I am a good friend, but I am not loyal

Posted by Sebastyn in Introspective | 3 comments

I came to think about my loyalty as a friend through a bit of a Freudian slip. I said to a new friend that “I make friends easily, but I don’t keep them”. She looked a bit shocked and scared for the future of our friendship, so I attempted to calm her a bit… “I mean, I don’t let most of them close to me.” She accepted the explanation, but I must say, the first version was probably more accurate, just the way it sounds. I do let go of friends when they become an emotional burden to me, so maybe I’m just not very loyal. There are some deal breakers that will make me cut a friend loose. First one is endless negativity. People who refuse to be dragged out of their own misery do not deserve my ear. If all you do is complain complain complain and blame others for your miserable situation, and give an array of excuses on why you can’t get away from your situation, there’s only so much I can take of it. Second one is hostility towards me or other people. Third one is pretending to be something you’re not, which is an absolute turn off for me. Why would I want to be friends with a person who doesn’t even like themselves enough to be who they are? And I should say I have a fourth one, too… If I find that no matter how well we got on before, there’s really very little what we have in common. (Often happens through a hobby or school, once the link is gone, the friendship is gone.) And then there is one more… If someone is taking liberties with me that I am not ready to give them, as in consider themselves a closer friend than what I see them as, I’ll be quite quick to cool things off with them. Like “if I invite you over, it doesn’t mean you can move in”.

I used to feel a bit bad about my ability to leave friendships behind without much of a worry. When I realized that I’m not really that loyal, I felt it like an absolution. Silly, isn’t it? I’ve been trying to live up to the standards of loyalty, when in fact I’m not really. I think this may be quite the INFP thing to think. Or maybe I’ve defined the word loyalty wrong. Maybe I am so loyal, that leaving friends for a good reason feels to me like I’m not being loyal. I used to sleep with ALL my stuffed toys when I was  a kid. ALL of them, and there was a lot of them, too, as you can only imagine for a kid who had no cousins but 3 living grand parents, 3 aunts 2 uncles and 2 unrelated god parents… You know how people tend to bring stuffed toys to kids from holidays and so on? I could barely fit into my bed with them, but I had to pile them all next to me so that none of them would feel left out. I was uncomfortable, but I couldn’t stand the thought of just choosing one special one to sleep with, although secretly I had a favourite, but I would have never told any of them which one it was. Eventually I decided they all have to sleep in their own bed because I was getting too old (and big!) to share the bed with them.

Maybe I’ve been trying to apply this same level of loyalty to people as well, and felt guilty for not being able to go that far. How do you define loyalty? Like that of a dog – you can treat a dog pretty bad before he calls it quits.

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