BullDog777

ok, in my sobriety, i think i have become a pretty good friend to other people. however, one of my closest friends and i had a pretty big disagreement and i haven't talked to him since. it's been almost 2 weeks.

why do i care? he helped get me sober. he says i'm his best friend.

background: we were supposed to go motorcross riding at a track about an hour north of where i live. we were supposed to meet up at 1:30 to go turn some laps and it seemed like we were. he called me at 10:30 to re-confirm.
So i packed up my truck and waited and waited and waited.

at 12:30 i call him...no answer....1:00, i call, no answer....1:20 i call, no answer... so i leave him a message saying if he didn't call me back by 1:30, i wasn't going..he calls me back 10 minutes later...right at 1:30 to tell me he was busy relaxing with his girlfriend and kids and just didn't feel like calling me back right then.

i'm pretty furious. he asked if i was still going and i still wanted to go, so i said yeah, but i wanna talk about this because i'm annoyed. he blew me off.
so i get to the track and tried to take him aside and express my annoyance and he blew me off....i told him he better listen because i was not messing around...he blew me off.

i rode for 2 hours, didn't say 2 words to him, packed up my s#it and left.


he texted me 2 days later asking if i was still pissed. i told him "hell yeah" i was. i told him he was really disrespectful to me and wasted my time and that was not something i would accept from anyone. i told him what was worse was i got no apology and for that i said that he could eat s#it as far as our friendship was concerned.

i've never been one to ever let anyone walk all over me. i have high self esteem, and that was unacceptable to me.

so another 4 days go by and now he texted me this morning asking if we could talk because i was his best friend and he wanted to iron this all out.

thing is, i'm still pretty pissed. if i say i'm going to do something, i do it and i'm on time. this guy is late for everything and obviously thinks his time is more valuable than mine. i say F that s#it.

my wife says i'm over-reacting. i say if he was sorry then why did it take him 2 weeks to say it? i'm not sure what to do here.

TheEnd

I think you have a valid point and I can understand your frustration about the situation. The only thing I can suggest is meeting to talk about it, since he seems like he is willing to understand your side of things. I don't know, maybe you have never expressed how you truly feel when he does stuff like this, so he might not have a clue. We think the world knows exactly what we're thinking, but in hindsight I would say that everyone is pretty clueless how we feel unless we express how we feel. And if this has been going on for a while, you're going to have to set a firm boundary and stick to it, if you ever want anything to change.

Fandy

If the friendship is important to you, have your say and let him have his...then let it go.

i agree that what he did was rude and inconsiderate, but maybe his good qualities need to be taken into consideration too.

maybe it took him so long because he was waiting for you to cool off?..or he realized that his behavior was wrong and has a hard time fessing up to it?

BullDog777

both of your opinions mean alot to me, so i'm going to take your advise and let him know i'm willing to talk about it.

thanks to both of you.

erikm02

^ Great idea. Hope you two can work it out, I'd be pissed too! But at least give him the chance to either explain himself or at least finally apologize.

NYCDoglvr

I'd be furious too. One possibility is to explain how you feel and that by being so inconsiderate he's showing he doesn't respect you or your time.

LexieCat

Yeah, it was rude and inconsiderate of him, and maybe that's not something YOU would do to a friend, but he might not have seen it as the big deal you did and not understood how upset you would be.

By the same token, haven't you ever pissed someone off HUGELY and not realized or understood what a big deal it was in their eyes? If not, well, you've been lucky or are an EXTREMELY sensitive human being.

I've also learned to accept that certain friends are gonna drop the ball with certain things. I have a choice--I can decide their behavior is intolerable in a friend and drop the friendship, OR I can realize that this person, despite his/her other great qualities, is likely to be undependable in this one area but decide that the friendship is worth keeping, even with this issue, and accept that about the person.

OR there is a third option, which is to keep the friendship and make myself sick with anger every time they behave in the way that they are prone to do.

Either of the first two options is OK, it's a matter of individual tolerance. The third one is the one that leads to huge resentments. Which only hurt US.

LaFemme

What Lexie said

bellakeller

What LaFemme said.

BackToSquareOne

What bellakeller said.

Opivotal

What BackToSquareOne said!

BullDog777

we texted a little bit yesterday because one of our mutual aquaintences was trying to snake a deal for a bike that my buddy had been working on for the better part of a summer. when i heard about it i texted him to give him the heads up and i know he appreciated that.

-we still need to sit down and really talk about this, but i don't think he ever anticipated how i would have reacted.


i think TheEnd said it best....he just needs to know about certain boundries when it comes to making plans and being respectful of everyone's time.

Larkspur

I think you just need to make better boundaries for yourself.

If he's late for everything, start giving him consequences. "Sorry, I can't go now, it's too late." Or (if meeting for a meal) "I can only stay for 20 minutes now, because I have to go at six." Then do it. Sometimes we get mad at people for 'walking all over us' when the truth is, we let them do it for ages and save up our resentment instead of just being honest with them that we have a problem.

Then again, you could ask yourself whether you have actually been genuinely inconvenienced or if it's just your pride being wounded. Were you really doing anything else much that day that you couldn't fill in the time reading or doing some gardening or working on a bike or whatever? Surely your life's not that empty?