This is part of Advice Week: Friendship Edition. We’ll help you make friends, leave them—and even sleep with them.
Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Ashley C. Ford is filling in as Prudie for Jenée Desmond-Harris while she’s on parental leave. Submit questions here.
Dear Prudence,
My best friend and I met in college—we’re now both in our mid-30s. We’ve stayed close, Her kids call me aunt and vice-versa, we’ve all traveled together, etc., though we live several hours away from one another.
The last few years have been really tough though. In addition to all the strain of COVID, her dad died of cancer after a couple years of treatment (including a Hail Mary search for new treatments in other states). She was the primary caregiver during all this, while raising her own kids and working as a middle school English teacher. Now her mom is ill and has moved in with her (they sold the house they loved to move to a bigger space), her grandpa has cancer, and she is in the midst of selling her childhood home since Mom isn’t capable.
It’s a lot, no doubt about it. But our friendship is in a really weird place and I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried to be in contact over the last three years—text message check ins, cheerful voicemails just to say hey, invitations to things we both enjoy—I’m usually met with radio silence or a quick thumbs up. I respect if she’s not in a place to respond…but then she’ll randomly reach out, say she desperately needs a girls night, won’t I drive down and see them? I usually agree, but it’s a high likelihood that she’ll cancel, or if we go, that she doesn’t really engage or looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.
She asked me to meet up this upcoming weekend—I’ve agreed, and it’s been quiet ever since. We don’t have any concrete plans other than the date. Honestly, I’m tired. Like actually physically exhausted. I’m in my busy season at work, and we’ve had a lot of things happening in my household that are taking all my emotional energy. I could really use some time with my friend—IF she actually engages and asks about my life too. I can press again for a commitment for the upcoming weekend, but the larger issue is how to continue a long-standing friendship with a very good person. This one-sided relationship is very tiring.
—I Could Drive, But I’d Rather Be Sleeping
Dear Rather Be Sleeping,
Because you two have been friends for such a long time, I assume this moment of spotty communication is relatively new, and coincides with the difficulty your friend has faced during this season of life. For that reason alone, I have to believe in the possibility of you two maintaining your connection in a consistent way again. Grieving and caregiving for three elder family members sounds difficult in a way that is hard for me to fathom, and I am sure she is also exhausted.
However, as much as you want to be there for your friend right now, it might be more important to make sure that when you’re both ready to reconnect, there is something there to salvage. No matter how much you love and care about her, or how long you’ve been friends, being canceled on over and over after making long-distance travel plans is ripe for building resentment. That’s what you don’t want. Perhaps you can say to your friend, “I’m happy to answer when you call, and return your texts, but I need to take a break on making travel plans for a while. I’m always here for you, and this is the best way for me to do that right now.” I don’t think she loves or likes you any less than before, and in time, you will bask in each other’s presence, according to plan.
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Dear Prudence,
I have a group of friends that I’ve had for over 10 years. The group is five women and we’ve been through a lot together including having kids, divorce, family issues, etc. This group means the world to me. However, in the past few years, one of the women has gotten an edge to her. She is constantly defensive and thinks everyone is attacking her even when they aren’t. She has even inaccurately started calling two of the women “misogynists” just because they have familial support and/or they have a different relationship dynamic with their husbands than she does. It has understandably caused a huge rift in the group to the point of fracturing it completely. I think this woman really is a good person and I really like her, but her inability to see her role in the group conflict is becoming too much. How do I help her to see that calling a friend a “misogynist” isn’t OK and that she isn’t the victim that she thinks she is but rather she’s the problem?
—NOT the Misogynist Friend
Dear Not the Misogynist Friend,
I wonder what might be going in your friend’s life that caused her to become a more aggressive communicator. From your letter, it seems like this friend isn’t having specific issues with you or anyone else in the group, so I assume the reason for this shift is coming from outside your circle. Calling someone you care about a misogynist because the way their family works is different from yours is pretty harsh, not to mention, it also does not seem to meet the definition of misogyny.
Is it possible there is an area of her life, maybe at work or home, where she feels particularly subjugated by someone else’s misogynistic behavior? Maybe she feels stuck in that situation, and is, unfairly, taking it out on the people closest to her? I can’t be sure, but it certainly sounds like whatever her issue is, it has little to do with the people who are bearing the brunt of her displeasure. Give her a call and poke around to see what’s happening in her world these days. My guess is that whatever is bugging her will come up. Once you have the full story, maybe then you can encourage her to process her feelings in a way that doesn’t leave lifelong friendships in jeopardy.
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Dear Prudence,
I recently moved several states away from nearly all of my family and close friends. I’m coming back home on a short visit soon that is jam packed with events for both family and friends. To own my own errors in this, I probably didn’t make it clear enough to one of my best friends which days I would be unavailable during this trip—she has been dating a new guy for about a year, they’re long distance and she really really wants me to meet him during this trip home. There are two issues with this though.
