Look, if you invite a friend to a dinner that requires reservations, and the person shows up 45 minutes late, you don't just take it like a doormat. You SAY SOMETHING. You say, "Hey, you're late, and what's up with that?"

Exactly. Not only that, if it's your birthday, for God's sake, you GO AHEAD AND EAT WITHOUT HER. You don't sit around fuming and "miss your dinner reservation" - unless you're looking to seize upon the event as an excuse to bolster other, pettier, grievances.

agreed about the passive aggressiveness -- or at the very least, LW's reluctance to confront the friend. Sometimes we women are like that -- uncomfortable with direct confrontation. I do sense tho that the friend is unhappy with the LW -- geez, maybe LW even stalked her to this new town.

In any given band, you usually have a star, or a legend-in-his-own-mind. This person shows up late, changes the set list, forgets the chords to "Louie-Louie," gets plastered, insults nice fans, and so on.

We musicians know that we will have to put up with this person. It is an occupational hazard. Have you noticed, though, that bands usually only stay together for two years, tops? Eventually, we get fed up and we drift away.

I advise you to do it as the musical pros do it: No big confrontational break-up. Just find somebody else to play with, and smile, and apologize for not being able to make it to rehearsal, or out on the road. Drift away. Eventually you will drift back into this person's part of the world, and you can try again, if you wish.

because the answer is clearly 'open your mouth solve your problem.' All you need to say is "Mary, I really enjoy hanging out with you. The next time we go out I'd like to have dinner just the two of us."

From your letter it seems like all you have done is to angrily cancel your plans and then expect Mary to guess that she has distressed you by inviting other people. She can't read your mind. If you have a problem with her behavior the way to solve it is to tell her (1) that it bothers you and (2) what you would like her to do instead. If she continues to do it anyway, then you might consider some of the other options the folks here have brought up.

Before I respond, I'd like to take a moment to slam Salon's staff. Once again this article has a totally misleading title. The friend has not "gone bad." Nowhere does the letter writer say that or anything close to it. Salon, cut it out, please.

Mary is what she is - an extreme extrovert who is shallow and incapable of understanding why two people would want to spend time alone together. Chances are she's always been this way, she just hasn't always been as able to arrange things to her satisfaction. Extroverts get a charge out of having lots of friends; it's like a drug. And they can be addicts who lose everything worth having to their addition.

There's no need to ditch Mary. Just take her for what she is... a person who gives exactly this much (_) of a shit about you. You are a friend of hers but it's very easy to be her friend and so doesn't mean much. If you want to spend time with her, let it be on her terms. Don't invite her; she's a boor who doesn't understand that someone other than her can be "host." Let her invite you to a mass party. Pick an invite to a place where the food is good. Maybe someday she'll lose all her friends in a terrible personality crash and decide she has time for you again. Maybe by then you will have grown past needing to make her feel good about herself. Maybe you'll be gracious anyway. Who knows.

Anyway, stop trying to teach the pig to fly. The pig is a pig is a pig is a pig and if you want to be friends with her, you need to learn to like wallowing.

Where do you get that Mary doesn't give a shit about LW? Seems to me she's been extraordinarily generous - letting LW stay at her place, introducing her to scads of new people, including her in events and outings. She might be a flake when it comes to punctuality, but she certainly doesn't strike me as someone who doesn't give a shit.

It's also unfair to say Mary is "incapable of understanding why two people would want to spend time alone together" when LW has never TOLD Mary she'd prefer to spend time alone with her. If LW had ever ONCE said "let's let this just be us this time" and Mary had gone ahead and ignored those wishes I could see your point.

I agree with you about the misleading header though. Sheesh!

I admit I'm assuming the LW has said something about the scads of people being suddenly invited... the tone of the letter makes it seem clear to me that there have been many arguments on this subject with Mary refusing to budge. She describes Mary having a snit when her ways are questioned. If your assumption that she has said nothing is the correct one, well, that's different.

No one who gives a shit about someone ruins their birthday. We're not talking "oops I'm 15 minutes late" here. This is not normal flakiness.

And letting someone stay at your place is not a sign of anything in an extrovert. Mary gets a person to be around all day so she doesn't have to listen to her own thoughts. It's a good deal for her. Plus she gets to put someone in her debt and be worshiped.

was when LW didn't hear back from Mary on the number of people coming on the hike/dinner and decided to cancel the whole thing without informing Mary.

And, I dunno, I find it really, really difficult to believe that someone that late for a birthday dinner wouldn't acknowledge/apologize for her tardiness (even insincerely) unless she assumed it was a large gathering that would be going on all night. Or that LW didn't say, "Where have you been? We've been waiting an hour and a half!" The whole thing seems fishy to me.

Then again, I think LW is a whiny, passive-aggressive little smugster whom I dislike more and more with every comment I post, so I could just be knee-jerking here.