Dear Exhausted Friend,
Let's help your friend articulate her boundaries
For the first installment of the Dear Zoe advice column, I’ll be answering the following question from An Exhausted Friend.
Dear Zoe,
I have a friend who finally dumped her terrible boyfriend. Now, he won’t stop texting her. Night and day he sends long paragraphs either trying to make her feel terrible for breaking his heart or apologizing and trying to win her back.
Our friend group keeps telling her to block his number, but she won’t do it. How do we help her to end her connection to this man once and for all?
Sincerely,
An Exhausted Friend
On Substack and Instagram, I conducted a poll about how you all would respond to the inquiry. The results:
Help her articulate her boundaries: 53%
Plot a revenge scheme on him: 4%
Help keep her mind off of him: 15%
Frame him for a crime: 28%
I concur with option 1, as much as I love the idea of enacting small-scale, inconvenience level revenge on someone who won’t just f*ck off. But here’s what I really have to say:
Being a friend to someone in a bad relationship is a difficult position to be in. However, it is even more difficult for your friend who is the one actually dealing with the fallout of the bad relationship. It’s likely that we will all find ourselves on both sides of this coin at some point in our lives. In these situations, it can feel extremely obvious that your friend needs to block him and cut off all communication, but for her, it definitely isn’t so simple.
Kudos to your friend, I’ll call her Jane, for ending the relationship. She did the very brave and very difficult thing of breaking up. Unfortunately, the communication did not end with the breakup and herein lies the problem. At the heart of the issue is boundaries or rather, lack thereof.
Breakups are rarely clean but one of the elements that make things so messy is confusion about future communication post-breakup. Blocking someone may be best for one party’s mental health but can also be unrealistic for the disentangling of two people’s lives. Possessions will likely need to be exchanged, conversations had about who gets the cat in the divorce, who needs to get a new Hulu account, etc.
But this communication becomes a problem when one party refuses to accept the other’s decision to end the relationship. This guy, I won’t give him a name, seems desperate in his attempts to win Jane back, using both guilt and apology to make amends.
Jane needs to decide what boundaries she is comfortable enforcing with him and stick to them with all her might.
Once in grad school, I ended a situationship with someone I’d had an on-again off-again fling. I made the mistake of not being clear that the ending of the relationship also meant the ending of communication between us. Instead of stating this clearly, I would occasionally respond to his messages and attempts to contact me. My unpredictable and intermittent responses were inadvertently driving him a bit crazy. Understandably so. The truth was that I didn’t know what my boundaries were until I felt they had been crossed. The same may be said for Jane.
If Jane is comfortable keeping an open line of communication, she should limit it to one form of contact. Perhaps for her this is text. This means no calls out of the blue, no IG messaging, no coded playlists on Spotify or whatever else he might think of to reach her.
As her friend, you could assist her by talking through what boundaries she can reasonably keep and what level of contact she’s comfortable with. Help her craft a message she can kindly deliver to him about the expectations and gently remind her of her stated boundaries when he tries to reach out in the future. You may also remind her that him continuing to reach out is a sign of disrespect, both to her and himself.
Jane is going through a Canonical Event for a young woman so do your best to shower her with love during this time. A breakup is a major life change and if you’ve been largely dependent on one person for love and companionship, it can leave a huge void where that person used to be. Each breakup is different and while you may see him as a complete bum or bozo, there was something about him that kept Jane in the relationship all this time. Even if she knows it’s for the best, the pain of the breakup may be clouding her ability to see that truth.
Help her see beyond the breakup by encouraging her to leave the house, try a yoga class, join a book club, or go see a movie. Keeping her mind occupied and having plans to look forward to will help ease the breakup pain tremendously in the short term. If you have a cute, nice, single friend, introduce them to Jane to remind her that love is infinite and possible elsewhere.
If all your time with Jane has been spent by her talking about the breakup or her terrible ex lately, I would try to focus your hangouts on activities going forward. Otherwise, you may have to set some boundaries yourself about how emotionally involved you can get in her problems. Make sure to take care of yourself as you’re helping take care of your friend.
It is incredibly hard to watch your friend in pain, and I know you would do anything to take the pain away, so it can be extremely frustrating when the solution to her problem seems so obvious to you — “BLOCK HIM.” But if she isn’t in a position to hear advice, there’s no point in wasting your energy. It can be a lot of pressure to have your friends telling you what to do. Especially, when you aren’t going to do what they say. This can lead to frustration on your end, and isolation on Jane’s, which is the last thing we want and could very likely lead her to get back with her ex.
Sometimes the hardest thing for a friend to do in this situation is just to be present. Be there to listen, encourage, validate. Take her out, buy her a drink. Let her know your thoughts if she asks. Remind her that you’re on her team, that you love her and want the best for her.
And don’t be afraid to recommend your therapist if you’ve got a good one. Therapy is an extremely useful tool to help her learn how to express boundaries, deal with the pain of the breakup, and get some 1-on-1 care. Talking to someone who is removed from the people involved can be an invaluable experience.
Each one of us is on our own journey and it’s all of our first time here. At the end of the day, it is her life. It is up to you how emotionally involved you want to get with her problems but know that you cannot control your friend, nor her ex.
If you or someone you know may be in an abusive relationship, call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or 1-800-787-3224 (TTY), text “START” to 88788. National Domestic Violence Hotline