I’m 55 & friendships are more toxic now than as a teen – I’ve lost 3 close friends because of social media jealousy
JEALOUSY, insecurity and competitiveness can plague playground pals.
But as author Jane Green has found out…at 55 my female friendships are more toxic than in my teens…and social media fuels the poison.
By the time I hit 55, I thought the jealousies and insecurities of female friendships in early life – when we are still figuring out who we are – would have worked themselves out.
But I’ve lost more close friends in the last few years than at any other point in my life.
And the three I lost recently were all for the same reason — social media.
We often read about how social media is damaging the younger generation, but in my experience it can be toxic for adults, too.
As an author, I have a social media following of roughly 150,000.
It is the only way I have of marketing my books — and part of having any kind of public profile involves sharing aspects of your life.
Despite spending much of my time at home, my Instagram profile would have you believe I live a fabulously glamorous life, because of course I only show the interesting bits.
I share those parts of my life — and often my innermost thoughts — to connect with my followers and inspire them to buy my books.
However, I never expected to lose real friends as a consequence.
The first was a woman I had considered one of my best pals for more than 15 years, and it was utterly devastating.
She went from being a BFF (best friend for ever) to an NFF (now former friend).
She was the one I confided in, the calm, wise port in any storm.
But looking back, I can see our friendship had always felt troubled.
We met through mutual friends, and had that instant click.
To compare is despair
The day we met, I went to her house for tea, and we didn’t stop talking for hours, amazed at how we shared so many similarities.
She was a cook, an aspiring writer and, best of all, she lived around the corner.
I’d show up at her kitchen table in my pyjamas, and she would do the same at mine.
It felt like finding a sister.
But after a few years, I started to sense a distance between us, a coldness in her.
I didn’t understand why there were times when I couldn’t seem to get close to her.
Often, she was warm and loving.
Then she would act uninterested.
I would run into her at a kids’ event — our children are the same age — and she would be cold or spend the entire time avoiding me.
I’d watch her from across the room and had no idea what I had done.
I would be hurt, but knowing that she didn’t like confrontation, I would wait it out, showing up at her house after a week or two, praying that whatever she was going through would have passed.
Sure enough, we would always bounce back.
Other friends told me they had observed her being competitive with me, resentful of my success and colourful life.
I hadn’t listened.
I didn’t know that she was following my Instagram like a hawk, that she felt left out when I was at parties or events.
It never occurred to me that she could be jealous.
How could someone who professes to love you be resentful?
It didn’t make sense to me.
While we weren’t involved in each others’ social lives on a daily basis, she was the woman I considered my rock, the one I turned to when I needed to feel supported.
‘I do not compare’
I am married with six children, and while husbands can be wonderful, they rarely see things in the same way as a female friend.
She has many friends I do not know and I was rarely invited out with them.
I have many, many character flaws, but jealousy isn’t one.
I feel nothing other than delight when I see my friends having a good time on Instagram.
I do not compare myself to other people.
There will always be people who are more successful, more attractive, thinner, wealthier and have more glamorous lives, just as there will always be people who are less successful, who have smaller lives.
I have always believed that to compare is despair.
I am fine with not being invited to places because you cannot invite all the people all of the time.
We would talk about this, and she would agree.
I assumed she meant it.
The University of Buffalo in New York recently did a study on longevity of relationships.
Although they were studying marriages, I believe their findings apply equally to friendships.
They found that the success of relationships is based on holding your partner in higher regard than they hold themselves.
I find this moving, and true of all my close friends.
Where they feel insecure or ill-equipped, I see them as strong and capable of so much more than they believe.
She burst into tears and confessed she had seen my Instagram feed and was jealous
Anna
Last summer, after another bout of my friend seeming to be angry with me, I finally called her out on it.
I had recently posted some pictures on Instagram of me out with a group of friends and consequently I’d felt that she had been off with me.
After a couple of weeks she invited me for tea.
I asked her what was going on and told her that if I had done anything to upset her, I would love to know and to apologise.
She burst into tears and confessed she had seen my Instagram feed and was jealous.
We hugged, and I attempted to reassure her of our friendship, but I left her house feeling uneasy.
I don’t think she meant she was jealous, I think she meant she felt excluded.
But the very fact she had used the word “jealous” got me thinking about all the years she had blown hot and cold.
Red flags
I understood immediately that this friendship was doomed, for jealousy is a deal-breaker.
When you are simply living your life, and you have a friend who is jealous, there is no fix for that.
I knew that every time she looked at my social media she would not be happy for me.
I thought I knew what red flags to look out for in friendships but I failed to recognise this one.
I decided to withdraw quietly. We live in a small town.
Our paths will undoubtedly cross.
Recently, she blocked me on social media, which I think we’ll all agree is a “f*** you” if ever there was one. I have been left feeling tremendous grief at the loss of a friendship, which, however flawed, was part of the fabric of my life for 15 years.
Since then, I have lost two more female friends, both of whom mentioned Instagram as the reason.
One because I had posted an article I had written on friendship, and the newspaper in question had chosen not to use the photograph of her and me together.
And another who wrote to me saying, “I continue to think we cannot understand each other through Instagram”.
This was after a summer when all I had posted was me sitting in my garden.
Even though I thought those friendships were real, jealousy, I have discovered, does not diminish with age.
If anything, social media is guaranteed to fuel insecurity and jealousy.
We are bombarded daily with images of people we know living “perfect lives”.
Anything can set off a jealous woman.
A child getting into a good university? Jealous.
Losing weight? Jealous.
A great night out to which they weren’t invited? Jealous.
A new relationship that makes you happy? Jealous.
Even when we know our friends aren’t perfect, that their kids are struggling in school, that they are mortgaged to the hilt, many of us still choose to believe the Instagram version of their life.
Then we stop opening up to them, convinced we aren’t good enough, that we are somehow “less than”.
We hide our truths, and can, if we are not careful, become unutterably lonely.
Grief is a strange thing.
I know this will get better over time, and I am fortunate enough to be surrounded by a small number of soul sisters, women who know that success, abundance and happiness for others will only lead to good things for you; women who get no greater pleasure than raising their friends as high as they can.
I thought the teenage years were the most difficult for navigating friendships.
I thought I had weeded out those that were toxic and that by this stage of life it would be easy to recognise friendships that are bad for us — the women who are needy, or high maintenance, the women with two faces, the gossips.
Perhaps my mistake was in thinking all friendships are supposed to last a lifetime.
Don’t get me wrong, many of the female friendships I made in my 20s are as strong today as they ever were.
But my newer friendships have been more fragile — and I blame social media.
However much you think someone knows you, all it takes for a friendship to falter can be a photograph, a vision of a life that you think they know is flawed, but the photograph seems to overrule all that they should know is true.
Learn from my mistakes.
Keep an open heart and find the people who love you as much as you love them — and steer clear of their social media accounts.