Dear all, friendships change; often they become deeper and more genuine, but sometimes they take on a strange ‘tint’. That’s the case with Pia, who’s at a bit of a loss right now:
‘My name is Pia and this is about my friend, whom I’ve known for eight years. Our sons are both 10; they became friends at nursery and that’s how we became friends too. We’ve spent a lot of time together – at playgrounds, in the gym, but also without the children.
Over the last year, however, something has crept in that I’ve tried to ignore for a long time. I feel as though we’re constantly competing with each other. Or rather, that she’s always comparing everything. Our boys both play tennis, and I keep noticing that she’s somehow in a better mood when her son plays well and mine plays worse. I observe exactly the same thing when it comes to school marks. If my son happens to do better in a test, she gets really bitchy.
Can this friendship still be saved?
When it comes to work, she constantly emphasises how busy she is, how stressful everything is, and that we’re lucky because we have a cleaner and her mum lives in the village. She says she has to manage everything on her own, her husband is away so much and mine is at home much more.
A few weeks ago, we went for a drink together one evening and I asked her if she was at her wits’ end and/or unhappy, and how I could help her. She was really snappy about it, saying everything was great, everything was brilliant, she had no idea what I was on about.
Since then, the atmosphere has been a bit odd and I can feel how it’s stressing me out. I’m really nervous about saying anything when something nice or good has happened to us, because I always think she’ll put a negative spin on it again. I ask her lots of questions and try to figure out why she’s behaving like this, but I can’t get a word out of her…
But I have to say that being friends with her is doing me less and less good. I don’t want to compare myself to her, I don’t see any competition between us, but she does, and that makes me sad. Now I’m wondering: do you know those friendships that somehow only work if one of them always feels better than the other? Where one of them is always somehow putting the other down? What would you do in my place?
