Yes, this happens. I can't say I've been a firsthand party to a situation exactly as you describe, but I've certainly witnessed it.
In my experience, what underlies it in many cases is that a lot of people place a VERY high priority on not voicing any kind of disagreement. They will go to extreme lengths to avoid having to honestly say "I don't agree with your opinion on X" or "I feel uncomfortable because you told me that you do Y."
If you're the kind of person who likes having things out in the open, the choice to take a dramatic, friendship-ending step without talking can be bewildering or even bizarre.
But I've definitely seen multi-decade friendships wither because one party didn't want a "confrontation," however mild and/or unrealistic that prospect might be.
In my opinionated POV, this is often projection combined with extreme black-and-white thinking. The friendship-ender a) thinks the other friend cares a lot more about whatever the issue is than the friend actually does, and b) can't conceive of how a friendship could continue if the friends don't "match" on every value. And instead of asking, they just walk away.
That said, and not that you asked for this, the first question I'd consider in this situation is whether the friend might be finding it painful to be around someone who has children. If she wants children and hasn't been able to have them, or if she has children and is raising them pretty differently than yours, she might decide it is best to just step away.
That might be the case. The timing is right-ish, ie the last time we hung out, Hawaiian Punch was about three months old.
She presents herself as someone who really doesn't want kids whatsoever, but honestly that doesn't tell you much about what someone finds privately painful.
Actually, that would imply that I should gracefully step out of the picture, rather than sending a friendly email when I'm coming to town. (I'd been planning on at least sending "Hey, I'll be in town if you'd like to get together" emails.)
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... the first question I'd consider in this situation is whether the friend might be finding it painful to be around someone who has children. ...
That was my first thought as well.
Have you ever thought of reaching out to the other friend? I ask, because I sometimes cut people off when I was depressed and then felt like I couldn't repair the breach, so having someone try to reconnect with me later would have been appreciated.
2.last - I'm not sure there's any reason not to send the email when coming into town. She could just as easily ignore that email much as she ignored you're last one. You can still be gracefully out of the picture / non-harassing, but still occasionally (or the next time or two) you will be in her town, attempt to initiate a get together.
This has happened to me too. In high school, my best friend really cooled it off senior year, and to this day I don't know exactly why. I suspect it had something to do with me getting the newspaper editor job over her and also that I went to my first choice college while she had to go to Iowa because her parents got divorced, but she never said anything--just inexplicable coolness. I was so shy and awkward I could never bring myself to ask what happened.
I've been on the other side twice. Once it was a friend who was so generally obnoxious that could never introduce him to any of my other friends. I was the only one in the world who could stand him, and finally I stopped being able to stand him either. The other was a friend who had always claimed to nonpolitical but came out as a joyful neocon after 9/11. He was baffled by my response, even though he'd always known where I stood and how important these things were to me. We're sort of patching it up, but my enthusiasm is weak.
I had a friend who went to Harvard when I went to MIT who stopped answering calls; I sort of assume that was a coolness mismatch, but I don't know.
Sure, but if she'd been a really good friend she would have realized the coolness wouldn't have gone to your head.
8: Well, the waves of coolness radiating from MIT wilt the average Harvard undergrad rapidly. That's just self-preservation on your friend's part.
The married with kids thing is always a potential factor, for sure, as there are some people who will resent it or just not be able to deal with the amount of time you're naturally inclined to spend talking and thinking about it. This doesn't mean there's something wrong with you -- at any rate, I find people with kids who never, ever talk about them to be far more unsettling -- just that interests and emotional needs diverge. (I have to admit that I don't hang out with any of my blissfully domestic former friends either, not so much for the reason of wanting kids as for the reason that our schedules just don't tend to match.)
That can happen in all sorts of ways, really. As life goes on and one gets to know more and more people, the possibility of unwittingly slighting someone (in their view) grows, as maybe they need some emotional investment from you at some point that they think they're entitled to and you aren't in a position to give (or even be aware of the need for). Or sometimes views and inclinations can change in ways that the people involved don't directly perceive, except in that one looks at the either a few months on and decides they've never liked them (either because of a change in the other person or some unacknowledged change in themselves). There's a ton of it that there's basically no control over.
Have you ever thought of reaching out to the other friend?
