The Miracle of Advertising

A few months back I discovered that the person I called my best friend in the whole world, the person I had been friends with for the majority of my lifetime, the person with whom I shared an honorary PhD in Dirty Dancingology, was insanely jealous of of my boyfriend. To the point where she decided she'd rather not be friends with me at all than live with the fact she'd have to share my time with someone else.

I suppose I should've seen it coming. Even though L and Chris got along really well, she was forever making comments about how much time I would spend with him, how it was insane to date someone who lived 6 hours away (at the time), and how our relationship could only end in heartbreak. Still, the fact that she and Chris were friends seemed very promising to me; she and my previous boyfriend had hated each other with the ferocity of a thousand suns. Seriously, if they spoke two words to each other in the course of an evening I considered it a huge success.

While Chris was still living in New York it was easier to ignore. She did inform me that she was put out when I chose to spend most of last summer in New York, but otherwise she seemed to be able to keep her jealousy in check. It wasn't until I told her that Chris would be moving out to Boston that everything broke down. "He's moving out here? So soon? Don't you think it's too soon? It's too soon! You're going to regret it. Wait, you're going to live with him? This is ridiculous." And so on, and so on. You get the point.

And while I understood her need to speak her mind (often, and to countless other people, even), it became a bit tiresome week after week. One night I was out with a mutual friend of ours and she happened to mention that L had been talking about me- had, in fact, been talking about me to everyone we knew. Maybe she was trying to garner support of her "Chris stays in NY" campaign, maybe she didn't think it would get back to me, maybe she just needed to vent. I didn't care. I was angry. Then our mutual friend also informed me that L had admitted to having a crush on one of our other friends- a girl- and it was then it dawned on me. L was so crazy jealous because she wanted to be with me.

Ohhhhhh.

I resisted that idea for a while, assuring myself that she would've said something before, that there was no way I wouldn't have noticed. I told myself that I couldn't know that was true. I ignored the fact that people had been teasing me for years that L had a crush on me. She wasn't gay! I would've known! She dates men! But in the end, I knew my hunch was right. It didn't surprise me or freak me out, nor would I have cared if she had said she was or was not gay. But she definitely didn't trust me as much as I thought she did, and that hurt.

To make a long story short, I never ended up confronting her, she freaked out when Chris moved here (for various reasons), Chris and I moved out, L decided to not ever speak to me again. End of story, right?

No. Me, being the sap that I am, decided it wasn't good enough to leave things at that. I thought, for once in my life I should just suck it up and be the bigger person. Pride and holding grudges have always been my weakness and I knew that I could play this not speaking to each other game until the end of days. But it just didn't feel right, to end a 10 year friendship with an email confrontation. So I wrote her back and told her all the things I had been thinking for months and months. I spent time pondering how I wanted to word things. I worked at it. I told her if she ever wanted to talk, like really talk, I would make time.

The response:
"I think of you in a far off city or a boat or something without phones or email access."
-L

Wha huh? I live approximately .5 miles from you. Apparently my grand gesture, my Buddhist philosophy of being the "bigger person", did not play out exactly as I had thought it would. Oh well. C'est la vie.

And the reason I decided to finally write this all out? No, it wasn't some overwhelming desire to tell the world about a failed friendship. It was this ad on a website that suddenly reminded me of her:


Props to Google for its simplicity. And who knows? Maybe if L had seen this ad a year ago things would have turned out a bit differently.