Friends With Zero Benefits
1-800-Bridesmaid
📞 Hello? Hi. It’s me, Jen Glantz. Welcome to the Bridesmaid for Hire Hotline. A place where real stories are shared and your best advice is given.
This week: We have our first confession from a woman named Carol who needs the hotline’s help. Read her situation below and share your advice👇
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😔Friends With Zero Benefits
Dear Bridesmaid for Hire Hotline,
Carol here. I am writing to you not as a bride or a bridesmaid. I am not even a maid of honor. I am simply just a person who is going through a bit of a friendship frenzy and figured I’d bring it to the table and share it with you here.
Here’s a bit of backstory:
I’m 33. I live in Houston. I am single, but I am okay with that. I have a great career, and I love love, but I’m not in a rush to settle down, especially with the wrong guy. I will admit that I am lonely, but it’s not because of my relationship status. It’s because I feel like I don’t have any real, worthwhile, deep friendships anymore.
Most of my friends are married. A lot of them got married in their early or mid-twenties. I was a bridesmaid, a maid of honor, a wedding guest (on repeat) for all of them, all of the time. It was fine, but that’s also when there was a major shift in our friendship.
Is that what weddings do to friendships? Destroy them? I’m kidding, I guess.
I feel like in my twenties, I had five really good friends. When each one got engaged, I was so happy for them. I celebrated them. I did whatever they wanted and needed.
But after the wedding, it was like a send-off for our friendship. Nothing was ever the same.
The frequency of our hangouts went south; we barely texted anymore about trash TV or random topics that used to be entertaining, and stuff like that.
I tried. I literally kept trying. But every single one of these friendships sort of crashed.
Until…
Here’s the catch! The friendships all went from alive and well to silent and short. But when things in their lives started to change, they always came crawling back.
For example, one friend, out of the blue, started to show interest in me again. She asked to make plans, would text me randomly throughout the day, and took an interest in my life.
It was weird, but I thought: okay, cool. Maybe she’s starting to realize that she’s been a jerk of a friend since getting married.
We went out for happy hour, and she legit spent the first 20 minutes telling me how much she missed me and how life just got so busy after the wedding and blah blah.
I forgave her because friendship is complicated, and people do deserve forgiveness. But then she gets two margaritas deep and opens up to me about how Tony (her husband of three years) is turning out to not be the love of her life. She’s bored by him and their life together. Another margarita in, she asks if she thinks flirting with a coworker over Slack is cheating. A final margarita in, she tells me how jealous she is that I’m single and not tied down to one person and that my life must be so fun and carefree.
In between each margarita, I want you to know she didn’t ask me anything about my own life. She didn’t bother to see how my job was or what it was like to finish my 10th full marathon in two years (I know she knew about this because she liked my IG post about it). She didn’t ask me about how I was dating someone for a year at that time. She just assumed my life was all the things hers wasn’t.
Anyway, after getting together, she kept trying to be my best friend again. She kept wanting to get together, and I kept saying yes. Even though it seemed like she was going through a lot, it was nice to have a friend around to do things with.
But about two months later, she changed. She mentioned to me during one of our hangouts that she was all about Tony again. She was done flirting with the guy at work and happy with her husband. It was right after that hangout that she stopped being my friend again.
Okay, that’s one example. But I have more.
So many of my friends only come back around when their lives are falling apart. When things are good, they stay away.
But what about me? What about what I want and need from them? What about just being my friend in the good times too?
I could use advice. Do I just end these friendships or do I continue to try? Do I bring this up to the friends or do I just let it go?
Help!
Carol, Houston.
Leave Carol advice, guidance, and what you think she should do. I’ll compile all of your words and share them in next week’s newsletter as as response to Carol.
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So here's just a little more tough love for you. Understand that all of us live our lives in seasons. Right now their season is to be wives and when you are married, your life becomes about your family. It's not necessarily fair but it's real. Now on the other side of that coin, understand that people will only treat you the way you allow. If you allow yourself to be someone who is always available, then so be it. If you also allow yourself to be a landfill, then so be it.
You have to take some accountability for that. Be intentional about the conversations and people that you entertain. It's so, so necessary for your own peace and well-being. A true friend will never treat you that way and this doesn't mean that they don't care about you. It could simply be that that friendship has expired.
Embrace the fact that not everyone is meant to be in your life forever. Go make some new friends and forge ahead. If you're truly bothered by the way they are treating you, then speak up and express how you feel.
I know how you feel Carol. I had a friend that was all about the guy she was with and only contacted me when things went bad. That’s no friend. A friend would not want to only hang or talk when things, guy or otherwise, got bad. If she can’t be a friend through it all she’s not a friend at all.