I would have, but she moved away in the intervening years. If she were local, I think we could regain a friendship, but I don't see much point in resurrecting the friendship to be a long-distance friendship, when it doesn't have any foundation being a long-distance friendship.
Actually, now I'm remembering: I saw her quite a bit when Hawaii was a baby, because my mom was sick and I was going home a lot. Also, she flew out to come to our wedding during that same period.
So it may be the kids thing, but if so, it kicked in when Hawaii was an older baby/toddler.
13 about the friend in the OP, 12 about the six-years-ago friend.
If it is that she wants kids so badly that it's difficult to be around them, there's hope for the friendship yet. IME that pain fades as friends' kids age; the wanting is focused on relatively interchangeable infants, not someone else's particular and individual child. Give it a few years, while you finish having kids, and in the meantime do email when you'll be in her town and can propose an obviously kid-free activity.
15 before seeing 13 & 14, obvs. Never mind.
She is very, very private about relationships. She may have had an expectation about her own life when Hawaii was a baby, that got altered for some reason, and so it became an issue only these past two years.
I sometimes cut people off when I was depressed and then felt like I couldn't repair the breach, so having someone try to reconnect with me later would have been appreciated.
Seconding Bostoniangirl's comment here. If she were struggling with depression, it would be entirely unsurprising to have it manifest in the ways you describe, though of course {A->B} & {B} doesn't imply A. Go on and email her about when you'll be visiting; it's really easy for her to just trash the email, and on the off chance that she might someday want to reconnect, the potential upside vastly outweighs that more likely, but trivial, downside.
I was actually having a conversation with a long-time friend recently, and she suggested that part of the reason I'd been (arguably) neglecting long-lasting friendships, while simultaneously pursuing stuff with near-strangers, was precisely to avoid an imagined feeling of judgement, which I would only imagine coming from someone who actually knew me. There's no particular reason to think that this sort of thing is what's happening, but my point is merely that there are a lot of ways this could have nothing to do with you whatsoever--she could indeed in the abstract continue to value your friendship highly--that would nevertheless lead to the behavior describe.
I'm still not on speaking terms with my friend who went to treatment last year. And now he and his wife, also my close friend, whom I have been in contact with this whole time, are splitsville. So I sent him an email (in reply to his email announcing their split) that set out my position (essentially: I'm not going to apologize for anything, I'm not sure what the best way to repair our friendship is, but I still care about him and miss him.)
This has been such a traumatic experience. I feel like it's been eating away at me, even on those rare occasions where I go a couple of days without consciously thinking about it.
I feel like I've been consciously dropped by mid-level friends on several occasions, without clear explanation, but I'm guessing probably to do with my politics. Which, whatever, it's sad, but if you're talking about someone you were never super-close to, there's only so much energy I'm going to be able to spend on thinking about it.
I dropped a friend just over four years ago: very deliberately just stopped returning her emails and phone calls. We had been close friends but always a bit off balance in our approaches to friendship: I don't think of myself as a classic Guess person in the Ask/Guess distinction, because I can be pretty direct, but she was definitely an Ask person. Ask, and then if the answer is no, push, and then push some more. She put some pressure on me about something (I don't even remember what -- an unreturned phone call, maybe?) at a time when I was extremely busy and stressed, and I told her to back off, and she didn't. And it just broke something, and I couldn't deal.
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Antifa action in Duluth apparently went pretty well. Of course, there's so much interest in organizing the far right within mainstream Republican circles, actually putting on your Red Skull outfit just seems a little superfluous nowadays.
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I have been on both ends, I think. Certainly I've ended a few friendships, and some have come back to life later. Who knows why your friend drifted off (I guess the kid thing is plausible, but you can't really know) but if it's someone you were really close with, I think she does owe you some sort of explanation. If it were just an acquaintance, these things happen--friendship has a courtship process during which people are sometimes weeded out, though this is maybe not much acknowledged?
I have been on both ends, I think. Certainly I've ended a few friendships, and some have come back to life later. Who knows why your friend drifted off (I guess the kid thing is plausible, but you can't really know) but if it's someone you were really close with, I think she does owe you some sort of explanation. If it were just an acquaintance, these things happen--friendship has a courtship process during which people are sometimes weeded out, though this is maybe not much acknowledged?
