The Maid of Honor in my wedding pictures who is no longer my friend
It’s hard to lose friends especially when you thought the friendship would last forever.
QUESTION
Hi Irene,
I had five close friends at my wedding. My maid of honor was a friend who was the newest of the bunch (a few years) but also one I was closest to at that point, due to proximity and how often we hung out together.
After the wedding, we hung out a few more times. But I felt our friendship dwindle and I asked her about it. We ended up having a disagreement, and she stopped being my friend, despite my good faith efforts to maintain the friendship. I asked my other friends, whom she befriended on Facebook and who only met her once or twice, to defriend her and support me.
While what ended our friendship was petty, it was extremely hurtful to not be able to maintain the friendship and to lose a friend who was my maid of honor. Not to mention that all my wedding photos now remind me of the rift. None of my friends defriended her.
However, months later, only when I deleted two common friends that I had with her, she deleted all the friends she met from me. Is it wrong for me to feel my other four friends, some who I have known for more than 20 years, were disloyal?
Signed, Liz
ANSWER
Hi Liz,
Losing a friend that we think will be a “forever friend” is always painful and upsetting but your experience is not that unusual. To tell you the truth, over the years, I completely lost track of the woman who was my maid of honor. People and relationships change. When I look back at my wedding album, I smile when I see Joyce and remember the nice things about her.
Perhaps what is more upsetting in your case that makes it hard to look at those photographs is that the relationship ended in a disagreement and that your troops didn’t rally behind you.
Just because you had an argument with your maid of honor doesn’t mean that your friends were disloyal for keeping up whatever relationship they had with her. It was probably unfair of you to ask them to defriend your Maid of Honor.
My advice would be to put this incident behind you and to nurture the long-term friendships you have with the other people in your wedding party. Don’t badmouth your Maid of Honor or place your friends in the uncomfortable situation of taking sides. While this incident was upsetting, you have no choice but to put it in perspective and move forward.
Hope this helps.
My best, Irene
Category: HANDLING BREAKUPS, Relationships with ex-friends
Comments (16)
Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed
Sites That Link to this Post
- My maid of honor doesn't seem happy for me - The Friendship Blog : The Friendship Blog | February 24, 2015
- In the Media - How to manage your bridesmaids (Wedding) - The Friendship Blog : The Friendship Blog | January 30, 2015
- Feeling hurt after being left out of the wedding party - The Friendship Blog : The Friendship Blog | November 12, 2014
This happened to me. I was the bridesmaid in her wedding, and I think that’s where the rift began. When she started dating her husband, I saw a lot of red flags and he was very rude to me. Aspects of her personality changed greatly as well and I was seeing her less and less. When she asked me to be a bridesmaid, I was thrilled, thinking the friendship would be rekindled. That didn’t happen. I was also having some financial trouble with graduate school and an eventual job change. I told her I could not afford out-of-state bridal showers and would need help paying for expensive alterations and hair. She promised to help pay for me, she never did. I also was struggling with my relationship with my partner, leading in a brief split and then a reconnecting of the relationship. Her husband would make threatening comments about my partner when I would come over to their home for girl’s night.
I feel if I declined being a bridesmaid we may still be friends, or maybe our split would hurt less. I still worry about her husband, he seems very controlling, but I may be the only one who perceived him negatively. Maybe there was jealousy, as I was having trouble with my partner, but I still remember the shock and worry I felt when she told me they were dating. She even prefaced the disclosure with, “Don’t be mad, Y and I are dating…” how does that not make a friend worry? I told her about my worries when they were engaged and as her husband became meaner towards me after the wedding, well, I told her how that behavior bothered me and that’s where it ended.
I hope she is safe and happy with him. I know I can’t be her friend anymore because I distrust her husband so much. The only way I could see us being friends in the future is if they divorce, and I’d hate to wish that on anyone. It hurts because we were good friends prior to meeting him and if I was married first I would’ve asked her to be my MoH. Ever since she married her husband that dream died.
Apologies for a late reply, I just need to vent this anonymously.
I am sorry it came to this, it’s always hard to deal with the loss of a friendship.
I agree with Amy F, dragging other people into it was wrong and immature on your part, never ever drag other people into something that doesn’t involve them directly.
