Terms & Conditions

2

Someone once sent me an email that contained the following:

A Reason, a Season, or a Lifetime

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or
a lifetime. When you figure out which one it is, you
will know what to do for each person.

When someone is in your life for a REASON . . . It is
usually to meet a need you have expressed. They have
come to assist you through a difficulty, to provide you
with guidance and support, to aid you physically,
emotionally, or spiritually. They may seem like a
godsend, and they are! They are there for the reason
you need them to be.

Then, without any wrong doing on your part, or at an
inconvenient time, this person will say or do something
to bring the relationship to an end.

Sometimes they die.
Sometimes they walk away.
Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand.

What we must realise is that our need has been met, our
desire fulfilled, their work is done. And now it is time to move on.

When people come into your life for a SEASON . . .
Because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn.
They bring you an experience of peace, or make you laugh.
They may teach you something you have never done.
They usually give you an unbelievable amount
of joy. Believe it! It is real! But, only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons; things
you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional
foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the
person, and put what you have learned to use in all
other relationships and areas of your life. It is said
that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

Author Unknown

I’ve thought a lot about conditional friendships over the years. It’s usually something I associate with children, you know, “I’ll only be friends with you if you stop being friends with Susie”, or something like that.

But it has happened to me as an adult too. I had a wonderful friend a number of years ago. But she had some upsets in her life and separated from her husband. I was friends with both of them and they lived in a very, very small community of about 250 permanent residents. I went out to visit them once and she was involved with a new guy, he and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye, but we tolerated each other. Then one day I went over to visit her ex and she actually yelled out the door at me and called me a traitor. Later when I sat down to talk with her about it she point blank told me that if I wanted to stay friends with her, I had to like the new guy. Period. To say I was shocked at having a condition like “like him or get out of my life” was an understatement. I told her that you can’t make two people like each other, and that I didn’t think he and I could really ever be buddies but the best we could likely do was to continue tolerating. It wasn’t good enough for her and she basically threw me out of her life. We have patched things to the point where we communicate once in awhile but that’s about it. She’s happy and I’m happy for her, but the damage was done.

Another very good friend pulled a similar stunt on me several years ago. She became involved with a man whom we all saw massive problems with, mainly that he did not even respect her and treated her poorly. He was a petulant little boy in a man’s body and he took out his frustrations on her psychologically. Thankfully not physically though. We went for lunch one day and she gave me an ultimatum, like him or… I was point blank told that I was a lousy friend if I didn’t do this for her. The thing is, I simply can’t be a hypocrite! I told her I loved her, but that everything she said about him and the way he treated her was fundamentally wrong and that I simply could not be around him with his horrible treatment of her and her friends. And she more or less divorced me for several years. Eventually they split and when we talked about it she told me she thought I had ended the friendship. I told her that I had never ended anything, I was always there for her. Many tears later I think we are good.

And now it appears to be happening again, only this time I’m lost because I don’t know the terms and conditions. All I know is that I am being cut out and it appears to be because I am going against what she wants. But she did choose to take it out on me again tonight by “forgetting me” in front of a class of 50…after she called to make sure I’d be there. Guess she wanted to make sure I’d be there to publicly snub and make her point. I suppose if it makes her feel good to act like a four year old that’s her business.

The one commonality to the three of them is that they are all very high-strung people with massive expectations of people…and on some level I think they are (or were) all very unhappy people inside. And the only way they seem capable of dealing with differences in opinions with their friends is to lash out like spoiled children.

My only personal defence against this kind of behaviour is to try to talk it out, and if that doesn’t work, because they are too blind and stubborn to see what they are doing to people around them, to turn and walk away. I’d prefer to retreat and nurse my own hurt than to be continually confronted with passive aggression over a prolonged period.

But it brings me back to the issue of conditional relationships. I always said I don’t do conditional relationships. I don’t set out terms and conditions. But is that really true? The more I think about it, aren’t all relationships conditional on some level? The only difficulty is determining the specifics of the conditions.

Marriage is a relationship conditional on mutual trust and respect. Relationships depend on morals and ethics. Even parent and child relationships have conditions. Conditions may be unstated, but they depend on personal expectations. Being humans we all have expectations and that means that we have underlying conditions on how we interact with the world and the people around us. Ultimately we all have that one thing that will make us turn on another when it occurs. It’s something we can’t change because we are all composed of the sum of our values, actions, thoughts and feelings.

Life in general involves terms and conditions, I suppose it’d be nice to know exactly what they are at the outset. But I can just imagine that conversation…. “I’d love to be your friend, so let’s set out the terms and conditions up front? Here, sign this”

Might not go over so well.