Friendship Triangles, Envy, Competition, and Ghosting with Guest Christie Tate
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I have author, Christie Tate, back on the show! I have been so eager for this conversation. We are talking about Christie’s newest memoir, B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found.
We’re focusing on friendship triangles, envy, jealousy, competition, and ghosting–all issues that come up in the book.
You might know Christie as the author of the fantastic memoir Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life. It was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon book club pick. You might know her from a previous episode of this podcast where we talked about revealing too much too soon with new friends. I can’t wait for you to hear our newest chat.
FIND EPISODE #47 ANYWHERE YOU LISTEN TO PODCASTS!
Detailed Highlights from my conversation with Christie:
An Overview of BFF and the origins of the book:
Nina: I would love for you to give people an overview in your words.
Christie: I had the experience that I spent a lot of my late teens, all of my 20s, and a big part of my 30s focused on getting myself straightened out romantically. While I was doing that, friendships were on the back burner. They were like my emergency calls when the boy broke up with me, but I didn’t really put a ton of energy into them. When I finally settled down with my now husband, all of a sudden I looked around and I realized that I had as much work to do on my friends as had done to get him in my life as my healthy partner. And I knew that there were lots of ghosts. I would refer to my life as a friendship graveyard. I’d been very careless, very hot and cold. I wanted to work on that, and the time was ripe at the ripe old age of 35. So it’s never too late. It’s something I want readers to know.
Nina: From the reader point of view, they’re introduced to the story through your friend Meredith. Can you explain a little bit about that?
Christie: Right when I settled down, this woman in this 12-step program that I went to every week, I’d known her for years–she was not really on my radar, as a friend–she was a nice lady in a recovery program. She tapped me on the shoulder and she said, “Well, now that you have settled down and maybe found your person, now it’s time to work on friendship.” And I was offended and afraid, but inside when she said that, it rang like a gong. And she offered to work on friendships with me, She had just settled down too.
We both had the idea that we sort of sucked at friendship and wished we were better. And she’s like, I think we need to change the narrative. And the book is about how together, shoulder to shoulder, we worked on the lies that we told ourselves, our bad habits, and our childhood traumas that were impacting our ability to bond with other women. We just went real deep. Just two amateur lady friends, working on friendship. And it changed my life.
Nina: I underlined so many quotes and I really had to control myself to what I wanted to bring here, but I have one appropriate for this moment. I appreciated you pointing out in the book that women almost don’t have a chance to do friendship successfully from the get-go. It’s like we all really have so much to work on and we had to push ourselves past that.
And you wrote that after having your daughter, and these are your words now,
“I was carrying around a baby girl and listening to strangers, colleagues, friends, and family members project their fantasies of difficulty and drama onto her tiny fetal head. I felt compassion for all of us. Before we take our first breath, we are all written to a script about our difficult personalities, our emotional volatility, our fraught relationships, our propensity for so-called drama.”
Christie: I am getting heated thinking about it because I remember that from before my daughter even took her first breath. Everyone was talking about the drama, the middle school, the friends. Interestingly, reality sort of reflects some of that. But is that because we’re telling girls since before they can breathe that this is going to be hard and you’re going to be nasty to each other? That is not helping any of these girls navigate tricky, dynamic, rich areas of friendship. I think it’s shunting girls into bad habits and locking them into this narrative when we need to give them more space. We need to give it to ourselves and to them.
Nina: And we need to give them a lot of grace for the feelings we’re going to talk about today, like envy, jealousy, and this sense of competition instead of denying they exist. What I loved about your book is that you are talking about things we all feel. We do all have issues with feeling envious, jealous, and we’re going to separate those in a second. We feel that we are in competition with people, but to pretend we don’t doesn’t help.
Separating jealousy and envy
Christie: Jealousy is if there’s a triangle. If I’m jealous that my husband is flirting with Nina, I’m jealous of Nina. But if I’m just jealous that Nina is perky and has this podcast and knows herself and is big and expansive a person in the world, then I’m envious of her. My whole life really, until I wrote this book and had to nail down the language, I just used the word jealousy. Really what I’ve struggled the most with is envy–wishing to have the great things that seem to go effortlessly to my women friends. That’s envy. That’s my understanding.
Nina: I understand it that way too, and I think actually both come up in the book a lot. The friendship triangles–that’s more the jealousy, but there is envy, too.
Friendship Triangles
- We discussed the friendship triangles that come up in the book throughout Christie’s life.
- We agreed it would get exhausting for two members of a triangle to constantly be reassuring the third.
Christie:
“Triangles exist. There’s a reason why if you say the word triangle to a woman, she’s like, not good, not a good configuration. And everybody knows that. It’s a real dicey shape.”
Patterns in relationships we need to solve eventually so they can stop vexing us!
Nina: I have so many quotes from Meredith, but just in my own words, she points out a few times that we all have patterns and that certain relationship issues just keep coming up again and again. So it was the cheerleading and then Emily and Marni, and you didn’t really have a chance to solve the triangle issue for yourself with Emily and Marni because they had a friendship breakup, which is why it probably comes up again later with other people in the book. And I believe that too. As a spiritual person, that certain relationships come into our life in different forms until we learn to solve that issue. And it could be romantic, friendship, family, it doesn’t matter. We run into these same issues of triangles and jealousy and envy and competition.
