I (24F) am starting to feel annoyed by how many favors my friend (24F) asks of me. We’ve been friends for 2-3 years and we came into each other’s lives when we both really needed a friend. Naturally, we bonded quickly. But I’m starting to realize a pattern of neediness about her that is off putting to me.
She often asks me to do favors for her that feel like things that she could do for herself. She recently moved and is now a 30 minute drive away from me. Two nights ago, I was relaxing after work when she started calling me. I didn’t really feel like talking because I have long shifts and was just trying to watch tv with my boyfriend. After multiple missed calls, she starts calling my boyfriend and even leaves him a message. I realize it must be important so I call her back. It wasn’t that important. She says some of her cat food was delivered to her old house and asked if I could go knock on the door and retrieve it from the new tenants. I was definitely hesitant as I’m a highly socially anxious person and the thought of knocking on a stranger’s door kind of freaks me out. I said I wasn’t sure about it but she insisted that I could do it. She even said I could go anytime in the next week. I could hear the annoyance/disappointment in her voice when I told her I would think about it. I texted her after to say that I could do it the next day because I felt bad and wanted to be a good friend to her.
The next day I go to pick up the food and it was fine. I text her that I have the box. A few hours later, she starts relentlessly calling me. I don’t answer because I’m relaxing with my boyfriend and it feels like “girl who cried wolf” in the sense that I now know it’s not an emergency, she just wants me to do a favor for her. When I don’t answer, she texts to ask me if she could come pick up the food because she’s in my town after a tattoo appointment. This really infuriated me because she knew she would be my town the day after she originally called me to ask to pick up the cat food, but still asked me to go get the food for her. It feels like something she could of done herself, especially since she said it could be done anytime within the week. Annoyed, I sent her a flat text saying I wasn’t available that night to which she didn’t respond.
In isolation, this scenario wouldn’t be a huge deal to me as I like to help out my friends. But it’s become a pattern where she asks me to go out of the way to do things that I probably wouldn’t ask of others because of how it’s more convenient for me or someone else to do it. She often turns her problems into my problems. For example, she once urgently asked me to feed her cat for a weekend when she had two roommates home at the time. She didn’t want to ask them to do it because she was fighting with one of them at the time. It was uncomfortable for everyone when I showed up to feed the cat. The favors she ask of me sometimes feel ridiculous because it often seems like there is someone better/more convenient (in this case, her non-hostile roommate) that she could ask to help her out, but she asks me anyways.
I know a big issue in this is my difficulty with setting boundaries, which I’m working on in therapy. Sometimes I worry that people realize this about me and try to take advantage.
I guess I’m seeking advice on how to approach the conversation when she does come to get the food. I would like to try setting boundaries and maintain the friendship as best as possible.
TL;DR- my friend asks me to do favors that I feel she should do herself or are more convenient for others to do. How do I go about setting boundaries regarding this?