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After reading an article online about How it Feels to be Dumped by a Friend, I couldn't help but think of all the close friendships I have had over the years and wonder why I don't hear from these friends anymore, what went wrong with our friendships and why did it end the way it did?
While there have been many open discussions when romantic relationship ends, being dumped by friends are not often openly talked about, with friends. It is almost a social taboo even though the pain one feels when a friendship ends can be the same as being dumped by a lover.
I remember my first ever experience of being dumped, a primary school friend whose name and face I can no longer recall came up to me and declared she doesn't want to be my friend anymore. I remember thinking along the line of
do you really had to tell me that?, I was more puzzled than hurt and was too young to dwell on it, but the memory stayed.
The first time I was truly hurt by being dumped came in my first year of high school, my best friend and I fought over a pen we found in an empty classroom, I can't remember who kept the prized find but my friend ignored me when we saw each other in class the next day and at the end of that day, she quietly told me that she vowed to never to speak to me again.
After that experience I didn't keep a best friend throughout my high school years.
One would think these experiences leave you when you grew out of your teenage years but no, I've been dumped during uni by friends who preferred their new boyfriends to me. Nothing was said, they simply just disappeared from my life and social circle, curling up in the blissful matrimony of a new relationship. Curiously, these fade-away friendship did not affect me as much as when someone declaring their contempt to my face.
I've also been dumped for giving good intended advice on a friend's relationship, as I simply cannot standby and watch my friend wasting her time and life away with someone she does not, and will not, love. In the end, she shut me out. As foreseen, the relationship did not last; I wonder if my lack of restrain was to blame, or my friend simply did not want to hear the truth. Whatever it was, I have lost a wonderful friendship.
More recently I have been dumped for, what I understood to be, suggesting a new date for a lunch appointment because I was busy on the requested date (removed as a Friend on Facebook), changing a lunch appointment (not picking up my calls or replying to my emails) and talking too much about offering to train a misbehaving pet (cold shoulder treatment the last time we met and never heard from again).
These behaviour came across as petty as well as immature, it doesn't cease to amaze me how fully grown adults can behave like school kids.
When friendship ends, I resent the fact that I couldn't talk about these hurt with mutual friends, these attempts were often met with awkward silence and blank stare. I get the fact that people tend to shy away from conflicts, yet it is seen as socially acceptable talk about a trashy ex lover rather than an ex friend.
At the end of the day I just have to accept life is a journey of delicate balance, especially dealing with my fellow human beings, a little bit of everything is good, too much of a good thing is bad when it is gone.
