Thanks for reading Can We Talk?, a sex and relationships column that aims to tackle the burning questions about sex, dating, relationships, and breakups that you’re too afraid to ask your partner — or maybe even your besties.
Last time, relationship therapist Moraya Seeger DeGeare, LMFT, heard from someone who wanted to know how to support her partner who is experiencing the same anxiety disorder as her. Today, a Refinery29 reader feels shamed by her best friend.
Do you have a dilemma or question you’d like to see answered as part of a future Can We Talk? Submit it here.
Dear Moraya,
I have a friend, I’ll call her Bri. Bri and I have been best friends for over 12 years and I love her dearly. We don’t live in the same city, but we talk every week and make plans to see each other every few months.
Over the last few years, I have been exploring non-monogamous relationships and kink parties, both of which I have really loved and learned a lot through. Bri, however, is not supportive of this side of me. She has made unwarranted comments of “You’re going to get pregnant” or insinuating that I don’t understand how love works because I partake in these parties. She thinks it’s just in response to a vanilla relationship I had last year and doesn’t believe you can have love, romance, and intimacy in an ethically non-monogamous relationship.
I have wonderful relationships with my partners — we’re communicative, kind to each other, and they empower me. It’s hard to have my best friend not understand this part of my life. Bri has never been in a relationship, so I take that into consideration when I talk to her about my dating life. I see a therapist, and my friends who live here are nothing but supportive and have even started exploring [non-monogamy] themselves. I have done a ton of work on myself throughout the last five years, and I’m incredibly hurt by Bri’s comments. How do I talk to her about this and stand up for myself? She doesn’t seem to believe me when I tell that this world is special, fun, and healthy for me. She is critical and her comments hurt me deeply. Any advice would be helpful!
Sincerely,
Heartbroken Bestie
Dear Heartbroken Bestie,
“Can we talk about our relationship?” can be one of the bravest things to ask your friends. That’s exactly why I want you to do it. Let’s be honest with ourselves: Not every friendship will make it through every chapter. You and your friend have changed in the last 12 years, and when you dive deep into self-discovery, you don’t come out the same — that’s kind of the point. How do relationships, especially close friendships, navigate this constant change? If the relationship is the kind that travels through life, it includes these types of moments that challenge us when a best friend chooses a different life path.
The base for friendship — especially the coveted best friend slot — is feeling safe enough to show up as your complete, beautiful, and messy self, and still feeling seen, loved, and accepted. I could sit here and tell you that Bri’s opinion does not matter, that she’s being judgmental or simply can’t understand how healing it has been to find yourself, your voice, and a feeling of belonging in these new intimate communities. But that would be so profoundly dismissive of how much our best friends’ opinions matter to us. Our best friends are often our biggest influences — not because we need their constant approval, but because they are our closest and most trusted people.
Not listening to a friend feels like not listening to a part of ourselves. This is a key factor in why you can feel so stuck when friendships clash like this compared to romantic relationships. You might break up with a partner and say, “Wow, I am healthier now that I did not tolerate that,” or “I know what I want now,” but we don’t really use those kinds of words with friendships unless they’re deeply unhealthy or directly abusive.
While I can see people in your newer circles telling you to ignore Bri’s comments, I would challenge any advice that suggests you could easily ignore or dismiss the painful feelings you might have right now. When we go from feeling understood by someone to feeling unseen by them, the grief can be intense, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
There are three things that I want us to dive into as we work to move this friendship into a healthier place. I want you to address these things in conversation with Bri, once you find your words. First, how fear is showing up between you. You can ask yourself these three questions to help identify fear: “If I respond defensively, what am I feeling?”, “When I avoid a topic or a conversation entirely, what is the question I don’t want to ask or hear the answer to?”, and “What is my worry focused on?” When we’re looking to see how fear is showing up in a relationship, try identifying it by getting curious about what you are avoiding, dismissing, or feeling anxious over. Notice your internal anxious behaviors, such as thinking about a conversation on repeat, and notice your external anxious behaviors, such as reaching to others for excessive validation.
