I'm overwhelmed by my friend's endless grief and complaining: Feminist Advice Friday
Her partner died, leaving her with two small children. I'm tired of her complaining, and need her to be my friend again.
A reader asks…
My friend lost their SO 6 years ago and is raising small children on their own. I am the ear they complain to about anything and everything domestic care-wise. I understand life's burdens well and am sympathetic.
But anything remotely less-than the amount of sympathy they expect is met with, "You don't understand grief" retort. They're very quick to pull out the trump card of single parenthood and loss to compete with anything I try to share.
It's the constant need for sympathy and victimhood that I struggle with and I feel like this is a friendship that gives me crumbs in return (mostly connected via text).
They're also quick to disbelieve me and interject stating the obvious when I share, leaving me feeling disconnected. I don't feel I can ask for more from someone so burdened, lest I hear the aforementioned retorts. They're my only friend. How do I stop letting this eat me up so much that I need to walk away?
My answer
Outside of heterosexual relationships, which are notoriously exploitative and one-sided, when there is a problem in a relationship, it usually means both parties are wrong—and both are right.
I think that’s the case here.
I want to start by addressing what I think you are doing wrong, because you cannot change her behavior; you can only change your own.
One of the jobs of a good advice columnist is to hear what the writer doesn’t say directly. I can’t judge you as a friend or assess what’s going on outside of this letter, but I do have a suspicion I have to share with you:
Is it possible that you are not treating your friend’s immense grief seriously?
Is it also possible that you maybe don’t understand the challenges of raising small children after the death of a partner? Society tends to discount how immensely challenging motherhood is, and if you’ve never mothered children (particularly if you’ve never done it alone), it’s likely that you vastly underestimate the work and pain involved.
Maybe I’m wrong here. I can’t be sure. But our culture simply does not take grief seriously, and you use a lot of language indicating that you are not taking it seriously either. The near-universal experience of grieving people is that the people in their lives expect them to move on, to get over it, to quickly work through some sort of grief “journey” and then get back to normal. This leaves bereaved people feeling isolated, alone, and often hopeless.
I wonder if this letter could possibly the future of the story here.
Grief awaits us all. Perhaps that’s why so many of us want to hide from it. Losing a spouse when you still have young children is a uniquely awful type of loss that no one can really fathom unless they have faced it. Your friend needs more support than you can give—than anyone can give—because there is no way to emerge from such an experience unscathed.
Some of the other language you use here suggests you are dismissing your friend’s pain—for example, your assertion that she desires to be a “victim” is the exact phrasing people who want to demean grief often use.
Please sit with this. Consider the possibility that it’s not that she is a bottomless pit, but rather, that you neither understand nor take seriously her grief.
But none of this means she’s completely in the right. She doesn’t get to treat you as a human punching bag for her grief without ever acknowledging your needs. You don’t have to earn love by suffering, and the person who suffers the most is not entitled to the most love.
Because our culture devalues friendships, there aren’t a lot of cultural norms around resolving conflict. People will go to therapy and fight for decades to save doomed relationships with worthless abusers. They’ll let their friends go at the first sign of conflict.
You say you love and value your friend, and so I hope you’ll do the friendship the courtesy of talking openly and honestly about this issue. Please be open to hearing her feedback, and working together toward a mutual solution.
This all begins with a conversation.
Some realities I think you need to acknowledge include:
Her grief is boundless, and not comparable to anything you are experiencing. You do not understand it.
You likely have not been adequately sensitive to her grief.
You may perceive natural, normal grief responses as “playing the victim.”
Your friend is doing one of the hardest things people do—raising small children, alone, while grieving a partner.
You need guidance from her about what she needs from you as she settles into this permanent bereaved reality.
But you also need to draw clear boundaries. Remember, boundaries are for you, not for her. They are guidelines for what you need, and how you will respond if you do not get it.
Please be clear with her that you need space to discuss your needs, too, that you value her friendship, but that you need her to act like a friend. Be as specific as you can about what that means for you—about what you’re not getting now, and what you need to get going forward.
Grieving people lose a lot of friends. It is possible that this friendship needs to end—both because it is not serving you and not serving her. If that is the case, I hope you’ll do the friendship the dignity of discussing and formally ending things rather than leaving your friend to endlessly wonder what might have happened.
To submit your own Feminist Advice Friday question, please email zawn.liberatingmotherhood@gmail.com.
You're definitely right on one axis here: People don't understand grief. I was in the unenviable position of losing the love of my life at just 26 years old and she just 21. There are no programs, no supports, and no cultural scripts for that kind of loss. All the support groups I was referred to were for older people, and though no one was unkind, it was clear that we were just on different wavelengths. They'd had decades of healthy time. I'd had 2.5 years of suffering, then death. They had extended families to lean on. We had had no one but each other. People were desperately uncomfortable just hearing the bare details, so for the most part I stopped talking.
I did lose friends.
And yes, it hurt so badly I could not even express it. I still can't. But after a certain point, slamming my head into the wall about it got me nowhere.
People aren't going to understand. They just aren't. No amount of talking about it, boundaries, wheedling, or empathetic imagination on their part will change that fact. You will be alone with the grief. You face DECADES of time alone with that grief. The only way forward is to honor that and realizing that no one will ever truly meet you in that abyss.
This may very well be the wedge between their friendship, and I can hardly fault either of them for that.
Thank you for this compassionate advice. I'm so thankful that you stuck up for The grieving friend. Grief is so often overlooked in our society.
I lost my dad when I was just 12 and my mom was left alone to take care of me. It was a loss unlike any other. I did lose a lot of friends although thankfully some did stay.
But yes it is true that grieving people do tend to get absorbed in their own problems and pain and forget about the needs and feelings of others whose lives seem to be going so smoothly and well compared to theirs.