Tanja and Liz,
Apologises I have got the messages combined. So sorry. Lottie xx
Thank you for your reply. It is nice to get support from people who understand. I will give my kids and husband a hug. Right now as my kids are watching some t.v, which I only let them relax, play video games and watch tv on Fridays, I was just thinking about the past year and the difficulty I had when answering my son’s questions on why he can’t see his friend. That hurt my heart the most. My husband liked her husband but never liked her. It seemed that her husband still wanted to keep in touch with my husband but my husband said that he couldn’t because they are a package and her husband’s saying was: “happy wife, happy life” so he would not dream of asking her if the kids could see each other. The kids were hers.
So, my husband thought what would be the point, she would not even let her husband meet my husband for coffee. But, it has affected me because I always like to keep communication open, if you fall out with a friend because life gets busy and you find yourself talking less to that person, you never know when you could go down the same path again. I have reconnected with several people from my past and that is why I like facebook, people that were once my friends, I can still say hi and let them know I was thinking of them in that moment.
Thank you again.
Hi Liz,
So very sorry you lost your dad the pain must be awful.No doubt your husband son and daughter are a good support.You so obviously love them dearly.
As far as your so called friend is concerned forget her, she is the one who has lost a very good friend in YOU.Feel sorry for her, perhaps she has some kind of medication that she keeps forgetting to take. Every time you think of her which must be pretty regular, for you to be writing about it, change the thought onto good times spent with dad.You have lovely memories of him and nobody on planet Earth can take them away form you.Share those lovely memories with your son every time he mentions his lost friend.I know what it is like to be dumped.It keeps popping into your mind like some kind of torture. Some years ago on a very special birthday a friend fell out with me because I was given a poodle and I didn’t tell her first. Jealous just like your immature friend.How sad is that.This woman who you are wasting your thoughts on will fallout at the drop of a hat.She doesn’t deserve your attention.
Secondly what a fool she is to compare the loss of her mum against your dad.Circumstances will be so different it is impossible to compare.
When she says about your sister not working as hard as her step mum, again how does anyone compare the two jobs.It is impossible and laughable.She has set herself up as judge and jury. I would delete her number from your phone. As for the question about your other friends, the answer is they have freedom of choice as to who they stay friends with.Nothing to do with you. Give your husband and children a great big hug. Lottie x
I feel for you. I really do. I lost a friend last year. She babysat my son when he was two and I was in teachers college. She was a good friend, I always boasted about how kind she was to other people and how good she was to my son. She had two children of her own, my son’s age and so my son loved going there. I was friends with her for 4 yrs, so my son met her family at 7 months old. Well, over the course of time, something happened, and I am not sure completely what. In my view it could be jealousy.
Starting from when I noticed the change: my dad was hit by a car and in ICU. We were told he would get better but need long term care. I was pregnant with my second at the time and we decided to move from our condo, which was walking distance to her house to bigger house in another city that was 20 minute drive. After the move, my father did pass away from his injuries. I cried to this friend and she lost her mother at 17 from cancer. Her response was “Well at least you have someone to be mad at, I have no one to be mad at when I lost my mother”. Then, when I had a doctors appointment just before my babies birth, I asked if I could stay with her as the office was close to her house. That night, she tried to compare her mothers death and how it was worse than my father’s death. I said politely “I don’t want to compare, because it was sad for you but you lost your mother, I lost my dad, I knew my father so to me, this is devastating because I can’t describe the love I had for my dad, just like you can’t describe the love you had for your mother to me”. She stopped at that point. My friend was always a bit rough around the edges.
Well last year at a New years eve party. She said in the kitchen “my husband and I think that you and your husband think that you are better than us”. This took me aback because I had actually never thought about it until she said that. I don’t go around thinking who is better than who, I just live my life.
But, after that day, we never saw her again. On line, after that, she attacked my twin sister saying that her job as a teacher is not an important job and that my twin doesn’t work as hard as her step mom who works in a nursing home. This is was funny to me because how can she compare a nurse’s job to a teacher’s job and she was a stay at home mom, so how could she possible know what both those jobs entail?
