Have I been a lousy friend?

Question

I just sent a very angry email to my friend. The thing is, it was my birthday last week. For my friend's birthday I called her, and sent her a card and a gift package. She, on the other hand, did not bother to send me anything, and she's been offish for weeks - anything I say seems to either make her angry or upset. Whenever we fight she hangs up on me, or leaves. And recently she's ignored my texts and phone calls most of the time, and she went on Holiday for 3 weeks and didn't call me over one week after getting back. Basically, I feel ignored. Friendship is about give and take, but there's no give. She doesn't trust me and she makes promises she doesn't keep. I talked this over with another friend who made me feel like a clingy fool, but I still feel hurt. She never asks how I am or if I enjoyed myself, and hardly seems to care about how I feel at all. Was I wrong to have told her how I felt? Should I have just kept quiet and waited it out, again?

We started fighting when she said she'd been out christmas shopping. i, jokingly said, don't you dare forget me. she in turn got really angry and said she wasn't made of money and did I just use her for presents, which is so untrue. I was already upset since she apparently forgot my birthday and it all ended badly with her storming off and me as a result mouthing off in an email that she never bothered to stick around and fix things and did she give a crap about our friendship at all? in which case why bother talking to me. I've tried time and again to find out what's wrong but she never confides in me - after 3 years she still doesn't trust me.

Answer 1

I think it absolutely depends on whether you'd still like to be friends. It sounds like she puts your relationship on a secondary level. If you're not content to have such a relationship, perhaps you should find another friend, one that shares your feelings about give and take. I'm not telling you to abandon this friend completely, but perhaps to treat it as more of an acquaintance, so you don't feel obligated to emotionally spend so much.