The boyfriend booked his flights to our hometown during the two busiest days of my trip when the only free time we have is very early in the morning, so it’s already going to be really inconvenient to fit this in. Secondly, he’s full of red flags. He voted for Trump in 2020, and doesn’t regret it or feel bad about it (he also kept this a secret and then revealed it several months into dating her… but that’s a separate story). Every time we talk about him, she mentions something about him not following through on promises, being flighty, smoking a ton of weed, and not being emotionally supportive. And yet, she continues pushing this relationship forward, and now wants me to bend over backward to make time to meet him on an already busy day on a short trip home. She has a history of picking bad boyfriends, and she fully acknowledges this, which makes her staying in this relationship all the more frustrating.
I want to be a supportive friend and despite having tons of personal reservations about this guy, I recognize that I’m not the one dating him and my friend is an adult and can make her own choices. I’m also frustrated with her for not accepting that I just might not have time to meet him during this trip. I feel strong-armed into making a visit with this guy happen because he booked the wrong flights and I’m annoyed, both with her for pushing it and with myself for not standing up to her on it. For context, I have separate plans with just this friend earlier in my trip and she’s coming to visit me next month… so it’s not like I won’t get to see her at all. What’s the right move here?
– Bending Over Backward for the Wrong Boyfriend
Dear Bending Over Backward,
It sounds like, to your friend, meeting her boyfriend equals getting your approval. When someone wants to be in a relationship, and they haven’t gotten to the point where being treated well is a requirement, it can be rough on friends and family, for this reason. How do you talk about getting “bad vibes” from the person they’re dating without alienating our loved one? The truth is, sometimes you can’t.
If you aren’t available to meet her boyfriend during your short and packed trip, I wouldn’t go out of your way to prioritize it, especially since you’ll be seeing your friend anyway. She may read into that decision and assume you disapprove of her boyfriend. At that point, you can either tell her that you do disapprove and why, or that you just couldn’t make the timing work. Both options are honest, it just depends where you want to put the emphasis in your response. You’ll either end up having the conversation it seems you might need to have anyway, or they’ll stick it out and you’ll catch him the next time you’re in town.
Dear Prudence,
I (high school senior) have social anxiety, and have always struggled to make friends. And on the rare occasion I do make a friend, they tend to vanish quickly. The friend I’ve had for the longest time (three years) suddenly started avoiding me for a while. When I confronted him about it, he finally explained that he just needed a break. I know that I can be very clingy. I have a tendency to pick one person and stop bothering with other people. To top it off, I have a very neurotic personality that can’t be pleasant to be around. If I’m honest, I’m surprised anyone tolerated me for this long. I kind of assumed that if I ever managed to make a friend that sticks around for longer than a month or two, the issue would sort itself out. Evidently that was wrong. What now?
—Didn’t Think I’d Get This Far
Dear Didn’t Think I’d Get This Far,
There are over seven billion people in the world (last I checked), and they have all kinds of personalities and they gravitate toward all different sorts of personalities. It may be true that so far your disposition has been read as very clingy and neurotic, and those descriptions might be accurate, but that doesn’t make any part of you, or your experience with friendship static or fated. You’re what? Seventeen? Eighteen years old? There is so much time to become who you’re becoming, and I worry about you feeling like you are not the kind of person who can have long-term friendships, or friendships where you’re treasured instead of “put up with.”
If YOU think you’re too clingy, too neurotic, or too much for someone to want to spend time with you, those are aspects of your personality that you can address however you see fit, whether that be through professional assistance or otherwise. But I am less inclined to suggest that you change yourself, and more interested in you shifting your perspective. Hono
We all have things we could work on to be better friend material, but that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve friendship until we’ve gotten it all right. I don’t know any person who values their own company, and believes in their ability to be a good friend, who comes across as clingy. It is just as important that someone can be a good friend to you. Honor the break your friend needs, which by the way, doesn’t mean you’re not friends anymore. When, or if, they come back around, let me know what you need from a friend, and let them decide if that’s the kind of person they’re ready to be to you.
—Ashley
More Friendship Advice From Slate
I have a close friend who is part of my inner circle and works in the same industry as me. This means we’ve shared details of our salaries, even helping each other make connections and get pay raises. So I know that we’re on pretty equal footing finances wise and at a similar place in our careers. Except, we’re not on equal footing at all because they have a ton of family money that I don’t have access to. They’ve never tried to hide their family wealth in any way, which I always respected. I’d never thought much of it besides the initial shock of realizing that there were indeed families in the U.S. with that kind of generational money. But it’s started to become a bit of a point of contention as we’ve gotten older.
