Toxic Tango

Dealing with Toxic Friendships

Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash

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Friendships are sometimes hard to form, but they’re profoundly difficult—sometimes—to end. Unfortunately—and yet also very much fortunately—my fiancée, Britney, is ending one of her longest friendships.

Her friend, who I’ll call Samantha—not her real name—has been alongside my fiancée since grade school. They grew up together, in the same small Southern California town, chasing boys, surviving high school, drinking and partying too much, and getting into trouble.

At a certain point their paths diverged: Britney got pregnant very young and had her son at age 19; Samantha kept chasing boys and partying, moving to San Diego.

Over the years the two women stayed in touch, mostly via phone but also seeing each other in their small town, when Samantha visited, or else in San Diego. When they saw each other it was all about drinking. Britney started to notice that Samantha never seemed happy, always seemed perennially unfulfilled in her life, no matter how much she gained.

Samantha met a man, fell in love and got married. She had it all, externally: The career, the master’s degree, the husband, the money, the house, and, recently, the adorable baby.

And yet all along Britney felt like every time they interacted Samantha was negative, about her own life, but also, pointedly, about Britney’s, too. Britney noticed, too, how one-sided the friendship felt, how every time they talked—or nearly every time—Samantha wanted to talk mostly about herself, but seemed bored, distracted and disinterested when it came to Britney’s time to talk.

Samantha, when Britney would subtly somewhat suggest these things, would claim that she loved Britney, was in fact “obsessed” with Britney, and was protective of her, almost covetous. And yet simultaneously she treated Britney as if she were a child, patting her continually on the head when Britney said she achieved something.

Several times over the past decade Britney even “tried to cut her loose” by simply severing contact with no language attached to it…but, like the Godfather Samantha kept luring her, pulling her back in. It was, even to Britney, mystifying. Samantha seemed to somehow wield some sort of bizarre, magical power over her.

Enter me, August 24^th, 2022.

From the start I did not like the sound of Samantha. Britney continually tried to sell her “best friend’s” worth as being her physical beauty, her career, the amount of money she made, her husband’s bank account, and their high-end lifestyle in San Diego.

I was not impressed.

For one thing, I come from money so money doesn’t impress me. If anything money annoys and grosses me out. But more telling to me was the fact that Britney didn’t ever have anything genuinely good to say about her supposed best friend. It was always a wash of superficial inanity. We discussed this friendship often. When I asked candidly what Britney “got” from the friendship she said…nothing. And actually, she realized as we discussed it in more depth, it’s in the negative numbers, because Samantha always seemed negative, and, worse, to be actively trying to pull Britney down.

When Britney and I first met a year ago she was drinking and trying desperately to stop. She’d struggled all her life with her alcohol consumption. I of course related to this, being now 13 years sober in AA. Every day, back then, last summer, she lamented how her life would be so much healthier, so much more joyful and satisfying, if she could only stop drinking. She’d stopped exercising; she wasn’t getting anything done; she felt sad and frustrated.

When she told Samantha about this, Samantha was, strangely, upset about it. She liked the old Britney, the heavy drinker and boy-chaser. Who was this new nascent Britney? Britney started to realize—and I helped pull the veil from her eyes—that Samantha was a classic manipulator; an emotional user and abuser. She grasped, finally, that Samantha was profoundly unhappy in her own life; that she saw Britney essentially as an insecure loser who’d never leave their small town; and that Samantha felt deeply threatened by the notion of Britney getting healthier.

Britney changing her life in positive ways scared the living shit out of Samantha, because Samantha was deeply broken. Deeply broken, negative people are always going to take you down.

*

When I got sober, in 2010, one of the hardest things I had to do was cut ties with probably half a dozen good, old friends. They were drunks; that’s the simplest way to put it. They didn’t understand my being sober, my wanting to change. They relied—for gratitude, entertainment, gossip and mockery—on my pants-pissing blackout drunken behavior. They only knew that Michael. When I hit a spiritual bottom and cleaned up, some of these friends just didn’t understand. And so, hard as it was, I had to cut them loose.

It was the best thing I ever did in my life.

Several friends I sent long letters to, both physical and email. A few hated me. One is still my close friend now; we bonded and became even closer.

Samantha is an alcoholic; that is clear. (Also a coke-head.) Alcoholics and addicts will always take you down. It’s just the nature of the beast. I’ve been on the other side of this experience, of course: Several friends in the past ceased contact when they grasped that I was a selfish, angry, negative drunk who thought only of himself, and yet simultaneously thought he was trash.

Recently Britney said, about herself, “I’m a joke.” This wasn’t her first time saying this. But this time we dug deeper together and she told me it was largely Samantha. It was Samantha, she said, who’d always talked to her and treated her as if she were a joke. The teenage mom, small-town girl who was never going to change.

At last, after the past year of hearing all about this monstrous non-friend friend, I met Samantha. We did a group family gathering: Me, Britney, my sister and brother-in-law and their kids, my mom, Britney’s mom, and Samantha, with her cute-as-a-button eight-month-old baby.

