[Content warning: friends-breakup, loss, grief.]
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a good guy. But if he’s stuck in a toxic relationship with a manipulative woman, that says something about him, too. You cannot be around toxicity without some of it rubbing off onto you…”
My buddy’s words from ten days ago echo in my head. He’s one my newer climbing buddies, one of the ones I’m closest to on the team, and he was talking about my friend Jack. But his words apply equally as well to my closest climbing buddy, too, the one with whom I’ve gone on a couple of climbing trips and who, in this past year, has let me down several times pretty badly because of his own jealous, manipulative wife.
The last time he let me know was yesterday evening. And I mean “last”, not simply “latest” or “most recent”: “last” because I’m never going to let him do it to me again, because I’m going to walk away from this friendship and tell him as much explicitly.
It’s going to be terribly painful for me. It’s painful already. But eventually, it’s going to be less painful, and for me also definitely less unhealthy and more aligned with my values, to not have him in my life anymore rather than be, through his weakness, the puppet of his jealous, needy, controlling wife.
Once again, I need to remind myself that I have not come so far, I have not fought all those battles to liberate myself from toxic relationships or unhealthy situations, to just put up with more of them now, in some other form that was/is more indirect or disguised.
The toxicity of these relationships with my buddies here in Colorado was indirect or disguised because it wasn’t directly between me and them but, rather, between them and their wives or girlfriends and from there having effects on the friendship between me and my buddies, at first limiting the camaraderie between us or the time they could spare for me, and then eventually getting to the point where they actually let me know really badly — bailing on me for trips or plans; not offering me or taking away from me support in moments of need; acting in non-appropriate, selfish, or careless ways with me.
My two oldest and closest climbing buddies have been doing this with me for a couple years now, on and off. I have put up with it, partly because of my own neediness. I have had conversations with them to try and change things, I have processed my own pain and anger, I have tried to be patient, I have blamed them, and told myself that I had “no choice” but accept the limitations imposed on our friendships by their jealous, controlling girlfriends or wives.
I’m done with that now. I have a choice and, as reasonable as it is to blame them for their cowardly or unfair behavior towards me, it does me no good to sit and dwell on that blame while putting up with their behavior, putting up with friendships that don’t meet my needs. I have a choice, even if it’s a sad one because it involves walking away from these friendships that meant so much to me. It’s a sad choice but it’s also the only truly healthy one for me at this point. I need to recognize my own responsibility in the pain these relationships have caused me, my own weaknesses and patterns. I have been putting up with more than is good for me because of my own neediness and, I believe, because these two guys reminded me of my own father in some ways. At the beginning of our friendships, they were single or less entwined with their girlfriends so the camaraderie and male bonding had real space to form and grow between us. That was lovely: it allowed for true, deep friendships to evolve and, among other things, was deeply affirming of my masculinity in a very delicate and important phase of my gender journey. But as their romantic/sexual relationships with those women got more involved, other sides of these guys’ nature started to show, the sides that are similar to my dad’s: they’re good men, truly good men, but they’re also, to a certain extent, cowardly, weak men who will choose jealous, needy, manipulative women as romantic/sexual/life partners to control their lives. And the effect of that, as with my father & mother, is that these guys end up being puppets in the hands of those toxic women with the consequence on our friendship being, concretely, that I get let down. I don’t simply get “less time hanging out with them”, which would be painful but understandable and bearable. No, I get actually let down, kicked out of the house in moments of need, refused support, bailed on for plans — literally, concretely, and painfully (for me) put aside.
Probably, I put up with it for so long not only because I love these guys to pieces as brothers, but also because this type of treatment was, unfortunately, familiar to me. That’s where my responsibility lies. And that’s also where my choice lies, i.e. in stopping this vicious cycle for myself by stepping away from it.
And so, with tears in my eyes and heaviness in my heart, I am stepping away. For my own good — even if it might take a long time for me to feel the beneficial effects of this decision in my life.
In fact, this decision comes at a difficult time, at a time in my life when I am losing, for “practical” or “external” reasons, all of the five or six buddies I had made when I first moved out here. But, I guess, one’s got to clear out the old stuff that doesn’t work anymore to make place for the new.
The Little Prince and the Fox 