There’s nothing quite as hurtful as when someone you love disappoints you, and when your friends let you down, it can feel like your whole world is falling apart. If you’ve ever been bruised by a broken friendship, this is one post you won’t want to miss!
What is it about female friendships that can send us right back to junior high? Most of the time I tend to think that at 37 years old, I am well past all that girl drama. I have lots of wonderful acquaintances, but only a very small handful of people I would consider my close friends and my “people.”
Those are the ones I trust completely, the ones I can pour my heart out to, the ones who I know will be there for me no matter what, and the ones who are immune to all the jealousy and pettiness and cattiness that so often crops up between us women. They are the ones for which no explanation is necessary when we haven’t talked for a while, the ones who can pick up exactly where we left off as if no time has passed. The ones who understand that life gets crazy sometimes, and don’t take it personally.
They are the ones who won’t ever let me down.
Except, of course, when they do.
What then?
Not so long ago I found myself in this exact situation. One of my very closest friends was suddenly not so close anymore, and I had no idea why. For a while, I tried to blow it off, to brush away that gnawing gut feeling that something wasn’t quite right. And then, when the feeling didn’t go away, I even called to apologize. I told her I wasn’t sure what I had done, but it just felt like something wasn’t right, and that I was genuinely sorry for anything I may have done that had caused the rift I was feeling. She laughed it off and assured me that it was nothing, but still, the uneasiness lingered.
I wondered if I might just be paranoid.
But as time went on, it became more and more clear that I wasn’t just being paranoid. The uneasiness remained and instead, this friend, the one I had trusted and leaned on, admired and looked up to, stayed up until all hours talking to, the one I would do anything for, was quite clearly no longer interested in my friendship. She stopped responding to emails and text messages and suddenly no longer had time to chat, even though I could see from her social media posts that she was making time for lots of other friends.
And then, at the moment I needed her most, she completely let me down. I had reached out to ask for help on a project that was very important to me, sent her both a long email explaining what was going on and two text messages asking her to check her email. She ignored them all.
It crushed me.
All at once, I felt like I was 14 years old again. I replayed every conversation, every email, every text message over and over again in my head. I cried. Then I got angry. Then I cried some more. What had I done?
Finally, feeling completely lost, I called my friend Edie to talk about it. As my accountability partner, I knew she would probably have some good advice. If nothing else, she would be a shoulder to cry on. I half hoped she would commiserate with me and reassure me that this other friend was just a jerk and I would be perfectly justified to never speak to her again.
But that’s not quite what happened.
While she did commiserate and fully understand exactly why I so was hurt and angry, her advice took me completely off guard.
“I think you should give her grace,” she said quietly.
Every part of me protested. “But she is the one who should apologize! She is the one who hurt me! She doesn’t deserve grace!”
“No, she doesn’t,” Edie agreed. “But neither do we.”
Oh.
Chagrined and humbled, I promised to try to give grace, even if I didn’t feel like it. And wouldn’t you know it? Not 24 hours later, an opportunity arose. The friend who had let me down now needed me.
Friends, I had to dig deep. The last thing on earth I felt like doing was helping the friend that had just wounded me without an ounce of remorse or a word of apology.
But I did it anyway.
And you know what? It didn’t fix our damaged friendship. There was no dramatic change of heart, no “aha” moment, no tearful reconciliation. Just the opposite, in fact—in the time since, she has let me down several more times, and I have simply had to come to terms with the fact that our friendship will probably never again be what it once was.
But although it didn’t fix anything, it did make me feel better. It took away the bitterness that was filling up my heart and allowed me to let go of the hurt and anger I was feeling. It has also allowed me to have a lot more compassion, and to see that perhaps the problem isn’t something I’ve done, but maybe just a result of something she is going through.
It often takes a whole lot of effort and intentionality to be a good friend. It means being willing to put yourself out there and to risk being hurt. And, inevitably, because we are making ourselves vulnerable, there will be times where our friends disappoint us and let us down. They will hurt our feelings. They will annoy us. They will forget to show up or say something stupid, or make a decision we don’t agree with. They will be flawed and imperfect and inadequate. In other words, they will be human.
And although we may be justified in our anger or our hurt, the truth is that there have probably been plenty of times when we’ve been the ones to let our friends down, the ones who said something careless, the ones who didn’t come through, the ones in need of grace. At least I know I have.
In order to have a friend, we must BE a friend, and ultimately that means showing grace when our friends don’t come through the way we want them to. It means forgiving when necessary, looking for the good instead of the bad, and treating them the way we’d like to be treated, the way we’ve already been treated.
