Bad Friends Are Like Old Bras- Guest Writer!!!!

Hello all - I am so honored to post something written by a wonderful friend of mine.  She is one of the ladies who ran in Atlantic City with me and is also unfortunately dealing with a divorce because of a cheating ex.  She has been such an amazing strength and inspiration to me throughout our whole ordeal.  I honestly don't know what I would have done without this amazing woman.  So when she asked if I could post something that she wrote, I jumped at the chance.  She is doing this post and another one - this is called "Bad Friends Are Like Old Bras" and the next is "The Flying Vagina."  I hope you enjoy her work as much as I did!

Bad friends are like old bras: one can experience loss of support and lift from straps that have been stretched too far for too long and sharp jabs from escaping underwires.  Just as these old bras deserve to be thrown away, so do bad friendships.  I have experienced my fair share of bad friends in my twenties.  I have done what any bat shit crazy woman (girl?) would do – hang on to them for dear life, hoping and pleading that they would be as nice to you as you are to them.  They never changed, but luckily I did. 

You see, over a year ago I discovered that my (now ex) husband was cheating on me with several other women, one of which was my “friend”(aka Flying Vagina - see next post).  Long story short, I divorced that scumbag, and invested in one year of weekly therapy visits.  There are no words to describe the support and love that I have received from my friends during that very difficult year, some of whom were also experiencing difficulties in their marriages.  It helped as much as the therapy did, I swear.  During this time, I developed a sense of my boundaries and a baseline for how I was to be treated by friends, family and most importantly – men. 

Perhaps it is a case of mismanaged expectations.  You tell your friend that you are separated or divorced from your husband because he is a lying, cheating asshole and the only responses that you expected were “you go girl” and “let me know how I can help (soup, Kleenex, flatten tires, where is my baseball bat, etc.). 

Therefore, I was surprised to receive responses varying from empty, half-hearted condolences to complete alienation.  Some were married, some were single, some were close friends and some were distant friends.  I’m not going to go in to specifics here, because as you read this I bet you are recalling all of the things that bad, unsupportive friends have said to you over the years and you know exactly what I am talking about.  Ordinarily, I would have excused these friends’ responses as differences in perspective and kept them on my roster.  But now…

Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That.  Ladies, either step up and support your friends’ decisions or get lost.  Going through a breakup/separation/divorce/foreclosure/move/birth/death is hard enough (and you know that!) and we all need help and support during difficult times.  Do not send nastygrams full of your crazy talk about what we (as separated/divorced/grieving) women should be doing with our lives and postulate about what went wrong in our marriages and what we could have done or should do to make it all better.  We survived our own personal crisis without your “help” and now we will enjoy our freshly constructed, beautiful life without you as well!