Free Therapy!

2011 will go down in history as the year that I did a complete overhaul of my life. Starting with finally seeking treatment for the ADHD, and then on to the weight loss and health thing (down 37 pounds), finding a therapist (which is still sort of a work in progress), successfully living 100% on my own (no roommates) for the very first time, teaching myself to properly manage my finances (my bills actually get paid on time now), and I'm about to finally go back to school in August.
It has been a really jam packed 8 months and I feel like I've accomplished so much, but I still feel like I have so much more work to do and I think it's because there's a very important relationship that went to shit this year and it's just sort of dangling there with it's guts ripped out. It either needs to be buried, or put back together. The problem is that I can't do it by myself.
My best friend of the last 15 years married a guy she met on the internet. Due to the things that she told me about him when she first met him I was a little skeptical as to why she would even want to dedicate any of her time to this person, much less the rest of her life. That being said, it is not in my nature to keep my mouth shut and politely nod at someone just to avoid upsetting them, especially if that person is important to me, so when she told me that she was moving in with him really soon after they met I (surprisingly) didn't say anything. I kept telling myself, " At least she's not marrying him." Then she told me that if he got deployed they were going to get married. I'm not exactly sure what I said to her, but I'm pretty sure I basically begged her not to marry him. The divorce rate is at least 50%, also, the whole marrying a soldier before he goes off to war thing is really romantic, but the problem here is that soldier eventually (hopefully) comes home, and then it's real life with a guy you barely know. Obviously these are my opinions (except for the divorce rate thing, I'm pretty sure that's fact), but how could I possibly consider myself a friend if I didn't try and stop her from what I thought was the biggest mistake of her life? I would want my friends to tell me if the roles were reversed. I didn't expect her to listen to me, but still.
So one day we met up for lunch and before I've even really sat down she's blurts out that she got married the week before. I honestly don't think that I've ever been that hurt before in my whole life. This is the person that I've spent 80% of all of my time with since we were 14, the person who was already designated the maid of honor at my wedding, and vice versa, the person who's parents were nearly as close to me as my own... and she got married, without inviting me, without even telling me. It's been a year and it still makes me want to cry. It's not even like it was a secret, she told a couple of our other friends, but she mentions it casually to me over lunch a week later. No apology, no "I wish you could've been there", nothing.

What do you do with that? What do you do when the one person in pretty much your whole life that you ever really counted on looks you in the eye and basically says you just didn't matter enough to really count? That yeah, you may have 15 years of a ridiculously close friendship between you, but it no longer means anything? 

If you're me you cry for about a week, and then you figure you can pretend like you're over it until you actually get over it. You plan your "best friend" a surprise birthday lunch with as many of her other friends as you can pull together in an attempt to cheer her up because you know she must be bummed about her husband going overseas for a whole year. And then you don't hear from her for a couple months.

Whenever we would talk and she would tell me about their relationship it would inevitably lead to me asking her questions like, "Why would you put up with that?" and "How do you not see all of these things as blaring red signs?". Needless to say new husband came with his own special set of quirks including jealousy, control issues, and the bad habit of judging pretty much every move she made and then giving her massive guilt trips about her decisions. So, I guess, instead of just not telling me all these negative things about him she decided it would be easiest to just stop speaking to me, or so I thought that was the reason. I later found out that he thought I was a bad influence on her, and had been giving her so much shit (over the phone) whenever she was going to see me that she found it easier to just not see me, or talk to me.
This is where I started being stupid (i think). Instead of just accepting the fact that she had obviously decided I wasn't important enough to be a part of her life I eventually contacted her to talk it over. I guess I should've just let it go and accepted that maybe things just change, and there wasn't room for me in her life anymore but I didn't. Like I said: stupid. I can't even say that that's the last time I did that either, we've had probably three more of those horrible phone conversations since then where everyone gets all weepy and I have to explain to her again that I love and support her no matter what, but she should know me better than to expect me not to speak up about things, especially if those things involve her being treated badly. The conversations also include her telling me that she's been avoiding me because she can't keep us both (me and him) happy. Maybe that sounds a little fucked to you? It did to me. Apparently her having a relationship with me was causing strain between the two of them. The one time in the past year and a half that we've actually hung out, I went to her house to pick her up and had to wait a half an hour while she paced around her house listening to him bitch and moan on the phone about how he didn't want her to go out. He had been giving her shit for the past two days about it, to the point that while she was pacing around the house listening to him be a dick she was drinking an entire bottle of wine (straight from the bottle at 11am) just to deal with him. Sounds healthy, right? Also, he gave her a curfew. She had to be home every night at 9, otherwise he would worry too much.

*You can't see it, but right now I'm doing the international sign for cuckoo*

All of this is becoming a little ranty. I'll try and condense...

So basically over the year that he was gone she stopped seeing me and speaking to me altogether. She said she was coming to my birthday party and then bailed at the last minute, stating that she couldn't afford it. Which was awesome because the next day she posted on facebook about going out for sushi, and a getting her nails done. My birthday activity was snow tubing (very risque!), and it cost $20. He didn't want her to go, that's what happened.

So right now I'd like to say that I gave up.

 I almost did.

Basically, at this point, she's accepted a couple invitations to hang out and then blown me off at the last minute (via facebook email!!) because of "forgotten family obligations", which turned out later to really mean that she just didn't want to deal with the situation (that's what she told some other friends of ours).

Maybe you're thinking that she doesn't want to see me because I'm constantly pointing out what's wrong with her relationship, and how much I don't approve. Well you're wrong. I keep it to myself. What I don't keep to myself however is just how many gigantic shits she has taken on our friendship since this whole thing started, and I won't start keeping it to myself until she actually deals with it. I may be stupid enough to keep thinking that we can actually have a friendship again, in spite of what EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HAS BEEN INVOLVED IN SOME WAY HAS TOLD ME! In spite of the fact that she doesn't seem to care at all. I may be that stupid, but I'm not just going to shut my mouth and nod and smile at her like everyone else does. All of our other friends will do that, and then behind her back talk about how ridiculous this all is, how scared they are for her, and how unimpressive in virtually every way they find her new husband to be, etc etc etc...

I may stab you repeatedly with a very dull knife, but at least I have the fucking courtesy to do it to your face.

When I started writing this post I was thinking that I might end with a question, or a request for advice. But now I just think that I'm done. I would never in my life let a man treat me like this, why the hell am I letting my best friend do it? There is nothing any of you could say that I don't already know.

I'm just being stupid, and in this year of overhaul and renewal this is one of the biggest things that I need to straighten out. I need to let it go and detach myself because honestly, if she was going to figure out that our friendship meant anything to her she'd have done it by now, right?

I think so too.