Staying Too Long With A "Friend"---A Frog In Water

I was talking with a female client of mine recently, and she was recounting how she had "stayed too long" with her previous husbands. When I asked her to explain she said, "I knew a long while before I divorced them that I was not in love and that I really couldn't stand them, but I stayed anyway. I don't know why." It reminded me of the true scientific discovery that if you put a frog in boiling water it will jump out immediately, but if you put it in cold water and and turn up the heat slowly, it will not react to the incrementally increasing temperature and boil itself to death. People, like frogs, it seems, also do not react to emotional pain as forcefully if it is incremental. Have you ever had a friend who did negative things to you like criticize you constantly, put you down in front of others, or regularly say negative things about you to your other friends? It is interesting to see how many people have these "frienemies" in their lives and somehow rationalize keeping them as a friend. I am leaving the issue of spouses out of this discussion because there are particular complexities to extracting oneself from a marriage as I have pointed out in previous blog topics. The topic of "frienemies" though is interesting because very few people actually rid themselves of these people around them who are causing consistent emotional pain. Their cruelty is often rationalized away with comments like, "Oh that's just how he/she is," or "He/she doesn't mean anything by it." But the truth of the matter is that what they do to us hurts more than we often admit to ourselves, so why do we put up with this for so long?

One reason, like the frog, is that the relationship did not start out that way and it may have gotten worse slowly over time. Another reason is that they are not friends with which we spend that much time so we let the behavior go...every single time. But what about a "good" friend--one that we care about and whose opinion really does matter to us? Why do we keep them in our lives when they keep doing such mean things to us? I just want to suggest one reason we stay that most do not think about. It is about Loyalty---and in this case a misplaced Loyalty. It is not a loyalty to the friend because a part of us knows they are not a real, supportive friend, rather it is a loyalty to a relationship line. We stay friends too long with unsupportive people because we have a history together and it is a loyalty to this history of friendship and the past memories that anesthetizes us to the present day hurtfulness. So we take it and take it and take it all in the name of "friendship". The question is why should we take it, and why is it so hard for most people to extract themselves from such unsupportive friendships. What to do with the frienemies among us.