This leads us into the second stage of exploring why control might be taking over for you both. The fear may be driving you to want to return the friendship to a good place, but instead of being curious, one or both of you are being controlling. The third thing is to have clear conversations about your values and beliefs. Getting into the deeper bits, talking about your identities, and bringing in more curiosity to see if your key values align will help you both see a path forward. This is not solo work — this is friendship work, and it needs to be done in conversation with each other.
For many of us, our core friendships withstand many of our romantic relationships. But when they are out of sync, like yours is now, we don’t really allow ourselves the same level of heartbreak and anxiety or acknowledgement of attachment system activation that we would if it was a romantic partner. Attachment system activation is when, under attachment distress such as this, we reach for comfort and belonging in how we would have as a child. You might notice your anxiety has you checking in excessively with your friend or someone else, which may be out of alignment with how you normally would handle the situation, or you may be compensating in other ways. This is more personal, but it could feel like depression and exhaustion, or it could be something like over-exercising to want to get rid of the stress feeling. I can’t name the way you have tried to soothe this distress in your childhood, but it’s worth noting how deep this criticism could be felt for you. Be compassionate with yourself — feeling criticized by someone you respect is painful.
Fear is usually the motivation for words of judgment. We constantly want to make sense of things, and since your behavior is not making sense to your friend she may be acting out of fear. I also want to explore how you may potentially be making her feel. Since you mentioned that your friend is inexperienced with relationships, have you said things about that area of her life that could leave her feeling judged? Have you suggested she try lowering some of her sexual boundaries, and she pushed back from feeling shamed?
It can feel hard and humbling to realize we may have poked at our friend’s vulnerabilities, even if they were unintentional. Try these journal prompts yourself, and if your friend is up for it you can share it with her too. If you’re both open to it, try discussing what came up for you during this exercise. You can reflect on not only how you have been engaging in conversations about your sex lives, but also what emotions come up around those exchanges. I want you to think about what the larger unmet need in this friendship is right now. There may be more to it than a disagreement about what you do in your intimate life.
What scares you the most about your friend having a different sexual life than you?
How does it feel when they give feedback on your sex life?
What are you worried might happen if you share a boundary or tell them how you feel?
Boundaries mean different things for different people, and you and Bri may approach setting them in mismatched ways. When you two are discussing your romantic lives, what kinds of input are you both comfortable with? While you both want to feel like you can be authentic in sharing feelings, it’s okay to ask a friend to still be mindful of your physical and emotional limits, and that you both commit to fulfilling the larger relationship needs you both share.
I want you to think about how you are showing up in this friendship. Where might you be losing your voice and sense of who you are to meet a perceived relationship need that is actually not getting met? You have spent the last five years working on yourself, finding who you are, and expressing it — are you still able to express this new version of yourself in this friendship? Bri may be seeing the “old” you, and having trouble fitting this current version into your new non-monogamous life.
To reduce that disconnect, Bri may pointing out all the ways you could be in danger, making you feel like she doesn’t trust you to take care of yourself. The way you describe it feels like she is trying to parent you, throwing out warnings, fears, and even suggesting rules that come from the fear that you are not trusted to make good choices.
I wonder if you two have been trying to make your differences work for some time, which means your deeper values may possibly be the reason for this current clash. Have you been avoiding conversations with Bri about your beliefs on ethical non-monogamy and sexuality for a while due to something that might not be included in your question to me? It sounds like Bri doesn’t believe in the value of your relationships, and a supportive and trustworthy friendship would not require convincing that your sex life is valid. Our closest friends might come from vastly different walks of life, but to see someone fully we have to appreciate and value who they are and how they think. When a friend tells us who they are, we can’t respond with “No, you’re not,” and expect the friendship to continue.
Friendships that last through significant life transformations are capable of having these big conversations. Embrace it! If you can’t talk about this with your best friend, who can you talk about it with? I challenge you to start a conversation with Bri by saying, I value this relationship, I want us to have these deep conversations and not settle in feeling misunderstood. Can we talk about you and me?
You got this!
Moraya
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