Dear Fuck Up: Do I Have to Be Friends With This Person?

She seems to believe we already are

Dear Fuck Up,

A friend I briefly knew in college (approx. 10 years ago) keeps reaching out over text and social media, eager to catch up and discuss our personal lives, but I am not interested.

Am I being unkind? Or is it better to not reciprocate when I know I’m uninterested in a close friendship?

For background: We were very casual friends in college. We might cross paths in the library or at cafes and have nice conversations. I didn’t consider our conversations particularly intimate or deep, but I enjoyed seeing her. We never made plans to hang out one-on-one nor did we regularly text each other. 

For a period of a couple years after I graduated, I blogged about my life, sharing personal experiences and photographs. The blog wasn’t popular in any big way, but I probably had a few hundred regular readers, and two dozen people who’d reply and engage on a frequent basis. She was one of them. She’d email me paragraphs about her life, assuming a tone of intense familiarity. I appreciated her eagerness to respond to my blog, but I’d typically reply with a few nice, warm, but ultimately pro forma sentences or just not reply at all. To be honest, I felt uncomfortable about the emotional asymmetry that writing and sharing my life online sometimes brought, especially in interactions like that.

Now, I haven’t written that blog in many years and rarely post updates about my personal life online. But whenever I do, she replies with something to the effect of, “We really need to catch up. It’s been so long! When are you free for a call?” She’ll also usually include a paragraph about her life, especially where she’s at emotionally. I usually try to respond nicely, but deflect, like “Glad to hear you have a new job, even if it’s stressful. Hope you’re doing well!” I feel awkward but the truth of the matter is that we’ve never had a relationship where we’ve ever called each other or shared life updates outside of the email replies she sent to my blog. 

Part of me feels like a bitch because the easiest thing should be to give an hour of my time and just call her. At worst, she’s a little lonely. And maybe I would enjoy it! But another part of me resents that she is assuming we’re closer than we are. And I fear leading her on by agreeing to engage on a closer level of friendship than I feel interested in at the moment. But if I say that outright to her, I fear becoming one of those awful Therapy Talk memes. I have a suspicion that it is kinder to just be a little unavailable and disinterested, especially when it comes to friendships (as opposed to romance). 

What is the right way to approach this? Am I being a bitch? And if I am, is it OK to be one?

Love,

Unavailable 

Dear Unavailable,

We get a lot of mixed messages about how we are obliged to behave toward the people in our lives, however close. On the one hand there is the alarmingly popular sentiment that we don’t owe each other anything. While at one point this kind of thinking may have been a hyperbolic corrective to the people-pleasing expectations placed on women in particular, it has now evolved into a monstrous and paranoid worldview in which everyone, from your coworker to your grandmother, is a potential emotional vampire seeking to exploit your generosity and goodwill. This is a sad way to live. 

The alternative proposition — that we owe each other everything — has the double benefit of being a better moral philosophy and true in some meaningful way. It gets at the fundamentally social nature of being, and captures the sense that I am only a person by virtue of existing among other people. 

But I’m not a moral philosopher, I’m an advice columnist. In terms of concrete advice, pointing out that we live in a state of profound interpersonal obligation when a friend, or an acquaintance, or a stranger is asking for too much isn’t particularly helpful. 

So, what do you owe this particular person? More than nothing — should one of her life updates include the fact that she’s on strike, for example, you would owe her solidarity — but less than what she seems to be requesting. We don’t owe people intimacy. 

Where it’s easy to get confused, these days, is that the ways we live easily cultivate a false sense of intimacy where none yet exists. When you know someone just went through a break up, or see pictures of their family vacation, it’s natural to feel a kind of closeness. That this now happens with people we don’t actually know well at all is a recipe for mistaken and asymmetrical senses of familiarity. This kind of thing has been talked about to death in terms of the “parasocial relationships” some people form with celebrities, but the dynamic can just as easily exist between two non-famous people who may have a thin real-world connection but exist for each other now largely as online fictions.

This fiction of hers — that the two of you are closer friends than any evidence would suggest — does seem like one she’s been happy to maintain. After all, it’s been years of this and you’ve never once had that catch-up phone call. At this point, conceding out of pity could be crueler than staying the course. Perhaps she’s lonely and overly familiar because she’s seeking a connection, but just as she doesn’t truly know what’s going on in your life you don’t know what’s going on in hers. Maybe she just likes feeling as though she’s a person who remains friends with everyone from college. Maybe she also tells her former hairdresser that they are overdue for a call. Maybe her ultimate goal here is to recruit you into a multi-level marketing scheme. 

I think you can safely let go of any lingering guilt that this person is waiting by the phone. Remain polite and never express any interest in buttery soft leggings. 

Love,

A Fuck Up

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