The three toxic friends I've cut out of my life this year

As I look back on another Christmas, for me it has always been a time for ­reflection on what really matters. Now in my early 50s, married with children, it is family, and friendship: Love, essentially.

That is the reason why It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol are the two most beloved festive films. They know what is important, and it was not the expense of the gifts placed under the tree. It’s the quality of the love that had put them there.

The older I am, the more I think that love is the only thing that ­matters. But as I look with affection at all my Christmas cards on the mantelpiece there is a small cloud – an uncertainty, a grief, I suppose – on my horizon.

I have a happy marriage and I am very close to my family, especially my brother. But I have realised I am not good at female friendships. In fact, I have barely any female friends left.

In the past two years, I have dropped almost all of them. I suspect it has something to do with the menopause, which is a sort of hormonal equivalent of Christmas – a taking stock of what matters – and, famously, the menopause is when women start saying no to things that make them unhappy.

I have learnt to say no and so this year I faced Christmas with female acquaintances but no real female friends, or at least none of the intimate, gut-spilling Sex And The City kind, the sort that feel like love affairs. I wrote far fewer cards this Christmas, that’s for sure.

The first to go was Alice. We met at university. She wasn’t warm but she was very clever – at least she said she was, and I believed her. I was attracted to her courage – she could be very rude about other students and even teachers – and her air of ‘I’m the best person in this room’.

Now in my 50s, of course I look back and think: Am I drawn to raving narcissists? But at the time I thought she was dazzling: The most interesting, the most witty. She didn’t care what people thought of her, and I cared desperately what people thought of me.

Yet when I think about it, she was never kind. She was always there with a put-down (particularly about other people’s academic work, her speciality). But I was attracted to the sheer force of her and, as she got older, she seemed to mellow. Or I thought she did.

After university, we would ­sometimes go on holiday together. I was often single, and she always was. What man could live up to her impossible standards? (In ­retrospect, I think maybe she was very lonely.)

Her conversation was dazzling. But it was her way or the highway. If she wanted to go for an expensive dinner we did, even if I couldn’t really afford it. If she wanted to go to an art gallery for four hours (an hour will do me) we did.

One day in Paris, she opened the curtains of the hotel at dawn and bright sunlight woke me instantly. It was an obviously selfish thing to do and even more so given the context. I had a young baby at the time – this was a girls’ weekend, but she wouldn’t have called it that – and I needed the break.

But in retrospect, she didn’t just ignore my need for sleep. To her, that need didn’t really exist. Was I even real to her?

I would cope by sulking – I am afraid of confrontation and was afraid of her tongue – or not talking to her for a bit. She never noticed.

Things came to a head last year, just before Christmas. Because she has a high-paying job in sales and no children to spend it on, Alice likes to rent a big house for her birthday and invite lots of people she knows.

I used to think she did this because she was generous – she would never let us pay for our accommodation – but I now think she did it so she could simply boss us all around: Queen for a weekend.

The flashpoint was food which, in retrospect, is typical. Food is love, specifically a mother’s love.

I had promised to cook dinner for all these strangers, but some of them said they were leaving early, and she asked me to cook lunch for them instead. I said I couldn’t – a rare case of my standing up for myself around her – because I had a piece of work to do, and she knew that.

She sulked and so I gave in, saying I would get the work in late. I even made her breakfast to make up for initially saying I couldn’t do what she wanted. I shopped and I cooked and I cleaned up while fretting about the work, and at some point I looked down at my hands – the hands of a woman in her 50s, not a bullied child – and thought: What the hell am I doing here? Aren’t I a bit old to be playing Cinderella?

I didn’t say anything. I still feared her tongue. The next morning, I kissed her goodbye, and then blocked her on email and phone. I haven’t spoken to her since, and I feel only relief.

The next is Leanda. I met her through work. She was young and keen. She love-bombed me. She wasn’t subtle. ‘I want to be you!’ she would say. ‘You’re so brilliant! Tell me your secrets.’

I should have run a mile, but I was flattered by the attention. I learnt she had a very difficult relationship with her mother – Alice did too – and I think I became a substitute for her.

Leanda’s mother had a pattern – she would love-bomb her and then ignore Leanda for months – and, essentially, Leanda did the same to me.

