Sometimes I can be a difficult friend to
get a hold of because of my busy schedule and tendency to want to get to know
everyone or talk to different people all the time (which helps with being an RA
on my hall but definitely doesn’t help in keeping contact with my close
friends). And recently with many
projects and tests coming up in these past few weeks, it has been very
difficult to space out my time evenly and devote time not only to my studies,
but also my personal fitness life (I try to run every day or at least four
times a week… “try” is the key word) and social life with my friends,
residents, and everyday acquaintances.
Because one of my close friends had more time in his schedule as he had
less tests that week, he really wanted to hang out and talk about some personal
issues he had been having that week.
Unfortunately for me, I also happened to have three big tests and two
projects due in that same week, so I was feeling very burdened and didn’t have
any time to sit down for a long talk.
However I didn’t want to hurt his feelings as well by saying something
abrupt like, “I’m really sorry I just don’t have time for you this week” so
whenever he would text or call me about hanging out, I would come up
with various excuses to avoid being able to meet with him this week because I had so much
work to do. Unfortunately that actually
backfired and really ended up escalating our situation and the rockiness of our
friendship. In addition, he has a rather
passive aggressive attitude towards conflicts. So although he reacted courteously
to my excuses and even wished me good luck with my work, at the end of the week
it was game over. He finally blew up in
a sudden escalation moment while telling me about all the doubts he had had about our
relationship because of the way I had been treating him that week. He almost used a sudden death statement as
well saying that he was very close to breaking off our friendship completely
because he did not feel like I was putting in as much effort into our friendship
as he was (loss of equality based on the social benefits theory of equal benefits and costs in a relationship). I’ve always been good at
getting to know many people but never good at keeping in touch constantly so
that I can understand the individual better.
In looking back at my past friendships, I realized much of the time I
had only stayed or become close to my best friends because that friend had been
very good at reaching out to me all the time.
So afterwards when we finally calmed down, I felt that we were able to
use the voice response to really work things out and reach a win-win
solution. He realized that I sometimes
needed time alone just to do work and couldn’t always be open to talk to him,
while I realized I should be more honest in my communication with him and be
willing to listen to his problems as well.
So this conflict overall really helped improve our friendship since
because we were able to understand each other’s sides and thoughts better. Thus
in this situation, the competition that occurred (the escalation, and sudden
death statement) was actually an appropriate response to our conflict because
it brought the problem out to the open and allowed us to be more honest to each
other about the problems we were having with each other.
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