The Prowl: When Girlfriends Break Up
Being dumped is never a pleasant experience, regardless of whether you were romantically involved or not. This week, a female friend broke up with me via email.
A female friend decided to break up with me this week via email. Questions of break-up etiquette aside (although I suppose email is preferable to a Facebook/Twitter update), I'm not entirely certain how someone I did not know I was dating managed to end our relationship. Somehow though, she did.
A few days before I departed for a weekend excursion, I let this friend know that I would be in her city and would like to see her. This did not seem like an unreasonable request to me as I always thought that we were fairly close and it was not exactly like I was asking her to sacrifice her entire weekend. I understand that as a graduate student, she is a busy girl, what with balancing work, a boyfriend, some case studies, and crucial Facebook time. But a quick coffee/beverage/whatever seemed fairly possible within a 48 hour window. Evidently, not so. Calls and texts both went unreturned and the weekend came and went without arranging anything or even the acknowledgment that meeting simply was not doable.
Was I annoyed by her decision to ignore me? Simply put, yes. I suspected it might have something to do with a slight Blackberry mishap from several weeks prior in which tentative plans between the two of us had been made but nothing ever confirmed as a result of admittedly my own irresponsibility: I forgot my Blackberry in a cab. Maybe she was more irritated by this than I had initially thought?
Midway through the week, I got an email from her. She wrote that she was sorry she'd not been in touch over the weekend, explaining that "this must have been frustrating." Her silence had nothing to do with other miscommunication adventures, i.e. the Blackberry. Rather her life is simply too full at the moment to do things such as meet friends (or really just me). And since she does not enjoy talking on the phone, she wrote that she "cannot give me what I want out of this friendship." Thus, the break-up.
Upon receiving this email, I had several thoughts, most of which revolved around the central theme that she was full of shit. Having been to grad school myself and having dealt with all of the time constraints, both real and imagined, that she herself is now handling, I can say with almost certainty that there were zero occasions when academic obligations kept me from spending time with people I thought were important. I didn't--and the same holds now that I am out of school--get to spend perhaps as much time as I would like, but no matter how busy, there was always an hour here or there that could be sacrificed if willing. In fact, the "I'm simply too busy" excuse is one that I myself have made on multiple occasions as an easy let-down, a way to tell others, usually males, that I'm really not interested in them. I feel that this line is almost universally recognized as such and has almost come to be as cliche as the old "It's not you, it's me."
I didn't respond to my friend's email right away (actually, I still have not) mostly because I don't know what to say. I feel any response I give will make the situation worse, as I can think of zero ways to speak with her about this that will not involve me demanding an additional explanation as to what she thought it was that I did want out of our friendship. After all, I'd say that hoping to meet when visiting from out of town is fairly fundamental to sustaining most long-distance friendships. Without some effort to keep in touch, how are you really friends at all? Suffice to say, I did not feel this type of conversation would go overly well. Instead, I opted for the passive aggressive "wait it out and see what happens" kind of approach.
Then my friend sent a second email after the first, as a sort of clarification. Please note this wasn't an apology but rather what she termed an "addendum." Having previously announced that she was basically looking for different things out of our friendship (among those things, clearly, being left alone), this did not mean in her mind that we couldn't be friends. Again, I have told ex-boyfriends that one day we would be great friends and we should stay in touch. This does not mean that it's actually a sincere sentiment.
Maybe I'm being childish and I should simply talk to her (even if this is completely contrary to everything my WASPy upbringing has taught me). However, as the dumpee, I feel that I'm allowed to be a little childish, since being dumped is never exactly a pleasant experience. Knowing that someone wants to downgrade your position in their life, without your input, frankly just sucks regardless of whether this person is someone you are romantically involved with or not. So while I suspect that one day in the future, my friend and I may make up and be friends again, this hope also sort of seems like those girls who pine for their ex-boyfriend to take them back and admit he made a mistake when he traded them in for a shinier model. In the meantime, I will comfort myself with the knowledge that people simply move apart and move on and other friends will come along.