Even when we don’t feel like it.
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Grace or not, nvr doubt your own happiness. I have been let down plenty of times. Thought it was my own fault. Did soul searching and still blame myself. Until it hit me recently that things happened for a reason. People hurt you, because you are kind. And that's your speciality and uniqueness. No one can give your own happiness but yourself. So let those people do bad unto you, don't do it to them. I'm 38, very much single(obviously lonely at times n need friends/family for accompaniment) and I often choose to walk away when humans disappoint me. Of course, I will be lonely when I walked away but I know God is fair.
I have ADHD (as a 38-year-old woman) and have such limited mental space for keeping up friendships, I've become very content with the superficial. Everything else drains me as though I had just run a marathon. I love my friends, but need "appointments" to keep contact with them. If they're where I am - I'm 100% in friend-mode! But out of sight literally means out of mind for me. It's horribly embarrassing. I think I may be becoming more of a hermit - even though my life is very busy with kids, teaching, marriage, home-care, church, just like everyone else.
When there's not something I "have" to be at, I literally can't remember the things that are relationship-upkeep. Their problems become second layers to my problems. It feels too heavy that I, more often than not, do nothing. :( But there are no (absolutely no) negative or hateful feelings toward anyone. I just fail miserably at doing relationship upkeep when I'm perpetually running on empty. I swear, my husband was lucky we met before cell phones were common! We would have ghosted each other by accident!
I worry ALL the time that my acquaintance & close friends wouldn't understand all this. And I haven't told them about my ADHD - not even my family or in-laws beyond my parents (I'm also very embarrassed about my diagnosis). I'm married into a highly functional Type A Wonder Woman family who have never dealt with mental health issues like mine, but several close friends don't believe depression or ADHD are real enough problems not to push through with the right mindset. I look all right on the outside, happy even, but my mind is EXHAUSTING. I am so tired. And I probably look like a neglectful friend or distant sister-in-law , but it's not because of the person on the other end. I literally can't keep my head above what is absolutely necessary (which, in reality, is a lot of stuff, and I seem like I'm doing a lot on the outside - but if you ask me to do one more "thing", I'm going to cry.)
In a nutshell nutshell: In person = GREAT! long distance = inevitable ghosting :( Please keep inviting me. I need something on my calendar to get out of my rut. If I can come, I'll come. But I sure as heck can't be the one to schedule the get-togethers. :(
I don't think you're a horrible friend. I think your honesty is refreshing and could be the cause of some of the problems I've read in these comments. There's nothing about adhd or mental health that is any different than, say... diabetis. But there is stigma and I understand how you feel. Do me a favor and I'd your friends ever get their feelings hurt because you haven't initiated something, think about telling the friend what you're going thru and all you can do is be a good friend when you are in friend mode. Medication may help, there may be something in Chinese Medicine that will help, there are good anti depressants & great medicine that's been tested longer than a couple of years,on senior citizens cuz the animal rights people say no more testing on rats! Less side effects. I had a boss that explained it as being in a room full of boxes and someone turns out the light and moves the boxes around and expects you to navigate. Good Luck to you!
You sound like a horrible friend indeed!
I'd rather be her friend than yours, Kim any day. You don't seem to have much empathy for others. Good luck to you as well.
Someone I considered a bestie completely shocked me by using me as fodder in her high school level mentality relationship drama. The same old trick - pretend there is a crisis, describe horrible things that shock me, insist unequivocally that it is over & she needs support leaving him, which I of course offer. And then it turns out that this is just a dance they do all the time. And she shows him our text conversation & then BOTH of them condemn ME.
I'm so pissed at myself for falling for that since I've seen it so many times before; I really didn't see it coming. Your article mentions distancing, flaking, annoying, disagreeing --- all this I can totally accept. But I don't really know how to deal with being used as a drama prop. For me this brings up a question of whether or not the friendship even exists any more.
It probably doesn't existed as a friendship anymore. I am a widow in her 60s who went through a difficult marriage. I complained to family for years about circumstances that one or two friends saw first hand were abusive. I never left because I am disabled and had no financial means. My complaining only distanced me from friends and family. You yourself should not get drawn into her melodrama which is emotionally draining for her. You are not at fault and give her your forgivenes. Yet, as an older person I wonder what happened to a time when friends were there when you needed them to just listen????? 8/12/ 2019
I read this article a few weeks ago after someone shared on Facebook. I had a bad dream that night that my best friend of almost twenty years was mad at me. I reached out to her that day, telling her that I had a very realistic dream that she was upset with me (at the time, we were talking daily. I had been checking on her a lot bc her stress levels are high due to family changes.) She responded like her normal self and put my mind to ease. The same day, I invited her to an online event that was very important to me. She made excuses for not attending, which was really okay, but I've not heard from her since. I have tried contacting her, showing grace--still no responses. I have realized through this experience that she has actually done this every time I have tried to talk to her or plan something during the last year or so. I came back to reread this today for advice. I'm heartbroken.
