The Bride

Here is a bad time to end a friendship.

I’ve met the man I’m going to marry. We’ve known for a while that we both knew almost right away that we finally found each other. He has not officially asked me to marry him—that’s coming in December—but, because we want our wedding to be in April of next year, that only gives us four months to plan and that’s not enough time. Even though both of us have done this before. This time, it’s real, though.

I was going to order a dress online. I’d found one I was convinced couldn’t be beat, even in the vastness of the interwebs. I briefly considered wearing the one I had, but God was doing a new thing. Plus, the friend I was convinced should be my maid of honor thought it would be fun to go dress shopping. She’d already gotten me to come around on the idea of having those bride parties—a bridal shower and, what is it called, a bachelorette party but we’d call it something else because I’m not 25 anymore like I was the first time I did this. So why not go out and try on dresses? After all, I’d done that last time, too, and I think I went with multiple bridesmaids (I had eight). 

But that’s because I wanted things to work out like they’re supposed to. You know: meet my person young (check), have my community surround us as he and I discover we’re each other’s One (check), be celebrated by a flock of good friends (check) all organized by my best friend who stands right behind me (check) as I exchange vows in the church I met and dated my person in (check)….on and off for five years because we kept fighting and breaking up (…check) and even when we did finally get married (check, at least legally), we had to leave this precious family (so called, check) of a church four months after our wedding (…check?) because the pastor basically invited me to have an affair with him and my (?) person didn’t take my side but rather initiated (on Valentine’s Day) our first of what would be three separations in total before the thing that never really started officially ended.

This time, I’m not feeling a huge need for the parties, or a huge production of a bridal party. Maybe because the love is real. But my maid of honor says we should go dress shopping; even if we don’t find anything, it will be fun. And she was right. So maybe she’ll be right about the parties, too.

The spa time afterward isn’t fun. She is distant. Things are tense. I contort and rend and stretch myself emotionally, as per usual since the dawn of this friendship, to try to figure out why—you know: be supportive, be a good friend. That’s what I would want. That’s what I have wanted from her. For a while now. And I’ve tried to ask for it. But I probably wasn’t clear enough. It’s probably me, as per usual. This isn’t a good time to try again. She’s clearly going through something and I wouldn’t want to end the friendship by making it about me. So again, I make it about her. Is she sad I’m leaving? No. It’s just hard to wait for your person. I get that. But why did I ask someone who won’t even miss me to be my maid of honor? That sort of happened last time, too, except I wasn’t moving across the country. She was just moving out of the apartment we shared.

Here is a bad time to end a friendship.

My man has just proposed. It was the surprise of a lifetime—it was not December but October, so I had no suspicions—and it was, to quote a very good book, more than I could have asked or imagined. My maid of honor has, since the spa time, continued to be cold, distant, slow to respond, and emotionally unavailable. Has she always been this way? Is this why I’ve been straining for years to be a good enough friend and always feeling like I’m failing? Why I’ve felt compelled to strive to always have all the answers she needed, always do all the emotional support in the friendship? Why I’ve felt like I needed to apologize for my existence and why I’ve lately felt like I needed to apologize for asking anything as a bride of her, my maid of honor? 

All this may be why I lose it on her during our Wednesday talk that week. I’m pissed that I have to use the precious time I have with my fiancé for this, but she is so deeply unavailable all the time and I need resolution. I’ve told her I need it. She says it’s being prioritized. There is no evidence it is. I yell. I speak harshly. This is not the first time. This is not the first time I have felt unsupported, like I’ve giving way more, like I’m begging for crumbs, or like the things I need are being brushed off or just declared to be happening rather than actually happening, either. It is the first time I realize that breadcrumbing can happen in friendships, not just romantic relationships. 

It's not like this is the first time I’ve been severely breadcrumbed by a friend. My almost maid of honor for my first wedding was a finely tuned emotional robot. She was masterful at both stoicism and shaming emotions in others (yes, yes, I know now that was probably because she was really skilled at shaming her own emotions) and making others feel horrible for even daring to think they inconvenience her with any such thing as conflict. To be fair, she and I did attempt to have discussions about our relationship with a neutral third party, except that there wasn’t so much neutrality there; I have yet to meet another person that gets as triggered as I do by the lack of emotion. Is that why I have such mastery over slotting them into key places in my life they can’t possibly fulfill and seeing only after it blows up?

I get so triggered by it that I am willing to do the emotional equivalent of trench digging to maintain friendships. Or at least I was. Until I saw the pattern: I appoint extremely emotionally unavailable people to key roles in my life only so I have to strive the whole friendship long to live up to their sophistication, their superiority, their impossible standards as penance for being rejectable by my own mother—the queen of emotional unavailability.

So I have again elevated to a high spot in life yet another unavailable person whose actions they do not show celebration, let alone acceptance, of who I am. But six months before the wedding is a bad time to end a friendship.

Here is a bad time to end a friendship.

