Friends Will Be Friends

Friendships are great, aren’t they? In the immortal words of the greatest rock band in history, Tenacious D, “Friendship is rare, my derriere, when you find out much later that they don't really care.”

I’m coming off as more bitter than I meant to. Friendship is great. Your friends are your support system, your heart, your entertainment. When they’re true friends, that is.

I, however, have been blessed with some awful friends throughout time. I'm not placing the blame all on them, we all make mistakes. Here are three examples.

1. Let’s call her Beth. We were best friends from when we were nine. However, everything she said was a put down. She’d be talking about Golden Girls, and I was Blanch. If she was talking about Top Gun, I was Iceman. I was always the worst case
in any of her scenarios.

Now this alone, I could deal with. Then somewhere in high school she starting changing, getting sluttier and sluttier. She made it a point to flirt heavily with my boyfriend’s two best friends. These two guys had been friends for 10 years, and then Beth comes along and turns them against each other. She led both of them on, letting them each think they were the one she wanted. This went on for almost a year, and then my boyfriend and I broke up.

Instead of being there, supporting me after I broke up with my boyfriend of two years, she slept with him, and everyone in my school found out, and kept asking me about it. This is when our friendship was over.


2. Let’s call her Tina. Tina and I met in kindergarten, and became friends quickly. This friendship continued on and off throughout the course of school. We still talk occasionally. Tine, however, is not someone I would normally choose to hang out with. She was more a friend by default, because we had known each other so long. She was loud, brash, and embarrassing. She was also in and out of rehab all throughout high school, and we would lose contact at points. Oddly, we lost contact during her sober points, because the rehab group she was in discouraged friendship with non-rehab people.

All and all, Tina wasn’t a bad person. She was really jealous of other friendships, boyfriends, and attention in general from guys. She would send out a picture of us and our friend Mary to random people over the internet and ask who they thought was the hottest. Then she would proceed to get angry at me when I was chosen. She would flirt a lot with guys who liked me, especially Josh (who maybe had a little crush on me. Maybe.) She would also flirt with my boyfriends, but that didn’t bother me that much.


3. Let’s call her Mary. Mary and I became friends because all her other friends couldn’t stand her when we were in middle school. Beth and I felt bad for her, because she had been friends with those people for a long time. Mary was whiny, petty, and bratty, but she made for a hell of a sidekick. She was supportive of the decisions I made, she was always willing to drive anywhere we went, she always had us over to her house and her mom would bake pies and cookies. So I guess in some ways we used each other.

She was not what you would call great with guys. I think she was just so bratty and kind of mannish. She had to sit by while Beth and I dated guy after guy. If there were three guys, one would like me and the other two would like Beth (or vice versa). Mary, sometimes in conjunction with Tina, would send pictures to a certain guy of me while I was drunk, or making out with a guy. I’m not sure if she did it because she didn’t like me, or if it was because she was trying to show this certain guy that maybe I wasn’t the best person for him to like.

I kind of think it had to do with the fact that she never even kissed anyone aside from spin the bottle. All through high school she was friends with this guy that she clearly had major feelings for. She swore up and down she didn’t like him. One night after he broke up with a girlfriend, we had a fairly major make out session (are you sensing a theme from my high school days?), and after that, she barely spoke to me. We were still civil, we had mutual friends, but we went from being best friends to acquaintances pretty quickly. Okay, this one is partially my fault.




Again, the D says it best with “long as there’s a record deal, we’ll always be friends!.”

What are your worst friendships?

4 comments:

Avitable said...

I've had friends where I've made all of the effort, and they wouldn't even bother. I just gave up on them entirely.

The Ferryman said...

Do you have Beth's number?

Anonymous said...

You had some really *awesome* friends growing up. But I feel you're pain.

I had one friend in elementary school who was almost exactly like your friend Beth, and she once shared with me her theory that everyone went through an ugly phase in their lives and that she thought I was going through mine, right then. She also had a tendency to rat me out, when there was trouble.

Then I had a friend who was like Mary, who took a poll of all our guy friends to ask which of us were prettiest. When she found out I won, she said I was one of those 'pretty but dumb' girls.

Amanda said...

Avitable- Those sound like a lot of the friends I have now

Mr. Fab- Sure, no problem.

Jessica- Ouch. Beth would say crap like that all of the time