Bossy Betsy

Dear Betsy,

My stupid friends are stupid, and so am I. A couple of weeks ago we were out and I was drinking and someone asked me who my celebrity crush was. I couldn’t think of anybody. They wouldn’t let me say I didn’t have a celebrity crush. Unfortunately, right before I left to go out I was watching Celebrity Fit Club, so the only person who popped into my head was

Yeah. Sebastian Bach. I could just as easily have said K-Fed or Harvey Whatsit the Fourth, but I didn’t. Ever since then, people have been posting Skid Row videos on my Facebook wall, or singing, “I’ll Remember You” when I walk by. But the worst thing was that it turns out that my friend’s cousin’s sister’s uncle or something is his accountant, so they got Sebastian Bach to call me on the phone. They told him I was his biggest fan and I have alopecia. He felt sorry for me. He asked me about my hair and what my favorite song of his was. I lied all over the place. I was so embarrassed.

How do I get them to stop with this? I am so tired of hair metal I could scream.

Signed,
My crime is time, and it’s 18 and life to go.

Dear Crime,
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How do I get over a close friend who moved away and doesn’t make the effort to stay in touch?

A couple of years ago, I made a very good friend through a social group I joined. We had a great time together, did a lot of fun stuff together, we had a lot in common, and we eventually started feeling like we were long-lost sisters. She is a lawyer and her first job here when she and her husband moved to my city didn’t work out, so she had been desperately looking for a job. She wanted to stay here but started applying for jobs around the country. Then suddenly she got offered her dream job, in another state. I was very happy for her, but of course I was sad for myself because I was going to miss her terribly, and I assumed that we would stay in touch, through email and Facebook and the occasional phone call.

She moved away about a year ago. Her husband still lives and works here and they fly back and forth to see each other when they can. I don’t expect to see her every time she comes back (I’ve seen her a grand total of once here, since she left) but I did expect her to stay in touch with me. She hasn’t.

I’ve written her maybe once every month and a half or so over the past year, mostly to ask how this and that is going with her, and to try to talk with her about current events that we’re both interested in. I like keeping in touch with people on email and in various ways online. It’s how I assume friendship is maintained over long distances; to touch base once in awhile, crack each other up, confide about things, comfort each other, give advice when requested, etc.

Well, she has not reciprocated. She never answers my emails. I have called her maybe three times since she moved away a year ago. She has never once called me. I prefer email to phone calls, actually, and my other friends can tell you that I am not terribly diligent about promptly answering emails, myownself. But to never answer them? At all? I would only do that if I disliked someone and wanted them to stop bothering me.

I hear from her occasionally on FB. At one point recently I posted about some music I liked and she wrote on my wall that she loved it too and that we were long-lost sisters after all (something we used to say to each other a lot). I thought, oh, okay, she’s apparently not mad at me or anything.

When I finally got tired of never hearing back from her on email I wrote to her and told her that I wondered if I had done something wrong, and made a joke about, “you never call, you never write . . .”. She didn’t answer that email either, but later she posted on my FB wall that she promised to write me soon and that she was terrible about maintaining long-distance friendships. Okay, that’s been about three weeks ago now. Last week I wrote to her to ask her about whether she knew a lawyer here in town to recommend for a friend of mine who is having job transition troubles. No answer. Not even a gosh, sorry, I don’t know anybody to recommend, I’ll write you when work calms down. Not any answer at all.

I feel as if I had a valuable friendship and that it’s slipping through my fingers away into acquaintance territory. And on a primal level, it sort of awakens those low self esteem feelings of, maybe I just thought she liked me and she really didn’t. Maybe I’m not important to people I thought I was important to. But no – she had talked about how hard it is to make good friends when you’re in your forties/fifties, and how glad she was that we had met.

And realistically, if I put myself in her shoes, I know that her job keeps her enormously busy. She has to travel a lot for work and works long hours, and she spends very little of her time online. So part of it is the contrast between our lives: reading and writing things online is just not something she makes time for, while it is a big part of my life. Still, you could read and respond to a stupid email from a good friend once in awhile, you know? How hard is that?

One thing I know about myself is that I’m often much too quick to assume hostile or contemptuous motivations to people in their interactions with me, when I feel like they are being [insert negative emotion] to me, while they actually think everything between us is fine. So it’s very likely that she has no idea how abandoned I feel by her lack of ongoing contact with me, and it’s very likely that her not ever writing me back has nothing to do with her fondness for me or our friendship.

So, realizing that I can’t make her do what I want her to do, how do I stop feeling sorry for myself about it and stop worrying about what it all means? I need a different perspective. Thanks for listening!

Signed,
How can we be sisters if we can’t be friends?

Dear Sisters,
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