Sometimes, I think it’s important to recognise that you’ve been defeated. You can make excuses to yourself all you like, but in the end you have to realise that it’s a lost cause. When a situation has degenerated to this point, you can cut your losses and move on, or you can fight to the death when you don’t stand a chance. What Hillary Clinton and I have in common is our unwarranted devotion to option #2. Clinton gave up in her goal today. Perhaps I need to follow her example.

Of course, unlike Hillary Clinton, my obstinance wasn’t caused by unbridled ambition. God forbid I should want to rule a country! No, my only aim was to salvage a friendship on the rocks. I probably shouldn’t have bothered; the source of the conflict is that we have absolutely nothing in common, and somehow failed to notice for one and a half years.

My friend is a wonderful person, which is why I couldn’t let myself give up on our friendship so easily. She’s kind1 and she makes me laugh; the problem is that talking to her is so often a bore and even a frustration. Our interests are just too wildly incompatible. She loves drama and performance, and lives and breathes for the school play. On the other hand, my main interest is taking advantage of internationalism, and being a “citizen of the world”. I want to hear about life in other countries, but I also care about the factors that affect life there — history, politics, culture, language, the environment. Neither of us object to the other’s passion, but we certainly don’t care for it. I try my hardest to listen to her rambling about rehearsals, but I can’t force myself to be interested. My friend tries to care about the plight of Cambodians under Pol Pot, or Rwandans in 1994, or Iraqis being needlessly massacred thanks to US idiocy, but she can’t force herself to any more than I can about rehearsals.

I tried to resolve the issues a number of ways. I asked my friend to stop calling me, inviting herself to my house, and talking to me during class — I figured that she would stick to more interesting topics if she had less time to talk to me. It wasn’t entirely successful. Then I asked her outright to limit how much she talked about drama and rehearsals, preferably to only when I brought it up. That request changed nothing except how much my friend resented me — I heard exactly as much about drama and rehearsals. I also told her to tell me if I was annoying, but that took her until today. She resents my “controlling” behaviour, and says she no longer feels free to be herself. As she spoke, it seemed to strike a chord — she was completely accurate in what she said.

Rather than trying to force the friendship to work, I think I need to recognise that it’s time to call it a day. Ideally, we’ll come to some sort of amicable arrangement in which neither of us harbour any lingering resentment towards the other. I’m not sure if this is a realistic hope. I’d like to continue to get along with her and to chat on occasion, but daily is too often, and four or five times daily is way too often. I’m beginning to realise, though, that (as with Hillary Clinton!) my persistence and bloody-mindedness are doing far more harm than good. Something has to give.

  1. Except when she’s too inconsiderate to let me do schoolwork in peace, but that’s a minor quibble [↩]