It was after that, she defriended me from facebook. My son asked to see her son. We thought he would forget, but he asked for a year to see her son “my friend” as he says. So, I went online to figure out how to handle this. From some advice from a website, I told my son that they moved to another country, they moved back to poland. I told him if he was sad it is okay and if he needed to talk he can talk and that it is always good to remember the good times with his friend. So, my son compared his loss of the first friend he had ever known to his grandfathers death. He asked me if I was sad from losing my dad and I said yes. I told him that maybe one day he may see his friend again, we never know what life will bring.
For me, I was sad that my friend could just abandon a friendship like that when we had kids involved and they liked each other. I don’t know what happened. She did not take another one of my friends off of her facebook. I don’t know why. I never asked my friend to defriend her, although I wished it.
But, it made me see how she did not really care about my son and I wonder if her son misses my son as much as my son misses her son or if it was soooo easy for him. I wonder what she told her children and if she had to tell her children anything?
Other than my dad dying, this was the second saddest thing that has ever happened to my family, it was another loss. I have never had a bad falling out with a friend before. I have had friendships that dwindled on their own, life gets busy, but never a loss so abrupt and in your face.
So, it was heartbreaking for me. It still is, but life gets busy and you move on. I just wonder what she told her kids and if they cared as much as my son. My daughter will not remember, she met them a few times, first when she was born, three weeks after my dad’s death. Then a few times for dinner at my place and the New Year’s eve party and she was not even one years old yet.
My son had a heavy heart about it for a year.
Hi Tanja,
Sorry that this happened to you. Yes, I can see how his would leave you in a state of shock and sadness. You sound like a very thoughtful, kind person, and you deserve better.
Look at this situation as a lesson learned, and next time you meet someone like her, you will more quickly recognize the signs and not invest so much in the way of feelings of friendship for those who do not deserve it. It will take time to heal, but healing will come to you.
It looks like she was perhaps jealous or resentful of you and she had those negative feelings burning inside of her for some time before she let loose with her mean-spirited, thoughtless comments.
She sounds quite rude, and quite adept at overstepping boundaries (eg criticizing your sister’s occupation,telling you that she and her spouse both think that you and your husband “think you are better than her” etc). It appears that she has deep seated feeling of low self worth, and it comes out this way.
I realize that the end of your friendship was very hard on you and your son, but I really believe that you are far better off without her, and her mean-spirited attacks. She certainly did not consider YOUR feelings when she made those awful comments.
Perhaps you saw her as a better person than she really is, and then when she showed her true colors, you, of course, were shocked and deeply hurt.
Now it is time to move on, and without her in the picture, you will be able to find and maintain better, kinder friendships which will enhance your life.
Thanks Lauren,
Have you ever had this happen to you? I guess it still does hurt, but it hurts more seeing that my son was missing his friend. Of course there is the wondering whether her son even cared as well and if she had to tell her son something as well. She may have just bluntly said to her kids, we don’t like them anymore, she would do that.
But, I know it does no good to wonder because I will never find the answers. I hope I do find better friendships. I know being a twin, I have never been very good at friendships, and I am not that close to my twin. I would like to be closer but my twin would not like to be that close with me. Our mother does say it is jealousy and it is hard. So, I do think it is jealousy as well because jealousy can break relationships, I wonder what makes people jealous of others and why? In my sisters case, I know it is because we are identical but she was always sick and she had cancer and health wise etc that it was hard to look at me being so happy and healthy.
But, with this friend I do not understand it so much. Thanks for your kind words.
Tanja
Hello Tanja,
Yes, I had a very similar situation with someone who had been a friend for quite a long time. Like your friend, she was always a bit rough around the edges, but I overlooked that and overlooked many other things.
Then she started making insulting comments about me in front of other friends, she put me down, insulted members of my family and insulted my character by calling me “weak” in front of other friends. She also started bailing out at the last minute with flimsy excuses, or with no excuses.
Finally, (yes it took me quite some time!), finally I had enough, and I came to my senses, and I ended the friendship. I did so by just doing the slow drift. That was quite some time ago and now I feel so much better. Now I am quicker to spot mean-spirited characteristics in others, and this makes me more discerning in finding and keeping friends.