Samantha was worse than I expected, and I’d expected very little. First off, I didn’t find her physically attractive at all; I found her to look like a typical San Diego wannabe blond beach bunny, a dime a dozen, basic as they come. Her presence, her energy, was, as my mother commented when alone together in the car after the breakfast, aggressive, cold, hard and hostile. Yep. She nailed it. That was exactly right.

At one point Samantha smiled, winked at Britney and said, “Britney’s always been the brat, I’m the bitch.”

She smiled when she said it, but, as I believe Maya Angelou once said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Samantha was showing us who she was: A Bitch. A sad, angry, bitter, negative, mean, broken, manipulative bitch. And she was proud of it.

During the breakfast she explained how the small town she and my fiancée came from was trash which signaled that Britney, and her mother who’s lived in said town all her life, were also trash. Then Samantha proceeded to say how she was going to go out soon with Britney and get wasted, be “on the prowl” for drinking buddies if Britney didn’t want to stay out late. This is a woman with an eight-month-old baby, people.

Previously, Samantha had said several negative things about me, even though we’ve never met and she knows close to nothing about me. For example, on our wedding registry I wrote a brief story (a paragraph or two long) about how the two of us first met, and how incredible it was. I hadn’t known Britney planned to share it with anyone. But she did. Several of her friends, and all of her work co-employees loved the story. But Samantha said only, “It’s Michael.”

Recently, Britney went dress-shopping near LA with her mother and Samantha. While there, Samantha pushed them to drink more, which they did. She then informed Britney that she felt I wasn’t “good enough for her,” that “nobody is good enough for her,” that her own husband wasn’t good enough for her, and then added that “Michael isn’t good-looking enough for you.” After this she suggested that they stay the night where they were and go out and party, adding that she could get them an eight ball of blow.

Again, this is my fiancée’s supposed best friend, and besides that a woman in her late thirties with an eight-month-old baby.

Britney felt uncomfortable about all of this. Samantha is supposed to be at both our tiny, private wedding ceremony as well as our large reception. Admitting that I did not like Samantha and didn’t think she was a real friend and probably never had been, and explaining that I thought she was a controlling manipulator (and possibly a narcissist), I asked Britney yet again what she felt she actually “got” from the friendship. Friendships are like good conversations: A two-way street; a listening and a talking; a back and forth; a genuine caring, compassion, forgiveness and love.

Britney said Samantha had always said she loved Britney because Britney didn’t judge her. But all the while Samantha was judging Britney. It was a one-sided, uneven, toxic dynamic, and it wasn’t adding anything of value to Britney’s life. More than that: It was actually taking away from Britney’s life.

Britney admitted that everything I’d said was true, that she couldn’t honestly say why she was friends with Samantha. She said she didn’t want to hurt her old best friend. She explained how much family trauma Samantha had endured since childhood. She talked about how Samantha had to do everything on her own starting around age 16. She discussed Samantha’s broken, dysfunctional family. (Another thing Samantha had judged me on: Having a complex, damaged relationship with my sister…yet Samantha’s brother is a meth addict and she is estranged from her parents.)

So in the end Britney understood what had to be done. Toxic people have no place in your world. Life is too short. I applaud the people who cut me out of their lives when I was drinking. I was a disaster. Good for them. Thankfully, Britney has decided to uninvite Samantha to the wedding and to finally, after all these decades, set a firm, hard, unmovable boundary. I am beyond proud of her. Did I put some pressure on her? No question. But this was all her choice. She told me even a year ago that Samantha was negative and unhelpful and that she’d tried to end her friendship with her several times and always got sucked back in.

The time has come. We’re getting married. We’re in love. We’re 40 and almost 38. We’re grownups. We’re moving to Chicago next summer; we have many travel plans approaching. Life is too juicy and brief and beautiful to waste it on bitches. Manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, broken people will always seek to drag you down into the netherworld.

It’s astounding to me—always has been—how often people still think that having all the fancy external stuff will give you happiness or will save you from reality or that that crap will somehow magically make you a good or worthy person.

It doesn’t work like that. I learned that in 12-step recovery. “It’s an inside job,” as they say in recovery. The outside stuff matters not one little bit. Who you are on the inside; your character: That is what ultimately matters.

Maybe their paths will meet again one day. Maybe Samantha will see this as a wakeup call. Maybe she’ll look deep within herself and hit a bottom and find change. It’s rare but it happens. It happened to me. But I doubt it. Probably, like most toxic, manipulative people, she’ll try to turn it around, make it me and Britney who are the aggressors, try to get her fingers around Britney’s metaphorical throat and make her feel, yet again, like a joke, like trash, like she’s worthless.

But Britney is worth more than all the Samanthas on earth. Britney has character. Britney is loving, compassionate, soft, kind and good. She’s my best friend, my lover, my woman, and soon to be my wife. I couldn’t be more proud of her, couldn’t feel any more honored to call myself her man.

We change. Not everyone follows us. Sometimes it’s time to move on.