Reconnection

So, as you may have gathered, the phone line at home was actually disconnected (and still hasn’t been restored). I’ve been on a course the last couple of days and so haven’t had any access to the internet by any other means either. I texted my landlady on Monday night and told her the phone had been switched off and she texted back Tuesday night and said she’d try and do something about it the next day (Wednesday). That did rather annoy me because if it was her who was inconvenienced then she would have sorted it out straight away but because she’s living elsewhere she can’t be bothered. She did say to me over the weekend that sometimes she is “overly efficient” and indeed she was when it came to cutting off the phone but when it comes to getting her mistake fixed she’s not quite so efficient. I’m not convinced that she will get the phone line reconnected at all. Grrrrrrrrrr.

I can’t wait to move. Unfortunately, I still haven’t exchanged on the place I’m buying. I spoke to my solicitor at the end of last week and he had spoken to the vendor’s solicitor who had said it was all going to go through but now the freeholder is dragging her feet. She needs to provide a document before we can exchange and seems to need a lot of chasing to come up with it. But actually the delay may actually help me a bit as I am going away on holiday at the end of next week and whilst I want to exchange before then, I don’t want to complete until I get back. Anyway, hopefully sometime in the next week or so I will exchange and then it’s just a matter of coming up with a date on which to complete.

I was mulling over the friendship stuff again and I can tell you now that what I am going to write is not entirely coherent. I think I have concluded that a lot of what made that friendship go wrong recently was that I didn’t really trust my friend (and I suspect she may well have felt the same). To some degree I’m not really sure why I didn’t. Sometimes she said she would do things and then she didn’t do them, some of which was really important to me. and having someone say to you “Sometimes I say things to you and then I realise that I said it to deliberately hurt you and I feel pleased about it” doesn’t make it entirely appealing to trust someone though. We just never dealt with things properly and they chipped away at the trust between us.

Over the years, one of the things that I have realised is that spending time with people is important to me. I have a friend from university who a couple of times when she’s been due to stay for the weekend has then phoned and told me about all the other things she has fitted into the weekend as well. I find it frustrating when she does that and whilst to a degree I think that’s it’s quite rude, it’s also that I know there is that part of me that sees someone spending time with me as a way of knowing that they care about me and I matter to them. So if I get a call to tell me that what was meant to be a weekend turns out to be a Saturday afternoon, I feel a bit deflated by that.

There are different ways that people give and receive love and I think we probably need to see all of those different ways exhibited to some degree, but there is often one that is more important than another - and mine is definitely spending time with people and them with me. (In case you’re wondering the other ways are things like giving gifts, doing practical things for people, physical contact and saying encouraging and affirming things to people. I’ll come back to this another day). Anyway, with my friend who I fell out with, I raised it with her that she had quite suddenly stopped wanting to meet up etc - and the reply was that I just “wasn’t a priority”. This rang lots of alarm bells in my head. Apart from it not being a very nice thing to say, it was also something that tapped right into one of those things that makes me feel as though I matter. When she said that to me I backed off because if someone tells me they don’t want to spend time with me then that sends me strong signals. In reality I don’t necessarily have a need to see someone on a regular basis, it’s more about quality than quantity, but for someone to overtly say that to me tells me an awful lot - although hearing such things perhaps has a bigger impact on me than some. I actually don’t think I am explaining this very well because pretty much anyone would think there was something up if someone said to them that they couldn’t be bothered to spend time with them. I may have to try and explain it again at another point.

Anyway, I’m not actually trying to slate my friend because the thing is that she isn’t a nasty person or someone who is particularly untrustworthy. I have said the things as an illustration of what I’m saying about *me* and what makes me tick, but it doesn’t mean that they were the sum of either my friend or our friendship. Somehow the combination of the two of us did not bring out the best side in either of us though and I am definitely not beyond reproach in all of this. Possibly we could have done something about those things that were not very good but I know I would be given very short shrift if I even considered broaching that with her now. She made her views perfectly clear and there are some battles that are not worth fighting because you’ve already been told the outcome.

I suppose the point for me though is that I need to have an awareness of what makes me tick and that at times I need to temper my expectations and to recognise when they are perhaps unreasonable or just not likely to be realised. Having said that I‘m not actually cynical about friendships. It can be very disappointing at times but when it works, it can be a fantastic thing and I just want more of the good and less of the bad. I don’t suppose that is too bad an aspiration.