Hi Selkie,
I did not feeled hijacked at all on the other thread don't feel guilty.
Here are some thoughts about your reply:
Selkie wrote:
CeeMee, this sums up my friendships. I need time away to recover every so often. Sometimes I feel like it's the end of the friendship. I always come around though and we meet up again. You say you have learned to lower your expectations, in what way? Surely by lowering your expectations you are giving people a license not to meet your needs? How do you have close friends if your expectations of them are low?
What do I mean by "lowering expections?" The example H&H gave is one way of lowering expectations. Another example would be to allow that the standards I have, may not be in complete alignment with my friend's. For example, by my standards, I may think that considerate means... letting me know at least a day before that you aren't going to show for our appointment. She may think that considerate means... leaving a message on my home voicemail the day of. There could be a number of different factors contributing to our different understandings of considerate (culture, education, upbringin etc.). If I don't allow for difference, I am bound to feel disrespected. Another example might be that I am of the mind that a true friend should always remember my birthday and holidays with a phone call. My friend might think that true friends just get in touch when the time is right and circumstances allow and things should be honky dory between the two of us when that time comes. If on my birthday, I sit by the phone waiting for a call, guess what, I'm in for a real big disappointment. When my friend does call two weeks after my birthday, I have the choice of being perturbed or accepting that she has plenty of things on her mind, she has plenty of family birthdays to remember and remembering mine might be much to ask. These are just examples but the idea is that we cannot always assume that the standards we set for "friendship" are shared by everyone else.
I do believe that as we share more with each other and become closer friends, the more likely we are to try to meet each others expectations.
What Solitaire wrote some time back on this same thread and what others have also said is very true. True friends are few and not very easily found. As for myself, I don't have any really close friends right now. I am taking a breather from my oldest and dearest friend of 28 years. She's the one I spoke of on another post who has gone bonkers over her new found religion. I did everything I could to help her and to no avail. She hasn't been able to do much for herself. Finally, I gave up and pulled back. We are at a breather in our relationship right now. I hope that we will be close again some day, but for now, this is best for us both. Just about everyone else that I know is just an acquaintance. Some used to be called friends till I realized otherwise. I keep very low expectations in relation to them. That's what keeps us friendly and able to have lunch or coffee.
Selkie, maybe you might consider letting things chill for a while and seeing what happens. Friendships must be reciprocal. If I wind up doing all the work like calling and such, that's not reciprocal. Sometimes I have to chill and see what "will" there is on the other person's part. My days of chasing people down the street to be my friend are over. Granted, If I meet someone and we have a good conversation, I still get excited at the prosepct that this could develop. That is usually enough to send them running down the street. What can I say, they didn't give me the handbook on friendship when I came into this world. Come to think about it, not only didn't I get any manuals on any of the social stuff, I didn't get any training either. We were a large group of 6 children and mom thought our best and only friends should be each other. Now, we all barely speak to each other.
Selkie, I hope some of this is helpful to you.
CeeMee