I have a best friend that I try to please all the time, but I also have a twin sister that always gets the spotlight from everyone. I really upsets me when she gets the spotlight from my best friend too.
Exactly what I needed to hear today. THANK YOU!
Hi Ruth,
I just Googled "when your friends let you down" and came upon this post. It's so close to what I'm going through but with me currently it's three friends--my closest--who are being distant from me. And I am not getting it. I sent out a long e-mail to a week ago, as you said you did when a difficult issue was presented to you, and I've yet to hear back. Had I received such an e-mail from her or any of my friends I would have reached out right away--or within a couple days anyway. She's out of work right now and because she is single with no kids (while my husband and I and our four kids had struggled the couple times he was without a job and I worked just part-time), she should be well off enough to not be struggling, as she made more than me and my husband put together for a number of years. I get it, though, that unemployment is rough and believe me when I say I've listened to her for hours on end (that's no exaggeration) while she commiserated over her jobless situation (It seemed that every time she insisted we get together was when she had something to talk about), so not to respond to me when I'm going through a bump is really hurtful. In fact, she disappeared from our lives for about 10 years after my youngest was born, at a time I could have used a friend's help or at least a shoulder to cry on.
My other two friends are in no man's land as well. One lives in another state and if we don't communicate by e-mail or text or phone we don't communicate at all. I've sent a couple long e-mails to her, followed up by texts notifying her I'd sent the e-mails, and all I get back is "sorry, I've been busy" and no projection about when she might be able to call or reply. (I work from home and have worked all weekend in addition to all week so I am no stranger to busy. I don't have a 9-5 job, as she does.)
My third friend was a godsend to me when I was struggling with a family member's and a friend's ill health over the past five years. She was an amazing help, especially taking care of my youngest so I could be with the family member and friend. Now that those two have passed away and this friend is now in a bit of turmoil, I keep reaching out to her to get together or talk by phone or e-mail, but I get no response. l know she's busy (I am too), but how about just a quick text to say all is well or all is not well and let's talk? I want to be the good friend to her that she was to me.
I can't say that I've ever ignored a friend's e-mails, letters, texts, or phone calls to this extent in my life, so it's very hurtful to me. And since I recently lost that dare friend I was mentioning, I'd think my other friends would be a bit more understanding. But it is what it is, I guess.
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.
I can relate - beautifully written post.
Great to read this. I went through it 2 years ago with a friend I thought of as a sister. Could talk about anything. Spent hours visiting, on adventures and even just grocery shopping. Was hurt because she had lied about a trip she planned to be away for my birthday. Something dumb I know. Went through a tough phase with my father being ill during that time and in retrospect I was tired and over sensitive. The next day she sent me a kiss off text. And despite my efforts to reach out, even apologize she simply ignored me and we haven't spoken since. I was hurt of course, and have spent much time questioning of the friendship and emotional connection was ever real. But I now accept it was just something I had to go through. And that friends that care about you not only realize when you are out of character, but that from time to time you will be upset with each other for valid or dumb reasons but it won't end relationships
So what if it's your mother in law and sisters in law? When my husband and I were first married, I was included in activities when everyone was in town. For probably the last five years, I have been actively excluded, despite their knowledge that I am interested in sharing time with them. Not only this, but my mother in law has shredded me by yelling at me more than once in front of others in the family.
Unfortunately, I'm not able to just ignore them and move on, because my kids like to spend time with my husband's family. Also, my husband also seems to be oblivious to this.
What makes it especially hard is that my sisters in law always are charming when we are all together and they seem friendly and interested, but they will decline my invitations for things like day after Christmas shopping and then go out themselves.
As I read what I have written, it sounds like I'm paranoid, but this happens regularly and repeatedly. I would love to just write them off, but I feel like that would make things worse. But living with it I'd also humiliating.
Sometimes inlaws are mean girls
When mine treats me mean I ignore them until there nice again
I donit to keep the peace
Hang in there
Your husband's family sounds like my ex's. Is he a mama's boy? Worships his mom, your cooking will never be as good as hers? Just curious.