Christie: It is ironic that Meredith was always telling me it’s a cycle. She’d say, you’ll get a chance to have this exact same situation and act differently. And I would think to myself, yeah, really. And then it turns out it was with her and my frenemy of all frenemies. And I am still so humbled that whatever work that Meredith and I had done, I did get my chance to do it again. When Meredith was sick, I knew it was going to be a problem because there were lots of potential triangles. Of course I wanted to be there and I didn’t want anyone else to be there, that was my first impulse. But very close next to that or running parallel to that was my love for Meredith and wanting her to have what she needed and that trust that I didn’t have with Marni and Emily, I was able to have it years later, with Anna and Meredith. This woman who I struggled mightily with was the one to call me and tell me that Meredith had passed away. And I just felt nothing but love. And I was so afraid that when that happened, I would just be too busy being jealous. And I didn’t have that. It was pure.
A bit more on envy
Nina: I love that you got to that moment. I don’t want to skip over Anna because Anna is such a good example of envy and she’s just one person, but I feel like we all probably have an Anna.
Christie: Anna is a really good person. People really love. I really loved her and so did my friends. She was goodness. It felt much more complicated to be envious emotionally by someone who was just a good person, a good friend to me who was just living her life. And I’m secretly in the corner, like a hamster on a wheel with my rabid envy of everything about her. I mean, she is great and wonderful and also I was bringing a lot of delusional black and white distorted thinking into the relationship, which eventually did get in the way. It’s not true that I was able to just hide that and just hope that went away and the relationship would not suffer. That is not how it worked.
Nina: Well, maybe if we admitted those things. . . as we think about solutions to this kind of stuff, maybe things wouldn’t get so out of hand and friendships wouldn’t have to end necessarily if we could just say, I find myself so envious of you, so if I sometimes don’t ask about your trip, or I, you know, it’s, it’s not cause I don’t care. I’m probably just dealing with my own, I mean, I don’t even know how you would say that, but
We also talked about:
- whether it would diffuse the envy to admit to a friend you’re feeling envious
- helping our kids understand the realities of the “popular” group
- Christie’s friendship story starting back with the original relationships in her life–with a triangle in the home
- how we stick to feelings that are familiar even if those feelings are serving us
Competition
Christie: I think where competition has been most problematic starts back at the fact that I haven’t felt entitled to my desires, my hungers and my ambitions. Competition for me stems from I want, I’m hungry for, I want to go for this thing. And because that’s sort of unspeakable, I think I have the idea that that’s not very feminine, that it’s not attractive to be so hungry and ambitious. That’s some socialization that I’m working to shed. . . It becomes not a shared experience. . . It goes all the way back to the most gendered thing ever. I wasn’t allowed to want. So it was a secret and then it was like a secret loss when I didn’t get it. And as I’ve been a little bit shoutier, I want things. I want other people to want things too. It became okay to truly root for someone else when I was able to own what I wanted and let them root for me. But if it’s not a shared experience, I’m in so much trouble.
Ghosting
Nina: You are so comfortable understanding yourself. That comes through in both books and I think a lot of people can learn from that. I wanna tell you something totally different topic from triangles or envy. I appreciated the point of view from somebody who has done the ghosting, because I was ghosted by a very close friend. And I get so many letters from people who have been ghosted or from people who suspect they’re about to be ghosted. And it’s very rare to get your point of view. You acknowledged in there that you also missed the friendships in some cases. I appreciated that.
Christie: I have so many feelings about ghosting. I’ve had a ton of conversations about it, and I have never talked to another ghoster, not in a friendship. I can’t be the only friend who has ghosted. I hope I would not do it today, but I did not have the skills for anything except vaporization. I did not have the skills, and I don’t like that I have that in my history at all. Where are the other ghosts? Email me, guys. Tell me your ghosting stories.
Nina: I should tell my old friend. I thought of her a lot when I read your book and it was actually really helpful, and it actually gave me compassion for my old friend. Instead of anger, it gave me compassion to consider maybe that was all she could do at the time.
Christie: The relationships, the ones that I write about with my high school friends, I drifted away out of shame. I didn’t have the word shame yet. I hadn’t been to therapy. I was just like mortified by who I was, and I was so lost and I just couldn’t bear what I perceived as their shininess. It was easier to drift. But when I drifted away from a close friend when I was a new mom, I didn’t have the bandwidth. And when I think back to that one–we’ve since reconnected–I too have compassion for me and for her. I remember thinking there’s no way out. We have trapped each other and somebody has to throw open the window and jump. And that’s how I thought of it as kind of an act of mercy, even though from her vantage point, it looks like it’s just pure chicken shit.
The circle of friendship instead of a triangle
Nina: I wanted to end with the image of the circle. Triangles do come up a lot in the book and they come up a lot in our lives. but why don’t you explain the circle when Meredith dies.
Christie: I really felt the full impact of our work and the stunning gifts of my friendship with Meredith when she’d passed away. And she had a lot of friends. We had mutual friends, but we never hung out really in a group. . . I’d spent my life trying to discern the pecking order and rise or not fall down. And what I realized around Meredith’s death and planning her memorial service and all of us coming together is that I was visualizing a circle where there is no hierarchy. I was like, oh my God, the solution is a circle. It’s a circle that way there’s no jockeying. There’s just holding hands and moving around the circle. . . The triangle had softened into a circle and it couldn’t hurt me anymore. And that was because the shape in my head had changed. And then guess what? The way that I operated in the world also changed. I don’t know which came first, but I’m so glad that I arrived at the circle and was able to let go of the hierarchy and the triangle that had dogged me.
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