Bad friends are not good for us. Our self esteems is attacked and it can make us feel bad about ourselves. And yes, I think the root cause may well be jealousy. I don’t understand it, but some people cannot control jealousy, and they react by lashing out at others. It is called transference of aggression.
I am sorry about your son’s feelings. You sound like such a good mother..so caring and nurturing. I think that in the long run your son is also better off without his friend, as his mother may eventually have meddled in that friendship. Who knows. This is hard for both of you, but I truly feel that completely ending that friendship was a very wise decision.
Don’t look back, except to congratulate yourself for handling everything so well and so diplomatically.
Also, I wanted to say that my grandmother had a twin sister and her twin sister was not very nice my grandmother, to say the very least. It’s sad, but life is like that sometimes.
I also want to say that I am sorry about you loosing your beloved father.
Best wishes,
Lauren
I understand you feel sad and hurt at the loss of your friendship. It’s always disappointing to lose someone. However, I think your reaction of dragging your other friends into the drama was immature.
Everyone is entitled to maintain their own friendships and relationships. In my opinion, asking your friends to defriend her is overstepping the boundaries and something crossed the line and had the potential to risk your other friendships. I would certainly question the reliability of a friend who asked me to defriend even an acquaintance and I wouldn’t want to be pulled into the fray.
If you try go concentrate on the positives of your experiences with this woman, and view the relationship as one that was good while it lasted, rather than focus on the ending, you’ll feel better about yourself. Don’t give the end of the friendship the power to ruin your memories when you look at the pictures. This is in your control. If you can’t move on, perhaps seeking professional counseling can help you in this and future relationship disappointments.
This is a sad situation and I would feel a sense of loss, too. It’s a shame this is tainting your wedding memories. But I agree with Irene, that it was probably unfair of you to ask your other friends to un-friend your maid of honor.
Facebook is a loose and shallow medium when it comes to the majority of our social connections, generally speaking. Given that, I think your other friends were just taking the proverbial high road by not un-friending your maid of honor. It was, after all, your personal conflict and not theirs — and you admitted the conflict was over something “petty”. Which is why I wouldn’t blame the other friends for trying to remain neutral. That’s the grown-up, polite thing to do.
In years to come, hopefully, you will be able to focus on the healthy friendships you have, and treasure happy memories of your wedding.
You’re young, I presume; please take what I say as an elder whose learned from life what are fanciful notions and what is illogical… Learned the hard way. And maybe I can save you some of that because you’re young, you really are living on a lot of unproven and untested “notions”. All you need is to hear me out and let it sift for several days… Resist being pained for the “ouches”; write those off as being just inexperienced and that’s no crime.
Let’s begin at the beginning because you did derail there. You began your account by telling us of the investment you had in your Maid of Honor (MOH) with a sadness that it contact had dwindled. So, you asked her about that dwindling. What you asked is quite pertinent. You may have asked the wrong question of her and for your purpose. You wanted to rekindle your relationship. So, you needed to know how it could be done in her life. If you, instead, asked her about why it had dwindled, you no closer to your goal and getting into the territory of awkwardness. There is a big difference between “I’ve so missed catching up with you, is there a convenient way for you that we can keep in closer touch?” and “Why don’t I hear from you anymore?”… One is lovely and one is not. Always stay with lovely.
Your aim was to rekindle but you said it deteriorated into a “petty” argument. You were half the reason for that “petty” argument; so you must ask yourself why you allowed yourself to have an argument (petty or otherwise). You get say only over you. Your aim was to have more time with her but you derailed that for allowing yourself to argue. Usually, we derail for the myth of needing to be “right” on some point. Being “right” is a myth because “right” gets you nothing…not even your own self satisfaction. My bet would be that you fell for this temptation lock, stock and barrel. A wiser person than me once said “You can have anything you want. You just can’t have everything.” And I always remembered that in the choices I’ve had about how I conduct myself. In your case, you could have a rekindled friendship or arguing that you were right in some dispute… but not both. Your call, your choice. The key is that you always remember that it’s just one or the other; anything but not everything.
