PSYCHOLOGY|RELATIONSHIPS

I Never Thought This Good of a Friend Would Do This To Me

We got along beautifully and knew each other for years, but the signs are clear when looking back

Cathy (not her real name) and I met in high school, but we were never friends then. She was much cooler than me despite being two grades below me.

I dated her brother for a year after he had graduated from the high school that we all attended.

That is the first time I got to know her when I saw her occasionally at their house.

She was a very kind person with striking features. Most people thought she looked a lot like the singer Björk whom I adored.

Our worlds drifted apart once I broke up with her brother and moved to Seattle from Philadelphia.

I used to hear about her from time to time when I would talk to her brother. He and I tried to be friends after our break-up but he kept pissing me off.

Funny enough, the last straw with him was how much shit he talked about his sister Cathy.

I really didn’t like it.

He was mean and rude to her oftentimes and I grew tired of hearing his justifications of “tough love”.

I had moved back to Philadelphia about a decade after I first left at 19 years old and lived within walking distance of Cathy’s place.

Her brother told me her address shortly before I ended my friendship with him. She lived with her boyfriend in a small house near downtown Philly.

I had rented a place that was in the heart of Center City Philly and loved it, especially going for walks along the Delaware River.

Cathy enjoyed going for long walks too, so we decided to meet up and go together.

It was 2004 and that was the true beginning of our beautiful friendship.

Over time, we realized that we had a lot of similar interests. We both loved the outdoors, vegetarian food, drinking red wine, reading, music, gabbing, and having a grand ol’ time together.

I started dating a Portuguese man who was born and raised in Paris. Boy was he a character…

I had to work all morning and afternoon on Valentine’s Day and he worked that night. He claimed that he didn’t believe in the commercialism of the holiday. Neither do I.

There was still no good enough reason for him not to have called or texted to tell me that he was not going to come to my place once he finished work which is the last thing he told me.

Cathy and I shared many laughs over that relationship as well as her overly needy, controlling, and manipulative boyfriend.

We shared everything about our families, work, and life in general.

She felt like the sister I never had and I know she felt the same about me.

A year later, she moved to Asheville, North Carolina.

I stayed in Philly but visited her in Asheville a couple of times before she moved to Portland, Oregon.

Then I visited her multiple times in Portland since I had friends in Seattle to see as well. She had no ties to Philly except for me.

She married a sweet guy in Asheville with whom she moved to Portland because she accepted a job offer there.

Before him, there was this guy named David with whom she was madly in love with for several years, even though he treated her like shit most of the time.

The only time Cathy visited me in Philly, she brought him along, and it was horrible.

That was the only time she and I ever got into an argument throughout our entire friendship.

She let David dictate her actions so they ended up spending maybe 2 hours with me instead of the entire day which she and I had been looking forward to for months.

I was pissed but knew how she could be when it comes to guys.

Since we did not see each other often and mainly talked over the phone, it didn’t seem worth it to dissect and no real harm was done, so I let it go.

Fast forward a decade later. It’s all downhill from here…

Cathy and her husband had not had sex in a year. She was stressed out and miserable at work. She was seeing a therapist because she knew she was spiraling downward and wasn’t sure what to do about it.

Then she had an emotional affair online with a guy much older than her whom she never met.

This was shortly followed by another affair with a co-worker who was a hot mess and had long made his feelings for her clear- to her and just about everyone else.

Even her husband knew that the guy had a huge crush on her.

She slept with him just one time.

Cathy said that she wanted to see if she could go through with it, even though she promised herself and me that she would not.

This was after a very long conversation where she realized just how much of a shitstorm it could cause in her professional and personal life.

Boy did it!

Her husband was rightfully hurt and furious, and due to Oregon’s divorce laws, he took her to the cleaners financially.

She ended up having to pay him a lot in alimony because she made much more than him and had for several years.

Cathy was a workaholic and threw herself into online dating like it was her second job.

She cannot stand being without a man.

As one of her closest friends, I was at a loss.

I tried to help as much as I could from 3,000 miles away.

I checked in on her regularly and mailed care packages as well to try to be there for her as much as possible.

However, I started to get annoyed when she would reach out to me for emotional support and then not respond to my calls or texts for days when she was wrapped up with whoever was the “man of the day”.

A few months later, a man with whom she was going strong for a month, whom I and others warned her about, ghosted her terribly and completely.

