Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are by Carlin Flora

Author:Carlin Flora
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychology
ISBN: 9780385535434
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The next time one of your friends invites you to join a crusade, you should do it (unless it feels cultish—we’ll get to groupthink and other bad influences of friends in the next chapter). After all, you might just owe your good health, robust love life, sunny outlook, smashing career, and even your life itself to her.

Chapter 6

BAD COMPANY: THE DARK SIDE OF FRIENDSHIP

Shane Shaps still remembers the day her friend Claudia pressured her to climb the monkey bars when they were little girls in Louisville, Kentucky. Shane, who was terrified of heights, fell and broke her wrist.That type of bullying pressure from Claudia was not so atypical. Yet Claudia, who had been her companion since they were infants, continued to be an important—yet on balance, negative—part of Shane’s life. “Our parents were close friends,” says Shane, now forty and a social media consultant and mother of two. “It was a codependent relationship. She bossed me around, and I let her do it. I’m not a complete victim.” During college, the two lived together for a couple of summers, and later moved to the same building in Chicago after graduation. During that time, the four-foot-nine-inch Shane was thirty pounds overweight and struggling with low self-esteem and dating anxiety.

Claudia was fit and sporting a new nose, courtesy of a plastic surgeon. Shane would call her at work to talk, and Claudia would always say she was too busy. “Yet she was supposed to be my best friend,” Shane says. Claudia did let Shane cry on her shoulder at times, and in fact Claudia seemed to need Shane close by in order to have the perverse pleasure of rejecting her or controlling her (and others) in tiny ways. When Claudia got engaged, for example, she asked Shane to be a bridesmaid and then sent the bridal party a four-page e-mail detailing the exact type of silver sandals each was to wear and other laughably specific requests.

A few years later, Shane got engaged to an on-again, off-again boyfriend and moved to New York, without a word of congratulations from Claudia. The next dip in the two friends’ decades-long roller-coaster ride was set off by an anniversary card: “I felt Claudia wasn’t supportive of my engagement, but nonetheless, I sent her a card for her first anniversary. She called a few weeks later, furious that I hadn’t sent her one. What was really happening was that she didn’t like that my world no longer revolved around her. When the post office returned the card to me, I resent it and circled the original date stamp. She never called to apologize.”

Continuing the cycle of dependency, Claudia threw Shane a shower in Chicago. The party was so awkward that Shane tried to demote Claudia from bridesmaid to guest. She responded by writing to Shane: “I’ll be there and I’ll be in the pictures. You can look at me for all time.” Claudia’s parents hosted a dinner party for Shane the night before the wedding. But once Claudia’s father learned of the underlying drama, he refused to speak to Shane.

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