Hi Captain,
I (she/her) tried to end a friendship with my neighbor, "Anne" (she/her), and now I don't know how to handle the fallout. Since she literally lives next door, I can't avoid her attempts to reconnect like I might someone else in this situation. How can I handle the awkwardness? Should I accept her attempts to reconnect in the hopes of neighborly peace?
The backstory: I've lived next to Anne for 5 years. I'm in my 20s and she's in her 50s, around my mother's age. As soon as I moved in, she glommed onto me as a friend and started regularly inviting me over to her place AND inviting herself over to mine.I initially assumed she was just lonely and putting up with her would be a nice and neighborly thing to do. This was a huge mistake.
Anne is a walking drama-bomb. Her loneliness is probably related to her tendency to alienate friends. She constantly fights with her husband and wants me to be her shoulder to cry on. She complains about any and everything, often couching her words as "suggestions" or "jokes." She's made little comments about everything from how I clean my house to what I named my dog to the length of my shorts!
If she's upset about something (which is frequently), she'll take that out on the nearest person—often me. I've literally been relaxing in my yard when she pops her head over the fence to SHOUT at me with no context. If I push back against her complaints or offer my own suggestions, she'll snap at me.This all came to a head one day when she lashed out at my husband. He calmly told her he didn't appreciate this, and she did a "lalalala can't hear you" routine, putting her hands over her ears and storming away. It was seeing her behave like this that made it click for me—Anne is Not Okay and I don't want to put up with her bs any longer.
I texted her and told her that seeing that outburst made me realize that this relationship wasn't working for me. I told her I'd like to maintain a civil neighborly relationship but not be friends. She quickly flipped back to being friendly and begged me to reconsider and explain why I felt this way. I told her firmly that I really didn't like being yelled at and that my decision was final. She flipped back, sending a torrent of angry texts that really cemented my decision.
Since then, about once a month she texts a conciliatory message. The closest she's come to an apology is "I'm sorry if you were bothered" with no mention of WHY I might have been bothered, or by WHOM. I've also heard from other neighbors that she's pushing them to work on me and try to fix our relationship.This is all so bizarre, and I can't get my head around a woman my mother's age acting like a petulant teen. I do NOT want to be friends, and I don't understand why she's pursuing me like this.
My husband thinks I should let this all go, because running into her is intensely awkward and we see her several times a week. My other neighbors also tend to fall on the side of "forgive and forget" because they don't want to be roped into this any more than they already are. What on earth can I do?? I'm not able to move, so I've got to figure this out.
Thank you!
Hello, and thank you for your question! I want you to consider that what you should do about this whole Anne situation might be nothing. Absolutely jack shit. Sweet fuck-all, except ride it out and wait for Anne to lose interest and for your neighbors to realize that being nice doesn't make you a pushover. Every time you respond to Anne, even if it's to remind her to leave you alone, you just re-confirm that it takes this much effort to reach you. You gotta wait her out. And every time you respond about Anne, you give credence to the lie that this is your fault somehow.
When your husband suggests that you fix this, is he volunteering to step into the role of Anne Whisperer and Yelling Bud himself? Next time he brings it up, try suggesting that you give Anne his number and see how he responds. "I'm going to text her right now with your number and tell her how much you miss your talks. Problem solved!"
If he's not in love with this idea, but he expects *you* to hang out with Anne, then he gets to shut up about this for the rest of time.
And what about these neighbors who are so deeply concerned about neighborhood harmony? Are they inviting Anne over for tea, sympathy, and yelling for the sake of peace on the block? Maybe next time one of them corrals you about it, try saying, "Anne and I just weren't compatible as friends, but she's so lucky to have you in her corner!" Especially if it's another person who has lived on the block long before you, don't be afraid to get in there and twist that knife. "It's so funny, when I first moved here, Anne said she didn't have any friends in the neighborhood. I knew that couldn't be right, and here you are, the #1 Anne-fan all along! It was best that she and I part ways, but I'm so happy you have each other to lean on."
They want you to be friends with someone they avoid like the plague? That's adorable! Now they can learn how it feels to bounce right back under the same bus they tried to toss you under. (Seriously, nothing shuts up a volunteller faster than treating them like they volunteered to do whatever bullshit they tried to assign you and thanking them for their service.) "Oh, you're so right, I'm very new at all of this. But you! You've lived here forever and you're clearly amazing at all this stuff. Anne's very lucky to have a friend like you. If she tries to invite herself over to my place again, I'll send her your way, thanks so much for stepping up!" Follow it up with a giant smile and a subject change about the most anodyne topic you can think of and watch the color drain out of their faces as they try to come up with an excuse for why it has to be you. No mercy! "Oh, you know I don't like to talk about people when they aren't here, but while I've got you, where did you find the guy who built your deck? We're thinking about replacing ours."
