I Don't Have to Be Friends With Everyone

(source)

I am learning something important: I don't have to be friends with everyone.

I listened to a webinar this week about running counseling groups for girls in a K-12 setting. The presenter was Julia V. Taylor, and she stated that as girls get older, they don't learn how to socialize well with one another. In elementary school, it is sometimes customary to invite everyone from your class to your birthday party. However, as time passes, girls create closer friendships with others and not being invited to the birthday party or sleepover causes hurt feelings. Sometimes instead of talking about these feelings, girls talk about each other. We are expected to be nice, and sometimes this is difficult if we don't really like others (as we are expected to).

In my own life, I have felt that it is necessary for me to try to be friends with everyone. My philosophy is that "everyone needs a friend." I stand by that mantra. However, I don't always have to be that friend. 

There is a woman who I met at church (which is where I feel especially pressured to be friends with everyone) who I am having a difficult time liking. On paper, it seems like we could be great friends: same church, similar undergraduate experiences, artistic and musical interests, same values, both married. However, something is not clicking. At all. 

At first I thought it was her pregnancy. She was very pregnant and not even married for a full year yet. She flaunted it. She complained about it. She made a spectacle of herself and how "miserable" she was. Then she had the baby and I thought, "Great! She can stop, and we can be friends." Not so. She made comments about her "superhuman" qualities for giving birth without an epidural and complained about her baby (crying, not sleeping, having a faux-hawk at only 2 weeks old).

It was too much for me and I did the ultimate friend-cleansing ritual: I blocked her from my facebook feed (so significant, right?). I also stopped going to an activity that she helps to run because I can't take the baby-ness. Mr. M still goes, and that is fine with me. I just know where my emotional limits are.

I also still see her at church where I am friendly in every way, and I don't feel guilty. I feel relieved. I have wanted to be friends for 8 months, but mostly because my feelings for her were negative and I didn't want to feel that way. However, I now feel quite freed. She can be herself, and I can be myself, and it is OK. 

Goodbye, Baby-Flaunter. 

  

---Mrs. M.