the question wasn’t even important at all. She questioned why I would let her ramble for so long if the question wasn’t important.
Well, I told her that I didn’t think how we started the conversation was important at all, but I was invested and interested in what she was explaining since I had asked a similar question in the past that wasn’t answered at the time. I assumed that the conversation was fine since we started out talking about video games and her explaination was still about the video games. I honestly didn’t see anything wrong or feel like it was a topic change. Sally disagrees. We stopped talking that night on a negative note and the whole conversation about this maybe lasted 2 hours.
I woke up to a long wall of text where Sally explained how frustrated she was last night that she spent so long answering an unimportant question. Her frustrations stemmed from all the mental energy and time she spend explaining something to me that she didn’t deem important. My frustrations were from being ignored. We had a lot of back and forth text where she shares that she doesn’t want another situation like this to happen because it is mentally tolling on her.
In order for that to happen, she suggested certain measures. Amongst the things she suggested are:
* doing a mental evaluation of my mental energy before each conversation and letting her know so she can figure out how much she can talk
* me being more assertive in my interjections order to snap her out of her hyperfixation in the event it happens again
* me learning her key words or phrases so I can better navigate her mental moods
* stop playing devils advocate (this is what she calls me asking questions when I don’t understand)
Now I am conflicted because I don’t know how to feel about being asked to change my behaviors like this. It feels like there is a burden placed on me to change in order for our friendship to continue. I don’t know if this feeling is an overreaction. I care greatly about Sally, but this doesn’t feel good. Maybe I am in the wrong since she has shared about her hyperfixation and mental health problems in the past, but I didn’t realize it was to this extent and didn’t react to it in a way that was affective for both of us.
Is it fair of her to ask this of me? And what kind of preventative measures could I suggest instead so it doesn’t feel like the burden falls on just me to change? I really want to preserve our friendship and come out of this stronger in our relationship.
TLDR: My friend (30F) and I (26F) had a conversation that made my friend frustrated. Due to her mental health and attention issues, she’s asking us to take preventative measures so it doesn’t happen again. The preventative measures suggested mostly all involve me changing my behaviors in some way. I need advice on other methods so the burden doesn’t fall on just me.