JEALOUSY, insecurity and competitiveness can torment playground friends.
But as author Jane Green discovered… at age 55, my female friendships are more toxic than they were as a teenager… and social media fuels the poison.
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When I reached 55, I thought that the jealousy and insecurities of female friendships at the beginning of life – when we are still discovering who we are – would have resolved themselves.
But I’ve lost more close friends in the last few years than at any other time in my life.
And the three I lost recently were all for the same reason: social media.
We often read about how social media is harming the younger generation, but in my experience, it can be toxic for adults too.
As an author, I have around 150,000 followers on social media.
It’s the only way I can get my books out there – and part of having any kind of public profile involves sharing aspects of your life.
Despite spending most of my time at home, my Instagram profile would have you believe that I live a fabulously glamorous life, because of course I only show the interesting parts.
I share these parts of my life—and often my innermost thoughts—to connect with my followers and inspire them to buy my books.
However, I never expected to lose true friends as a result.
The first was a woman I considered one of my best friends for over 15 years, and it was completely devastating.
She went from best friend (best friend forever) to NFF (now ex-friend).
It was in her that I trusted, the calm and wise port in any storm.
But looking back, I can see that our friendship was always troubled.
We met through mutual friends and we had that instant click.
Comparing is despair
The day we met, I went to her house for tea and we didn’t stop talking for hours, marveling at how we had so many similarities.
She was a cook, an aspiring writer and, best of all, she lived around the corner.
I would show up at her kitchen table in my pajamas and she would do the same at mine.
It was like meeting a sister.
But after a few years I started to feel a distance between us, a coldness in her.
I didn’t understand why there were times when I couldn’t get close to her.
She was often warm and loving.
Then she would act disinterested.
I would meet her at a children’s event – our children are the same age – and she would feel cold or spend the whole time avoiding me.
I was watching her from across the room and had no idea what she had done.
I would be hurt, but knowing she didn’t like confrontation, I would wait, showing up at her house after a week or two, praying that whatever she was going through was over.
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Of course, we would always recover.
Other friends told me they observed her being competitive with me, resentful of my success and colorful life.
I hadn’t heard.
I didn’t know that she followed my Instagram like a hawk, that she felt left out when I was at parties or events.
It never occurred to me that she might be jealous.
How can someone who professes to love you resent you?
It didn’t make sense to me.
Even though we weren’t involved in each other’s social lives on a daily basis, she was the woman I considered my rock, the one I turned to when I needed to feel supported.
‘I don’t compare’
I’m married with six children, and while husbands can be wonderful, they rarely see things the same way as a friend.
She has a lot of friends I don’t know and I’ve rarely been invited to hang out with them.
I have many, many character flaws, but jealousy is not one of them.
I feel nothing but joy when I see my friends having fun on Instagram.
I don’t compare myself to other people.
There will always be people who are more successful, more attractive, thinner, richer and with more glamorous lives, just as there will always be less successful people who have smaller lives.
I’ve always believed that comparing is despair.
I’m okay with not being invited to places because you can’t invite all the people all the time.
We would talk about it and she would agree.
I assumed she was serious.
The University at Buffalo in New York recently did a study on the longevity of relationships.
Although they were studying marriages, I believe their findings apply equally to friendships.
They discovered that relationship success is based on holding your partner in higher regard than yourself.
I find this moving and true for all my closest friends.
When they feel insecure or ill-equipped, I see them as strong and capable of much more than they believe.
She started crying and confessed that she saw my Instagram feed and got jealous
A-N-A
Last summer, after another meltdown in which my friend seemed to be angry with me, I finally reported her.
I recently posted some photos of myself on Instagram with a group of friends, and consequently, I felt like she was with me.
After a few weeks, she invited me for tea.
I asked her what was going on and told her that if I had done anything to upset her, I would love to know and apologize.
She started crying and confessed that she saw my Instagram feed and got jealous.
We hugged and I tried to reassure her about our friendship, but I left the house feeling uncomfortable.
I don’t think she meant she was jealous, I think she meant she felt left out.
But the mere fact that she used the word “jealousy” made me think of all the years she was hot and cold.
red flags
I immediately understood that this friendship was doomed, as jealousy is an obstacle.
When you are simply living your life and you have a friend who is jealous, there is no solution for it.
I knew that every time she looked at my social media she wouldn’t be happy for me.
I thought I knew what warning signs to look for in friendships, but I couldn’t recognize this one.
I decided to withdraw silently. We live in a small town.
Our paths will certainly cross.
She recently blocked me on social media, which I think we can all agree is a “fuck you” if there ever was one. I was left with tremendous pain over the loss of a friendship that, although flawed, was part of my life for 15 years.
Since then, I’ve lost two more friends, both citing Instagram as the reason.
Firstly, because I posted an article I wrote about friendship and the newspaper in question chose not to use the photograph of me and her together.
And another who wrote to me saying: “I still think we can’t understand each other on Instagram.”
This was after a summer where all I posted was me sitting in my garden.
Although I thought these friendships were real, I discovered that jealousy doesn’t lessen with age.
In fact, social media certainly fuels insecurity and jealousy.
We are bombarded daily with images of people we know living “perfect lives”.
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Anything can trigger a jealous woman.
A child getting into a good university? Jealousy.
Losing weight? Jealousy.
A big night you weren’t invited to? Jealousy.
A new relationship that makes you happy? Jealousy.
Even when we know that our friends aren’t perfect, that their kids are struggling in school, that they’re mortgaged out of their lives, many of us still choose to believe the Instagram version of their lives.
So we stop opening up to them, convinced that we are not good enough, that we are somehow “less than.”
We hide our truths and can, if we are not careful, become unspeakably lonely.
Grief is a strange thing.
I know this will get better with time and I am fortunate to be surrounded by a small number of soul sisters, women who know that success, abundance and happiness for others will only lead to good things for you; women who have no greater pleasure than raising their friends as high as they can.
I thought adolescence was the hardest time to make friends.
I thought I had eliminated the ones that were toxic and that at this stage of life it would be easy to recognize friendships that are bad for us – the women who are needy or require a lot of maintenance, the two-faced women, the gossipers.
Maybe my mistake was thinking that all friendships should last a lifetime.
Don’t get me wrong, many of the female friendships I made in my 20s are as strong today as they ever were.
But my more recent friendships have been more fragile – and I blame social media.
No matter how well you think someone knows you, all it takes for a friendship to falter may be a photograph, a vision of a life you think they know is flawed, but the photograph seems to nullify everything they know. You should know it’s true.
Learn from my mistakes.
Keep your heart open and find the people who love you as much as you love them – and stay off their social media accounts.
This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
