Your worst best friend

Smiling Ted

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Have you ever had someone who was your "friend," yet always found ways to make you feel small, or that you had to earn their approval?

That's one of the central relationships in my WIP. I have some experience with how it works, but I would love some more material so that I could really make it ring true. Actual experiences and anecdotes, that is.

(And if there's something you'd like to share, but not in a public forum, feel free to message me privately.)

Thanks in advance!
 
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Clair Dickson

A dark core to every cloud
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I'd say the root is insecurity... on both sides. The person who is made to feel small justifies it to themselves or rationalizes the behavior.

(I can almost understand why people do it, at least on the psychological level, but I don't put up with much in relationships.)

Perhaps if you go into the MC's head you can write things about how the excuse or rationalize the behavior. (Yeah, I guess Patty's right-- this shirt does make me look fat. I knew I shouldn't have bought it. She's always looking out for me. I can't believe I thought I looked go in this...)
 

HelloKiddo

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All the stories I have like that are from females under 21, so I don't know if age will come into this (because teenaged girls are kinda like that anyway), but here goes:

I had this old friend who was much prettier and more popular than me and better liked by boys. We used to always go up and talk to guys together and halfway through the conversation she would ask the guy(s), "who do you like better, me or her (meaning me)?" Of course, they always said they liked her better and I was left standing there awkwardly like a third wheel.

I had another friend who great at trivia and math and pop culture and--well everything like that. She was pretty bright. And she constantly insisted on challenging me to quizzes and trivia games and the like, which she always won. But what would make it particularly annoying was that she liked to then compare out tests and point out all the errors she thought I had made that had made me lose. Like, "No, see, here, on number four, you should have divided by 10, not multiplied."

There was one odd twist to that story though, because she was always wrong about my errors. Nine times out of ten I had just made a clumsy addition or subtraction mistake that led to the wrong answer.

And the third friend I had like that was a girl who was offended by everything I said (when she was feeling belligerent). At the time I would feel bad and be ashamed, but looking back on it she just liked picking fights with me because she knew I would apologize and figure I'd been in the wrong.

So an example:

She was 20 and was play-fighting with this 16/17 year old boy, and they'd been teasing each other for a while. It was pretty funny, so I laughed and said something like, "quit flirting with him and let him go already, you're embarrassing him!"

Well, she pulled me aside and BLEW UP at me. And I mean she let me have it. One of the worst brow beatings I ever got in my life. She said, "How dare you humiliate me like that, implying that I would flirt with a seventeen-year-old! He's a child, I'm a grown woman! I'm not a goddamn pedophile, blah blah blah..." And this went on for like half an hour, me apologizing and feeling guilty, her continuing to accuse me of calling her a pedophile in front of everybody.

Then a third friend came over and said, "are you through flirting with the kid, can we go now?" She said OK, and I grabbed her back and said WTF? She gets no scolding? And my friend said, "you know me better than she does, you should know what upsets me."

I'm a little older and wiser now, would not be friends with a girl like that today! Hope this is what you were looking for :)
 

Hummingbird

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I was "friends" with someone because they liked to hang out. It took me forever to realize that the person was just using me to run errands. X.x I was just doing favors to be nice because I thought that the person needed help. That person was probably sitting back and laughing.
Once someone harshly pointed out what the "friend" was doing to me I confronted the friend about it. "Oh no, that is not true. You are my best friend... Can you (insert job here) for me?"

Yeah. X_x

After asking the person if they would do some favors for me and my refusing to do a couple of favors for them- suddenly the "friendship" fizzled out and that person was off to find another "errand-boy".