You told all your friends about the incident so they could soothe you which is proof enough that there’s not much satisfaction in “being right” because satisfaction doesn’t need soothing. So now you know something more about the notion of having to be “right”… It doesn’t pay off too well… Pays more poorly than being congenial. Not one thing about the world or your life is going to change for making yourself “right”. Not one thing. The sun’s coming up in the east the next day, you’re going to wake up to the same things before you to do and you’re going to do as you do the same way. There is no threat to you or your life to be congenial.
When we gossip to our friends about an incident, it’s called “vying for a vote”: That our friends all agree that we are great and the other is lousy. And you can do that but it’s worthless because your friends will really be voting to get out of an awkward situation or prevent one. They don’t give a crap about the incident that went on between you and the MOH; it isn’t significant to their lives. We all have more than enough going on in our lives to take on someone else’s…. except for the friend who has no life and is entertained by gossip and she’s not credible.
(Gossip is actually ugly stuff but women love, love, love gossip. In my generation, we could gossip away safely: We took it in stride as just “yak” of no consequence and less than half the truth. The target of our gossip was no one the wiser… And a good thing for that:Because she/he shouldn’t have to suffer the blab that was just that. Your generation, though, has social media and you’re using it all the time… to be pretty tempted to be indiscrete. You have to promise yourself that you will never ever use a social media to bring harm/hurt to another. Never. Life is hard; you’re going to find out over time how hard it gets. Never seek or bring hardship to another. You never know if you could be someone’s last straw and besides, that’s not what you were put on the earth for anyhow.)
When I do gossip with my friends, I announce right up front that I’m going catty or gossipy. It’s never to be taken seriously because it really is just twisted entertainment. I suggest if you disclose an incident with a friend to another, you decide whether you’re just venting or seeking earnest help. If it’s venting, you say it is just that. If you’re seeking, you have to give a friend permission to help you: They have to know that you’ll welcome something that they might be reluctant to say.
The task of friends is more limited than you might surmise: It is to enjoy each other and confide, perhaps, in generalities. When the task is put on them to help us with an unhappiness, that’s a tall order because they really don’t have the direct knowledge or authority to give us wise guidance. They will wisely and usually defer to what we have already concluded, as misguided as we might be; don’t ever take that as what they really think or would do themselves.
Let’s talk about loyalty. Loyalty is not ownership; your friends are simply people with lives who enjoy you. They may even come to care about you and would help you out in a jam. That’s loyalty. Taking up for you against another person way out there in expectations of a friend. If they remain friends with the other, it is because they enjoy that person as well. Your trouble with the MOH isn’t their problem; it’s yours and solely yours. Frankly, if you had friends who abided by your notion of loyalty, you’ve got some soft headed friends and those that didn’t were the sounder thinkers. You have no say nor is it your business who your friends hang out with, Facebook friend or associate in anyway with. (And I think this business of “defriending” someone on social media because we’re mad at them implies that we have something to protect on Facebook… What would that be? Unless you’re Hilary Clinton or Malala Yousafzai or being stalked, you probably don’t.)
We attract friends and attracted to friends because we are enjoyable to each other. To be enjoyable, we are bringing something into that enjoyment. Unfortunately, what you’ve seemed to do or try is to exact of friends something…That’s antithetical to how it works. I’d prepare for a fall out of other friends and accept that quietly and graciously hoping that there is no further fall out. Don’t bring up the MOH nor say anything bad about her. Not even if someone tempts you to do so.
You’ll find new friends and now have more realistic understanding of how friendships work and what friends are really for. Hopefully, too, you have learned something about being congruent to your aim and not get yourself derailed into “petty” arguments.
I read your comments and it is exactly what I needed to hear. I find it hard at times to stay away from gossip and I know it is wrong, but I like feeling a part of a group. I don’t always know what a friend’s purpose is. I have learned over time, that has we get older, friendships change. They are no longer about getting together every single week end and gossiping about so and so and crying to every time a boyfriend dumps you or something terrible happens.
The older I get, married with children etc, friendships become more of a formality. I don’t reveal too much, but I invite them over for a casual dinner once in a while and we do not talk every day but maybe once a month to catch up. We talk about things in general, but it never gets too deep. Being a twin, it feels weird to me because I am use to a certain type of connection, but I generally try to keep my distance. I have been friends with one person over a year now and there are times, she still feels like a stranger to me.
But, I am getting use to being a lone and being comfortable being alone.