Be Excellent To Each Other

If he's trying to turn others against you behind your back, that steps it up a gear into unforgivable cuntery IMO.

I'd be thinking about calling it a day with him at this point.

They might have said the same to him.

I'd rather have one good friend than 100 Kips.

You'd rather have one good friend because you have no friends.

I have 100 Xbox live friends AND excellent eBay feedback.

i voted other...i do wonder if you were as good friends if you thought you where, or that relationship was already coming to an end.. you're clearing not hearing what the other is saying. If you would like to resolve it, probably best to involve a third party/other friend to discover what's the pain behind the anger...

In not quite such strong terms, this is a valid point. That's actively seeking division of friendship.

Whenever my mates have fights I might agree with one side or the other but I don't let it change my relationship with either party. Any fight between them is theirs to sort out as far as I'm concerned; am I unusual in that regard?

No.

Taking sides pretty much sucks and only adds to the problem.
OK I'm no diplomat, but even I try to help patch things over in a non-partisan way when friends fall out, as has happened occasionally.

With variable rates of success.

Tl;dr all the convo but my comment is..fuck sake dude pick up the phone and speak to each other. Or arrange to meet. Honestly. Texts and tweets, it's rather pathetic.

I would have a face to face with him, if he is your best mate (or one of them) it’s worth hammering it out or at least trying to. If the friendship doesn’t survive then so be it, but you should both try.

Great emo band name, btw.

Quickest and easiest solution for maximum respect towards you from all involved:

Go to pub with him.

Buy him a pint and say:

"Sorry mate, I've been out of order, let's put it behind us, eh?"

Shake his hand and it'll be done and dusted just like that.

only I'd probably leave out the "Sorry mate, I've been out of order" part of that and just suggest the whole thing was buried.

He does sound like a bit of a handful though, this mate of yours.

I'd go along with that plan if he hadn't turned into such a nasty-ass psycho over it all, personally I'd really just be wondering if I want this person in my life or not.

Oh, one doesn't ever have to see them after that, at all. It'll diffuse the situation, they think they was in the right all along so bears no ill will (and will most definetly tell others about the apology), and one can walk away beig seen to be the bigger man. Then, just drift away over a period of time, citing family commitments or wanting to spend more time with whores or soemthing, or move to Yorkshire. It's win-win. Obviously, taking this strategy to this conclusion is incredibly cold but it's the path of least resistance. And I'd quite like to have TheVision at Throughsilver and I's soon to be introdcuded monthly 2-4-1 burger nights.

This is an incredibly long and weird way for a shortcut when you could just stop talking to them. You have some strange ideas sometimes.

I think the main point was the way you look to the rest of your mates.

Yes, you can walk away with reputation intact and drop the guy, just over a longer timescale. it's win-win.

I thought the main point was Malia getting more people to eat burgers with.

If it's two for one burgers then we need another person.. Start the auditions!

Well I haven't been specifically invited to the burger auditions so fine if you want to throw away 4 years of internet casual acquaintance. FINE.

YOUR SILENCE SPEAKS VOLUMES

Hang on Trousers, I'm still waiting to hear back from the wife on how I should respond.

What do you know! I haven't been back to lurk here for months and there's an interesting thread to sit and read through. I only came here to look for Ouya opinions. Definitely not too long a post at the start, btw.

Overall, as people have said, it's up to you, man, but it seems from what you've posted you've not really responded to him properly. Face to face sounds sensible if it's possible. In the past I've had arguments with people, dreaded meeting them again and all that has happened is we've shook hands and agreed to put it behind us. To be fair, it does sound like one or two of his posts were a testosterone fuelled version of an apology. He does sound like a dick, as other people have said, but this is the internet, after all. People don't talk proper on tinternet.

In my experience there is a thing with people who have children vs those that don't and that can be a bit of a problem between friends who have grown up together. Those that don't can be real dicks about it- so what I've read isn't all that surprising, but at the same time some parents can be dicks about them having kids. I've never understood the congratulatory 'well done!' you get when you announce that your wife is pregnant. Congratulations! You can have unprotected sex! I am now busy and important. A 'well done!' when your kids turn out well (like playing FFIII instead of Fifa) would be better.