I later learned that he had “love bombed” her and it was devastating.

Nothing like that had ever happened to Cathy before. It was rare for guys not to want to be with Cathy.

She was drinking a bottle or two of wine a day and was a wreck.

She and the ghosting guy had planned a trip to France for early September to scatter her mom’s ashes.

She had told her co-workers and had taken the time off of work already. She felt extremely embarrassed by it all and my heart went out to her.

My codependent tendencies (a term I previously knew nothing about) kicked in and I felt the need to rescue her.

Therefore, despite my better judgment, I told her that I would meet her in Paris and go to Nice with her to scatter her mom’s ashes.

I had gotten to know her mom as a teenager and it had been almost two years since I had seen Cathy.

It was against my better judgment because:

• I didn’t have paid time off of work as a massage therapist.
• I had just returned from a week in Italy.
• I worked three days a week while taking full-time college courses which included science, and my hardest semester started right before that trip. I was willing to miss a week’s worth of classes which is serious.

I felt it was my duty as a good, loyal, and long-time friend of Cathy’s to be there during this difficult time by doing whatever I could to make her feel better.

In June, I booked my ticket, as did she. We were excited.

I had only been to Paris once, for just one day and one night, and had always wanted to visit Nice.

Then, Cathy started dating this guy named Kyle.

She didn’t tell me until after I had bought my ticket that she had invited Kyle to go to France as well.

She said that she invited him when she was not sure if I was going and that she would simply tell him that she decided to make it a “girls' trip”.

That’s when she found out that Kyle had already purchased his ticket as a surprise for her,

He was very well off financially and could afford to transfer the ticket and eat the cost difference, but Cathy didn’t want to take the long flight to Paris from Portland and back by herself.

She was in a fragile state and I thought it might be good for her to have this guy go along, so I accommodated her by saying,

“Okay, how about this…Kyle joins us for the week and I’ll book a place near you guys. However, I want one full day, 24 hours, with just you.”

I knew that Cathy had a tendency to be overly catering to the guys that she dated, and I wanted to make it clear that I still wanted one day for the two of us without Kyle.

They had only been dating a little more than a month. I had known Cathy for 25 years!

Imagine my surprise when her quick response to me was,

“That’s asking too much. I’m not going to set aside a whole day for you.”

I. was. FLOORED!

It’s rare for me to hear any of friend of mine tell me that I’m asking “too much”.

I tend not to ask for enough.

That was the beginning of the end of my friendship with Cathy.

I spoke with several other friends to get their feedback and see if I was overreacting.

They were more shocked than me.

I knew I had to say something to her, which I hadn’t at first. My only reply was, “Okay.”

I gathered my thoughts over the next few days and texted her that I’d like to have a heart-to-heart with her when she could make the time.

Cathy got back to me quickly and we spoke later that day.

I confronted her about her poor behavior towards me in that instance and for the past several months in general.

Before Kyle bought his ticket, she did not think much of him. In fact, she made fun of him and did not think anything serious would become of them.

That’s when she was all excited about just the two of us going to France.

After our conversation, she became cold and distant with me.

No apology, no compassion, no sympathy, despite her also knowing that I did not have much money saved as a full-time student who worked part-time. I did not have paid vacations either like she did.

That’s when I thought to myself, “You bitch!?”

I decided to make the best of that plane ticket and changed it to a trip to Iceland the following February as a Valentine’s Day present to myself. I always wanted to visit and hoped to see the northern lights.

As a result of talking about this with a co-worker, I found out that I have codependent tendencies which strongly influenced my desire to be friends with someone like Cathy.

I sought out a therapist who specializes in codependency who helped me understand these issues more which allows me to look out for myself better.

When Cathy returned from France, she contacted me to tell me about her trip. I know that she hoped I would act like everything was okay and go with it, but I didn’t play along.

I no longer believed I could trust her to look out after me as a friend after what she did for someone she knew so little.

After a few failed attempts at reconciliation from both sides, we stopped being friends.

A year or two ago, she requested my friendship on Facebook without a message or anything, just a request. I only had a Facebook account briefly to help me move overseas. I denied the request and deleted the account.

Keeping myself a safe distance emotionally, mentally, or physically from those who have repeatedly hurt me, yet I still love and I know they love me, is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

It is also one of the most liberating and rewarding things I have done in my entire life.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.