Metro’s agony aunt Em Clarkson is here to solve all your problems.
This week she’s handing down sage guidance on how to stop feelings of jealousy amongst friends.
Read on for this week’s reader conundrums and Em’s advice.
Dear Em, two of my mates met at my birthday party a couple of months ago and have become really good friends.
They’re both lovely people, so it’s no wonder – but I’m starting to feel jealous. Every time I’ve seen either of them independently, they’ve asked about the other and I know they speak pretty much daily.
On the one hand, I know I’m being immature and should just let these two adults get on with a new friendship, on the other, I feel a bit neglected.
Should I say something or just accept it?
I don’t think you’re being immature and I think it’s absolutely inevitable that you feel the way you do.
It’s only natural to feel protective of the friends that we have and to let insecurities creep into the important platonic relationships in our lives.
So I completely hear you. This must be hard, and it’s an interesting one for me to answer, because two years ago I myself was a friend thief to my own best-friend.
At her 30th party, I told another of her friends that I was pregnant, and she told me she was too, and we ended up becoming really good friends.
I didn’t have many friends with kids and nor did my husband – our daughters were born two days apart and we now all spend loads of time together.
Truth be told, I don’t know how I would’ve got through the last two years without her. That friendship has become so valuable to me.
And wonderfully, I don’t think it has changed the relationship either of us have with our OG bestie either, in fact we’re both bridesmaids at her wedding in a couple of weeks.
But that’s not to say we haven’t both felt bad, because it HAS felt like poor friend-etiquette to do what we did.
And so karma came for me and gave me a taste of my own medicine recently, when two of my other closest friends started hanging without me.
And when the shoe’s on the other foot, it is hard not to feel left out, and that’s because at the end of the day, female friendship is complicated.
Or at least, it often becomes it. When we let feelings of jealousy in, or start getting insecure within ourselves, we have a tendency to assume the worst of the people around us.
We imagine that our friends get together with the sole purpose of bitching about us (because through this very specific lens it’s easy to forget that they have other things in common besides us!), and that every time they talk they do so in a way that deliberately excludes you.
In reality, this is not the case.
I learned that from being in my ill-gotten friendship and I apply that learning to scenarios in which any of my other friends form relationships without me.
When I step back and remove my ego from all of it, I realise it’s a great thing that my friends are all friends with one another and that everyone comes into someone’s life for a reason, the fact that you’ve been able to connect, and help form a relationship that each of them needed is a great thing.
So I think you can do both the things you suggested, I think you can accept their friendship, and I think you can say something about it too.
They’ll know that this is weird for you and will probably appreciate you bringing it up.
Their liking of each other doesn’t mean they like you any less and there’s no reason they won’t be incredibly kind and cool about it when you bring it up.
Even if you were just to start a WhatsApp group with the three of you in it saying ‘right you two, I’m happy that you have each other but I’m feeling VERY left out now and I want to rectify it so can please check our diaries and get a dinner in for the three of us, okay thanks love you both.’
It’s honest and to the point, which you’re allowed to be, with two people who still love you.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.
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