In our house, the buggy is sarcastically called 'the moral high ground'. I make a point of being extra careful not to just charge through as so many people do. I'm sure Mr TheVision is not like this (if you were, you'd have jumped on his comments with shouty righteousness and enjoyed every minute of it), but maybe that was his real point and he just worded it really badly?

I've had an experience of falling out with a childhood friend myself. We were school best friends from the age of about 10, but we ended up in a (shit school) band together. Guess what? He was the singer and I was the guitarist. Except he couldn't really sing. We took it quite seriously, but rarely played any gigs. We jammed at a studio every week & we got a bit of cabin fever really. My take on it at the time was that he had singers disease despite not being able to sing. Over time myself (and the drummer) got better and he kind of got worse and really started acting like a dick. He spoilt it and it just wasn't fun anymore so we just stopped doing it completely & never got back in touch. We never had a fall out, we just didn't go anymore. I found a better band and I've no idea what the other guys did.

With the benefit of hindsight, getting away from him (and going to uni) was the best thing I ever did as I gained massive amounts of self esteem by getting better, more mature friends who actually want me to succeed. But! I also can see that it must have been hard as we expected him to sing all this difficult stuff for four hours a week and I didn't really give a shit that he couldn't sing it. I also I only talked about music and the band whenever we saw each other (I was obsessed) which must have been a pain in the arse.

Does this help? I Don't know. Maybe assess whether it's time to move on or not. Are you better off with or without him?

I don't like mummy mornings either. The bandages get so sweaty when you've been sleeping in them.

Are you still not friends, TheVision?

Ask his wife.

Nope, we're still not friends. Every time I think about it I'm reminded of the nasty messages he sent and I think "Do I really need that in my life?"

Probably not.

His wife tweeted that she “loves her husband and doesn’t give a flying fuck what other people think. If people don’t like you for who you are then tough shit and good fucking riddance to ‘friends’ who actually were never true friends”

So there you go… I haven’t thought much about him but I don’t need the issues in my life.

Good!

Does that mean there's a vacancy? Where do I apply?

Wow, his wife is a real piece of work.

I'll need a spreadsheet filling in first. Do you really think you're up for it?

With that kind of laid back attitude, you're in! When can you start?

Little did you know, I already have. MUWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Hey, I'm already halfway through the application process. I sent in the pictures required and everything...

Is TheVision empowered enough to make that kind of hiring decision?

He'd better refer it to that harlot of a wife of his.

Too soon?

Sooner the better. A good replen plan boosts sales and minimses waste.

Surely this all started because your friend failed to 'like you for who you are'. She's crazy. She's essentially saying good riddance to her own husband.

One of the things I greatly dislike about my alto-Facebook* is the proliferation of posts from people who throw out angry comments, like that wife's tweet, without context. It's a bit of a childish wahwah that's clearly directed at someone specific, who is not necessarily on Facebook and won't see the post (typically because they're too cowardly to direct the comment anywhere the recipient can see it), while at the same time seeking attention from anyone reading. Just a smidge passive-aggressive

Cue responses from people saying 'u ok babes?', and 'wats up? xxxx' whereby the OP may expand with some more vaguities about how 'some people will get what they deserve' or some dippy derpy bollocks like that.

As for your friend (two weeks late to the party here), he sounds like a combination of angry and depressed. He doesn't have very many friends, but his sense of self-esteem is contingent on the perceived respect he gets from them. Any challenge to any comment he makes is seen as a direct attack on him, and is a loss of face. His only hope is to overcompensate with an unnecessarily aggressive backlash in order to make you back down immediately, so as to maintain his sense of self. Immediately threatening to detonate the friendship bomb at the first sign of disagreement is a sign of how critical he sees the friendship and associated respect to be, and he bet heavily you'd rather back down than tell him to fuck off for good.

I almost feel sorry for him, because he is obviously an unhappy person and his tactics have backfired massively. The attempt to have everyone else come down on his side, effectively making it an 'agree with me or you can ALL get to fuck' situation is him going double-or-nothing because the continuation of the argument is massively destructive to his fragile ego and he desperately needed to win just to get back to where he started.