One minute I was her best friend, the person she couldn’t do without, the next she would ghost me for months. She would come to stay – her life was always falling apart; it was as if she couldn’t bear to settle anywhere – and charm me. She had a gift for fun, while I am more uptight and conventional.

Join the debate

What makes someone a truly toxic friend, and when is cutting them out the right thing to do?

Go to comments

She would light up my life, but then something would upset her: Usually a small word of criticism or asking her to do a small chore. (She was living with us for a while.) And then she would flee in the night like Mary Poppins, and I would miss her.

So, I would call her up and ­apologise and it would start again: She would behave like a teenager, telling me my clothes were ­unfashionable, or I was fat, and I would be the soothing older friend, trying to organise her life to make it less chaotic, while ­feeling very controlling.

It came to a head in the spring. I am married, but I learnt Leanda was sleeping with a man I had been very much in love with in my 20s. They’d met at a dinner party I’d hosted.

I don’t think I’d have minded had my relationship with this man been a fleeting thing, but I had really loved him and when he left me I was devastated.

This felt a bit too much like wanting to be me, and I thought of the classic Bette Davis film All About Eve, where a young woman – Eve – insinuates her way into every aspect of Margo’s life (Margo is played by Bette, and she is magnificent).

I realise now I simply became Leanda’s mother: She both loves and hates me and, though this hurts me, I can’t really hold it against her. Everything we learn about friendship and parenting, we learn when we are young.

But I can protect myself from that feeling that I am hated. So, the next time she ghosted me – it was as regular as a clock by the end – I didn’t cajole or soothe her back into the friendship. I ghosted her back.

I know ghosting is a bad way to end things. I wonder if it is particularly female. Women are brought up to be pleasing, and it’s very hard to speak your anger. I still miss her – but I also refuse to be a martyr.

The third friend was Petra: Like Alice, another dazzling ­intellectual, who spouted ideas and anecdotes and made me feel alive.

Petra is a political activist working for a charity: Over the years she has gone from mildly Left-wing to full Trans-Palestine-­Extinction Rebellion nut.

Before Brexit we were vaguely aligned, though she was always selfish. (When we went to the seaside for the day with my young baby, she didn’t even offer to watch the baby for five minutes so I could have a swim. She just gambolled in the waves laughing.) But since Brexit she has cleaved to the idea that everyone who votes Tory or Leave is irredeemably evil and not to be spoken to, while I think that a liberal society must have polite debate or it ceases to exist.

Read More

The hell of a toxic family Christmas with a narcissist mother: SUSANNAH JOWITT

One morning last spring she sent me a text with a link about some Tory policy. ‘Don’t you think this is disgusting?’ The answer is – not really, and it is 9am. I sent a non-committal text back. It wasn’t good enough. She started texting angrily.

Eventually I replied: I don’t agree. More angry texts, and then she told me that only her parents made her feel this bad. Was this dialogue even with me or was it with her parents? Again? Then she said I am a bad mother, and she felt sorry for my children because I am their mother. I told her to leave me alone. (I thought: Get some therapy.) She wrote ever madder posts on X, then she came off the platform altogether, and I have no idea how she is now.

I now see this has been a ­pattern all my life.

There was Lauren, an alcoholic, who always asked me for help with her drinking, but seemed to hate me for it.

Or my flatmate Sarah who, when she got off with a boy we both liked, crowed at me: He wants me, not you, get over it.

When I remember them now, I think of a line by Martin Amis: ‘Your friends are strangers and always were.’

Now I look around and they are not just strangers but gone for ever. How do I feel with a cupboard empty of female friends?

In truth, happier. I am sorry for the way the friendships ended – the ghosting particularly doesn’t sit well with me.

But if you are afraid to tell your friends they have hurt you, perhaps they aren’t the friends you need. They have my address. Why don’t they write and say they are sorry? The answer is: Because they are narcissists, they aren’t sorry, and they don’t know what they have done.

I realise now I am a chronic people pleaser – letting Alice and Petra bully me, and Leanda leave and come back and leave again – are lessons I learnt in childhood, the first from my mother, the second from my ever-absent father.

But I have more power now. And I can honestly say as I look forward to the New Year, I feel more peaceful than I ever have.

That’s a Christmas present I will cherish.

Abigail Parker is a pseudonym. All names and identifying details have been changed