Letters to the Editor
Christopher1988
Published Letters: 567 Editor's Choice: 40
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You really missed this one, Cary.
[Read the article: My close friend has clammed up]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How can you go on about personality types and differences of expression and miss the clear signals: LW claims she has a "dear friend" but "dear friend" has not done a thing to keep in contact for a year, did not intiate contact but met at a party, and has intentionally kept shut about a serious relationship. This isn't about who "thinks" and who "feels" or who displays which characteristic more prominently. And what's with saying that LW must speak with "genuine feeling" before "dear friend" will open up? Clearly another friend did just this was was promptly dropped. Nothing suggests "dear friend" is a "feeler" waiting to know that this is more than a cold question-and-answer session. Nothing suggests LW fails to impart feeling in her discussions.
I find it particularly odd that "dear friend" is looked at as a riddle to be answered, or a test to pass. Find the "way in" even if you have to change your normal tactics. Maybe "dear friend" doesn't want to confide in LW, or anyone, no matter how strongly they show they have feelings about it. Or maybe "dear friend" has real friends that do hear confidences. It's not LW's place to "solve" the question of how to get "dear friend" to open up, but to figure out whether "dear friend" wants to be that.
Boy, if I didn't feel close to someone, and avoided them and their questions, and then they came up to me—at a party!—when I made no effort to contact them!—with some big emotional plea of "you're so important to me, and I just want you to know how much I really care" do you know what I'd do? I'd probably laugh in their face. Not to be mean, not even intentionally. Just because the sudden confrontation of the person's delusion with my reality would be too incongruous to do anything but laugh.
I don't find LW narcissistic as some people claim. A friend should be, to my mind, exactly what LW described. But what's not getting through is that, by displaying none of those characteristics, the "dear friend" is in fact demonstrating an unwillingness to be a close friend.
It reads as if "dear friend" does not consider LW to be more than an acquaintence, or perhaps once considered LW more and then decided to redefine the boundaries. There is clearly some disassociation on LW's part here, either about what the friendship has been or what it is now.
There is far too little info to go on here. Most notably absent in getting a beat on the situation is whether "dear friend" has always been like this, or if it is something new in the past year. It's an important piece because it would help explain how, without regular or deep contact, "dear friend" has come to qualify, or at some point came to qualify, as a "dear friend." If there was never a sharing of intimacies, perhaps LW should realize they were never very close. If there was such sharing at one time—and I tend to think there was, considering that LW reacts as if this situation is new and confusing—LW should probably try to figure out when the change occured and whether the situation is repairable.
But this has, I believe, absolutely nothing to do with the Myers-Briggs personality test.
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Short and sweet: it doesn't matter.
[Read the article: My close friend has clammed up]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It doesn't matter if she's taken a religious vow not to talk about intimate subjects. It doesn't matter if she's been in an abusive relationship and is now a silent sufferer. It doesn't matter if she's joined a cult and believes she's going to shift to a higher plane of existence on another planet after she joins an act of mass suicide on this one, and sees no reason to confide in those who are "unenlightened." It doesn't matter if she's decided to confide in different people and no longer chooses to do so with you.
All that matters is that you accept the new situation. The person who
has always been such an open and loving friend, a truly intuitive-extrovert-feeling-nonjudging type
is no longer, for you at least, that person. You can't change that. A mutual friend tried, no luck. Accept that. She has made a choice, she's had opportunities to contemplate and reject her new choice. She hasn't done so. She wants things as they are. Accept that.
Do with that what you like. Indulge in personal introspection, maybe try to see if you did something wrong (and you may well have done nothing wrong). Write her off a loony, or a person who breaks the bonds of friendship, or a mystery unsolvable. Settle this in your mind as you must.
But accept the situation, and move on with your life.
No matter how well you come to understand the "why," it won't alter the "is." Accept that, and don't try to change others. Try to change yourself, if you want. And if you don't want to change yourself, that's fine, too.
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Great response!
[Read the article: There's a cougher in the office and it's driving me mad!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What a week of questions! I think they were all silly, and this the silliest, but Cary's response turned straw into gold. Funny and to the point. Wonderful.