I'm extremely bad at maintaining friendships at a distance. And I've moved a lot. So the end result is, I have almost no friends left. This worries me a bit, butI'm not sure what to do about it. I don't really have any forced socialization in my life.
Also my partner is the same way, and we both work long hours. So we end up spending our down time mostly together (but without others) which is comfortable but maybe a problem over time.
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Speaking of your elite-type universities (8-10), came a cross a reference to this pretty incredible (to me) item from the fall of 1939:
Princeton's freshmen again have chosen Adolf Hitler as "the greatest living person" in the annual poll of their class conducted by The Daily Princetonian. Ninety-three votes were given to the German Chancellor, as compared with twenty-seven to Albert Einstein in second position and fifteen to Neville Chamberlain in third.So, yeah, there is some discussion of the definition of "great" in the article. A later article from the spring of 1940 has the Princeton graduating class agreeing with the freshmen.
I'm with Mr. S. in 23. I've had a couple of friends evidence some crazy politics. That's okay, getting all evangelical about the fucking birth certificate or F*R*E*E*D*O*M isn't. Email filters take care of those people.
And one couple I knew from college days in the early Sixties gradually distanced themselves. I suspect it's because the wife thought I was a bad influence on her husband. She gelded and then domesticated him very neatly over the years, starting off with trading his MG for a station wagon, and continuing on in that vein.
The moral of the story? Shit happens, no big deal.
Are you sure she's not just depressed? If you're in that state you might not answer any communications from anyone, not with any intention of ending a friendship, but just cause you're not capable of interacting with people.
Are you sure she's not just depressed? If you're in that state you might not answer any communications from anyone, not with any intention of ending a friendship, but just cause you're not capable of interacting with people.
She goes to the movies about once a month with my mom, actually, and she's still doing that. I'm really not disputing that this may all be because she's depressed, though. Emailing one person online can seem totally daunting, whereas going to watch Toy Story 3 (they both like animated movies) is a brief respite.
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If teo ever shows up in this thread, or anyone else knows the answer, what multi-use home gym thing did he buy? He reported that he liked it, so.
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Speaking of which, I just did push-ups for the first time in ages yesterday, and holy mother of God am I sore today. Working completely unused muscles is really nothing like working muscles that you've been exercising.
It's really great. You can do push-ups and sit-ups without it, of course, so it's mostly a pull-up bar, and a very convenient one. I'm really amazed by how quickly I can tell that it's working and that I'm noticeably stronger.
I believe that there's a conspiracy of silence about who had what relationship to Hitler 1932-1941. There's so much dirt on so many people -- the Bushes, the Kennedeys, IBM, some progressives, the oldstyle Republicans. Very few want to go there.
Follow up question: Is it a good idea or bad idea to email a mutual friend and say "Hey, I'm concerned because I've been cut off. Do you know anything about how X is doing?"
It kind of feels like talking behind her back. I mean, I am super curious, so that is a factor.
33-34: Interesting effect in the third picture--is he a left-handed truck-driver in a right-side-drive country?
Is it a good idea or bad idea to email a mutual friend
Go for it. It might satisfy your curiosity, and I think the potential for causing trouble is small.
38, 39: You're being Sherlock Holmes today?
37: Certainly not a bad idea. The friend's not talking to you anyway. If they somehow discover you're asking around, I suppose they might be (pessimistic outcome) irritated or (optimistic outcome) grateful for the concern. Either one might motivate them to get in touch with you. Or maybe they're not talking to your mutual friend, either, in which case at least you know it's not something specific to you. Not much downside.
36: I believe that there's a conspiracy of silence about who had what relationship to Hitler 1932-1941
The lateness of this one was what surprised me--a year after Kristallnacht and a few months after the invasion of Poland. To the broader theme, my father would relate how active pro-Nazi Germany groups were in his part of Wisconsin. He'd bring it up in any discussions of the Japanese internment.
Adolf Hitler as "the greatest living person" in the annual poll
Steve Jobs 80 years from now? Nah, probably completely forgotten rather than all time villain.
I had the same thing happen to me. I had this friend in Texas, we used to email all the time, Skype, the whole bit. Even visited each other a few times. And then, about six months ago, poof! Nothing.
I sometimes wonder what ever happened to her.