Shorter version: "Oh, you know Anne, bless her heart. Anyway, how's your garden coming along? Plant anything good this year?" If you're not from "bless your heart" territory, use the Yankee version of "interesting" that could mean "I found that genuinely interesting" or could mean "I would rather be fed face-first into a wood-chipper than experience that again" and it's left to the listener to decide which kind of interesting you meant. "Oh, Anne talked to you, about me? Interesting. Wait, before I forget, did you decide on a weekend for the neighborhood yard sale? I want to put it on my calendar." Be consistent, cheerful, and boring.
You sound like a nice lady. Minus Anne, your neighbors are probably all very nice people. And right now, everybody is trying to weaponize niceness against you. They are assigning you a Niceness Duty that none of them want for themselves. Fuck that. Before you accept the title of Neighborhood Mean Girl, kindly recall that every single person who moved here before you all came to the same exact conclusion about Anne that you did. They're not doing any of this for Anne, they would like you to do the nice thing and sacrifice your peace for their comfort so that they do not have to deal with Anne anymore, and they think it's easier to pressure you to give in than it is to deal with Anne.
The way to get this over with is to show them that they are incredibly wrong about that. You can beat them at this game without being rude or mean to anyone. You just nice 'em right back even harder without giving up a centimeter of your boundaries. As long as Anne is polite to you in public, you'll be polite back, but there is no "peaceful" world where things go back to how they were before. If others want "peace" so bad, they can tell Anne to leave you alone already or they can deal with her themselves.
If that doesn't do the trick after a couple of polite redirects, and somebody really pushes, I want you to try two things: 1) Mentally tag this person as unsafe. They do not understand boundaries, or they do and they just think you don't get to have any. From now on, they get the same treatment Anne gets: Polite waves and nods from a distance, no actual information about you, and no gossip about others that you wouldn't want sky-written above your home. 2) One time, I want you to drop the nice act, look them right in the eyes, and say: "I've changed the subject three times now, but you keep changing it back. Are *we* going to have a problem?" Hold the eye contact and stay quiet after you say "a problem?" so the silence can hang there long enough for them to mumble an apology and get off your lawn. If they avoid you for a little while after that, let them. Word will get around that you don't do well with people who can't take no for an answer.
Awkwardness is survivable. It is okay if you and Anne never make peace, and it is okay if other people feel weird about that. It is not okay for Anne to harass you and it is not okay for other people to harass you about her. And lest you write me off as a city dweller who just has no idea how close-knit neighborhoods work, know that I was raised in a tiny town surrounded by neighbors whose grudges had great-grand grudges that dated back to Revolutionary War times. My dad is a giant extrovert, and when he and my mom first moved there in the 1970s they all jumped at the chance to clue him in on longstanding feuds. As a kid, I walked their dogs and picked their blueberries and shoveled their front walks, and they made me homemade cider donuts and sewed me dolls they stuffed with the scraps from their grandma's rag bags and --in at least one case--human hair. In the process, they told me of their peeves: Who left whom at the altar back when the years started with 18--, who tapped whose maple trees secretly at night so there was no syrup one year, who got left out of the family tree that shouldn't have and who got snuck in instead, who swore up and down she was a war widow but nobody ever saw a husband alive or dead. These people hated each other's guts, but they still said a polite hello at church and took grudging bites of each other's pot luck offerings and tilled each other's fields after their men died because to do otherwise would be un-neighborly. If your neighborhood does not yet have a cranky old lady who takes no shit and tells no lies, you will have to become her. The rest of them WILL deal.
Over the years my dad has become the neighborhood old-timer, with grudges of his own. Here's one for your entertainment: He knows every neighbor's car by sight and if he's out in the yard he waves whenever they drive by. Every neighbor. Every time. Without fail. There is one lady who never waves back, and my dad has been salty about this for as long as I have been alive."Oh, you know Mrs. _______. She's a real cold person."
Is Mrs. _______a real cold person? Has she disliked my dad for fifty years running? Is she perhaps blinded by the glare when she comes over the hill and just doesn't see him clearly? Did she stop checking every yard she passes for waving neighbors 49-odd years ago? I will never know, but having a renewable source of inconsequential grievance seems to be one of my dad's great joys. She's probably adding years to his life, and if she waves now he might collapse from shock, so I hope she stays real cold. .
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