He needed to believe your wife was the source of the disagreement, because to concede that you and only you disagreed with him would be a further damage to his sense of 'control' over you. To believe a third party was the source, and a person who has an unfair advantage over him (being the wife/mother of your child), would be the only scenario in this terrible situation where it wasn't entirely his fault. To blame an overreacting third party is the most acceptable scenario psychologically.

It's all gone wrong, and he's fucked without friends now. To admit he was wrong and beg an apology would be too humbling, so he's more likely to maintain an unhappy silence indefinitely. It's also highly probable that if you reach out, he will be immensely grateful and genuinely apologetic. To make amends properly, by seperately apologising to your wife, for example, would take an incredible measure of will on his part, which is something you should recognise if it happens.

Of course, it's a question of whether you want to remain friends to someone who is this volatile, but be aware it probably comes from a place of unhappiness and a fear of social isolation. I sort of feel sorry for the guy while wanting to slap him over the head for his lack of foresight and for not just apologising in short order right at the start.

Thought on people with kids: Your kids are fascinating to you, and less fascinating to everyone else. Imagine having an annoying friend that does nothing except bang on about a hobby you have no interest in whatsoever, but who continues to harp on about it every time you see them while being completely oblivious to the fact you couldn't care less. That's what it's like. If I one day take up the same hobby, then great, we can chat about it, but otherwise it'd be helpful if you knew when to pipe down. kthxbye.


* My alto-Facebook is a public honeypot account so people can think they've found me when they go searching for me. The account is basically devoid of any real personal information and the friends list is a cavalcade of dipshits and arseholes that I went to school with and never liked/liked me. Their updates are predictably asinine with most of them being just baby pictures of the ugly golums they've managed to pump out, while otherwise appearing to have no life whatsoever.

On the other hand imagine a friend who gets incredibly antagonised at the slightest mention of something you are obviously dead excited about. I don't have kids (yet) but I have noticed that some people get really quite irrationally wound up by the slightest mention of them, to the point of being really quite nasty about it like Mr TheVision's cunt of an ex-friend up there.

Yeah I see what you're saying markg, and ideally everyone could exert a bit of control/awareness.

Pertinent example:

Recently one of my friends has had a baby. Not my kid, so I'm not *that* interested in him, but when I've been hanging out with her I've played with the little dude, fed him from a bottle, burped him, and allowed him to rub snot all over my shirt. So while I definitely don't give a shit about people's babies on Facebook, I'm not entirely inured to the existence of their babies when I know and see them personally.

The other week aforementioned friend invited me to a BBQ at her new house, so I turn down an offer to go go-karing with some other friends on the same day because I knew she really wanted a few people to turn up. It turned out to be a bit of a poor turnout, but unfortunately the only other people to arrive were other parents with kids she'd met at things like these postpartum 'Mummy days'.

The conversation is exclusively about babies, for hours. They talked about them constantly. If the attention of the group wasn't distracted by whatever cooing/screaming one of the babies was making, it was some discussion about baby shit (literally and figuratively). Given I have absolutely nothing to say about the subject, I'm pretty much sitting there quietly, sipping my beer, and pitching in whenever the topic of the conversation allows me to say anything at all.

Afterwards, my friend told me I'd been seen as anti-social at the BBQ because I wasn't 'getting involved' and that I'd come across as miserable. I was pretty fucking angry about that because it demonstrated a complete lack of awareness that if you don't have a baby, constant discussion about them is extremely excluding to everyone else. I wasn't being rude, or moaning, or even doing anything at all. I was sitting quietly with a half-smile while they talked about the state of children's diarrhea and how shitty their nappies can get, oh ho ho ho.

So I just told my friend that, while also reminding her I'd given up what would have been a pretty fun afternoon elsewhere just to be there. We're still talking because I think she got the message, and I learned not to go to anything when it looks like it's just going to be a parent party.

I have two nephews, a niece, and my brother currently has an 'it' on the way, so I have to be tolerant of this shit even though it's pretty fucking boring seeing the daily progress of these small people every day on Facebook. Some understanding that not everyone else finds it quite so fascinatingly awesome would be great though.

Which is what I believe me and my wife have. We had a first birthday party for our Daughter and invited those without children but told them that it would likely be kids so we'd totally understand if they didn't want to come.

But there's some good points there ElephantBanjoGnome... Very well put.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head for me there, EBJ. Good skills.