Female Friendships Going Wrong

If a rupture happens once it could be them, if it happens over and over again, it's probably you.

Theodore Chasseriau

Write to me with any problem or dilemma at AskPhilippa@yahoo.com Subject to Terms and Conditions

Hi Philippa,

Sharp intake of breath, there’s a first time for everything so here goes… I’ve had some cracking friendships with women over my 50 plus years, but as night follows day, they eventually crash and burn, where am I going wrong? Why is my relationship with the “sisterhood” bittersweet? Can you help me to keep my finger off the Self Destruct button? I’m finally saying “enough is enough” as three long term (interconnected) friendships have fizzled out. I’ve had plenty of time to reflect, and I need to get a fresh perspective on how I might live to befriend again. I have a pattern in my female friendships that when women get too close, I push them away again. It seems as if I sometimes get scorched by the other’s ego (I’m sure you’ll say that this is not a thing!). I had two key friendships at university where I ended up feeling as though I was the other’s sidekick, the Wise to their Morecambe. It was fun along the way but I ended up feeling diminished.

This has happened to me again recently. I sometimes help to build people up and then the power balance shifts and we go from being equals to me being their inferior. I haven’t taken a conventional path in life so I am a difficult peg to put in a hole. I’m an outsider but I’m used to that since childhood and I realise that can be off putting for some people.

My mother wanted a boy and she got me and that doesn’t make for the best role model growing up. I don’t think either of us have ever quite got to grips with that, you never quite get over it. I find it difficult to read boundaries and I think other people struggle to read mine. Just because I like a good chat over coffee doesn’t mean that I want to go away for a weekend with that person. But likewise, a person who doesn’t mind coffee with me doesn’t necessarily want me to get them a lavish birthday present either.

More recently I have tried to tackle issues in relationships head on, in the past I would have used avoidance techniques. However, I found confronting my friends with my pain doesn’t work – they don’t get where I’m coming from and it becomes about them. This is what has happened when I’ve tried to talk about my emotions with my mother too. In order to give me closure for my recent friendship failures I have written short apologies with no strings attached.

It doesn’t stop the rumination in my head but I’ll feel better if I bump into them in the street. But I can’t help thinking they will see my note as an odd gesture. I feel that people seep into me, overwhelm me, which is strange because I think that I put people off by being too intense. I present as bubbly and cheerful and if there was one word that other people might use to sum me up it is “enthusiastic”. I’m really good at striking up jolly conversation with strangers, and that gives me a lift. That’s the easy bit, it’s the keeping a friendship going year after year, with all the changes that child rearing, jobs, changes in financial fortune bring, that is the challenge. I feel that my legs are frantically paddling under water just to keep afloat in a friendship. I should just add – this could be more relevant than I think to unpicking this – I have a lovely husband and we are each others’ best friends and have been for 30 plus years – so I must be doing something right. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

My Reply

As this happens again and again, I don’t think women in general are your problem. I think something about your way of relating to women is. I don’t mean there is anything wrong with you, not at all, but perhaps there is something about the pattern of relating to women that you’ve inherited.

It is probably rooted in the blueprint handed to you by your relationship with your mother. All I have to go on is your remark that your mother wanted a boy, so I am going to have to do a bit of detective work, and I may be quite wrong. But I wondered whether your mother herself struggled with women and perhaps didn’t really know how to be with them. If so, then as well as inheriting a difficult blueprint, you may also have had a difficult role model for female relationships.

A sentence that caught my attention was, “People seep into me.” I wondered whether your mother may have related to you in that way too, so that she didn’t always know where she ended and you began. Again, I’m speculating, but I offer it because it might fit. In every parent-child relationship the parent begins as the more powerful figure, but if that relationship doesn’t gradually make room for the child to become a separate person, it can leave echoes that are replayed later. I wondered whether those echoes are there when you find yourself slipping into the sidekick role.

In other words, I wonder whether you are projecting your relationship with your mother onto new friendships, so instead of each friendship becoming something new, it becomes another version of something old. If that resonates with you, then you have somewhere to begin. Awareness is the first step to change. Without awareness, we repeat old patterns without realising we are doing it. I must reiterate though, I have very little to go on and I’m speculating.

I wonder whether psychoanalytic psychotherapy, or even psychoanalysis, might help. That way of working is particularly interested in the patterns we inherit from our earliest relationships and continue to replay in later ones. This type of therapy won’t tell you how to keep friends, but it may help you recognise what gets in the way of letting a friendship become something different from the relationship you first knew. The first step to change is self-awareness.

Have you got any experience or advice you could share with this subscriber?