My maid of honor and I finally talk. She’s reminded me that she’s brought up how Not Okay it is to be yelled at. It’s not that I disagree. It’s that there are quite a few things that I’ve been saying are Not Okay for longer than this and maybe they had something to do with this yelling incident that happened even though I said it wouldn’t happen again? So it’s gridlock. Again. She says I can’t yell but what she really wants to do is control the speed, the tone, the cadence, not just the volume, of my speech. I say there are things I need resolved. She says we can talk about those things, but her thing has to be addressed first. I say that neither one of us is more important than the other. She says her thing “is not about” her being more important, it’s about how we have to talk about things. What if I disagree? You don’t disagree, she says. 

This chutes and ladders is crazy making. I end the conversation as frustrated as ever. Which is a bad time to end a friendship. Plus, I’ve never ended a friendship. I’ve been the friendship endee not the ender.

That’s what happened with my previous near-miss maid of honor, though there wasn’t so much an end to the friendship as a conversation at the arboretum near Lake Washington in an early summer afternoon that began with, “You can change your mind about my being your maid of honor if you want.” Yet another person maneuvering behind me to avoid responsibility for their decisions. I had said I wanted her to be my maid of honor whenever my now ex-husband proposed, not thinking it would be more than three years later that he would (probably because our pastor forced him to). I had been serious when I said it, but I’m not sure why in all of creation I would have chosen her. She was my most triggering relationship. It never felt like we were friends for real. It seemed like she thought she was way more sophisticated than I would ever be—and I agreed. I didn’t like the feeling, so I “released” her from her pre-emptively assigned maid-of-honor duties. I don’t remember when, but it was before my wedding because I don’t think she was even there: she got married, moved to England, and we didn’t keep up. I think she has a son. I know her mom died of brain cancer ten years ago. But I only know these things through Facebook. I don’t miss her. But it is sad. It’s sad how often friendships just don’t work out.

Here is a bad time to end a friendship.

My bridal shower that my now-ex maid of honor planned is in six days. Can’t I wait to do this until after the shower? No. This hook of emotionally unavailable people (who I somehow have come to call “sophisticated” people) is going to tear me in half if I don’t deal with this the hard way. The choices now are hard or harder. Five days before this, I had told my now-ex-maid of honor how sad it was making me that she wasn’t there for the little milestones, the small celebrations, the texts about my dress, my fiancé closing on the house we found together, my new niece entering the world – she had even said she was hurt she couldn’t be there when I first met Sam so we could talk about them (“couldn’t” because I hadn’t properly apologize and she was holding out for me to figure that out on my own since I “should know” I needed to). 

She said, “Well, I don’t want to beholden to every ping on my phone.” After she had said she was hurt she wasn’t there for the beginning of my relationship with Sam. I didn’t know she was hurt. I didn’t know she could be hurt. It seemed like she didn’t care about me at all; the only person more mechanistically avoidant of expressing any emotion whatsoever is my mother. 

I explained how, once again, that was a contradiction. How is it that when you say a thing, it’s gospel truth but when I say the same thing, it’s wrong and you reject it. She tried to tell me they weren’t the same thing, like she reliably does when I bring up double standards of how she expects to be treated in friendship.

She said, “Sounds like I’m not meeting your expectations. What can I step back from?”

Oh no you don’t. You will not pin your obvious desire to GTFO on me. “That is the literal opposite of what I said. Remember the milestones thing?”

“Yeah. I was going off other things you said.”

My jaw stings. I can’t do this anymore.

But you also can’t have people blame their abandoning of you on you. You can’t let people make you responsible for their choices.

So I didn’t. We talked for three more hours then agreed to talk five days later.

Which was enough time for me to be sure that I was done. I was done with getting my nose rubbed in my mistakes. Done with being put last while being told I was being prioritized. Done with accommodating and compromising all around this person. Done with the double standards. Done with the shame and low self-esteem and constantly wondering if I would ever measure up to be worthy of real friendship. Done with being sure I knew what I was experiencing in this friendship only to be told I was wrong and go into a spiral of self-doubt and recrimination all over again. Done with every conversation being confusing and containing something super hurtful. Done with having to take all the blame. Done with never being heard. Done with this marria—I mean, friendship.

Oh.

They say you marry the parent you have the most unresolved trouble with. I definitely married my mom. I apparently had best-friended my mom, too. Again.

At least you can clearly signify the end of the self-harm of re-exposure to traumatic substances—or in this case, lack of substance—in a marriage. Of course, I’ve had a dear, long-term friend clearly—and abruptly—signify the end of the friendship, too: sending her new husband up to the room I was staying in in their house with my new plane ticket moved up to that afternoon (my birthday) instead of two days from then…when I was out of state visiting her…after I had just moved across the country due to the beginning of the end of my marriage. Talk about bad timing.

At least Arboretum Maid Of Honor gave me two years before I even got engaged to figure out a new plan. 

100-ish days before the wedding is not ideal.

But it’s not the worst time to end a friendship. The worst time to end a friendship is way after you should have.

Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse cyclist, saxophonist, gym enthusiast, cat lover and writer whose work has appeared in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at meganwildhood.com.