by Liquid
Thank you Civenge for allowing me to guest-write a blog post! I’m super excited to be here and hope to share some insight that may help people.
I want to share an experience of how friends can manifest as toxic, without even knowing it, and the steps I took to rectify the situation.
I’ve had a friend, let’s call him Brian, since I was about 15 years old. I met Brian through my older brother and he was fairly older than me; currently he’s 43 and I’m 31. Brian is who got me into Halo LAN parties, where we all brought our Xbox consoles over to his house and hooked them up and played Halo together. Those were awesome times and I look back fondly on those memories. I used to idolize Brian in a way; I remember thinking this guy is so cool, he has a job at the local pool, plays video games all the time, has a cool car (96 Mustang), and had a great sense of humor.
Brian and I started weight lifting together once I was out of high school, it was also good times and something totally new to me. He has his own complete weight set with a bench press, bars, dumbbells, the works. Now I got to hang out and bond with this dude while doing something that was getting me stronger. We did this for about a year. I eventually had to stop lifting as I went off to college in a town that was about 60 miles away, therefore lifting was no longer feasible. During this time period, Brian got laid off from the pool job as they closed it down due to structural problems, and Brian went through a tough time.
I still hung out with him on some weekends and when I was home during the summer, everything was generally okay and he eventually landed a new job working in HVAC. My relationship with Brian was still a friend, but was a friend I rarely saw once I got home from college except the occasional game night (maybe once every 3-6 months). Every few times visiting him he would throw around the idea of weight lifting again, sometimes directly asking me and sometimes hinting. At the time however, he lived south of me and it was about a 35 minute drive without traffic to his home, it wasn’t something I wanted to commit to as the time investment wasn’t worth it. So I often beat around the issue and said that would be cool but, can’t quite do it. He was bummed, but overall this seemed like an acceptable, realistic answer given the circumstances.
Fast forward to November 2019. Brian had bought a house only 15 minutes from me!
I sent Brian a message one day asking “Hey, did you want to lift together again?” He replied almost immediately! We set up the home gym in his external shed and started lifting within a week or so. I invested a non-insignificant amount of time helping him set the gym up and purchased some additional items to make the gym better. I was so excited, it was a great opportunity to be able to lift weights in the comfort of a home gym, with a reliable partner. Things went well for quite some time, it was nice to have a guy friend to chat with and bond, and I saw no issues.
We lifted 3 days a week, extremely consistently (missing maybe a day a month), for about 7-8 hours per week. As you may imagine, hanging out with someone that often for a week isn’t non-substantial. One day, chatting with my wife, we got into a small argument over some political issue. It ended not so great with me basically saying, “Well, that’s the way it is and the way it’s been for 60 years.” My wife didn’t know how to respond to this, so she said something along the lines of I’m not sure I know you anymore. This was strange for me to hear, to my eyes I didn’t change at all? It seemed she was the one being irrational and not seeing the way things are. However, since my wife and I don’t let things just lay on the back burner, we talked. A lot. This started to shine a spotlight on my relationship with Brian. I was starting to realize, I was becoming a portion of him, and I also started to realize just how toxic he really was.
From this point on, I started noticing things because it was brought to my attention. I started noticing whenever I’d bring up a topic with Brian, he’d immediately turn it either political or negative (usually both). Some examples: My wife and I are likely going to want to have kids, maybe soon! He immediately brought up an obscure political issue in this state about kids and medical consent. I later looked this up myself to verify the information, and found while there was some truth, his explanation distorted the law 5-fold and was meant to stir up controversy. Brian hears these things, usually on the radio or FoxNews and repeats them verbatim as facts.
I want to emphasize, now that I noticed this, everything, and I mean everything had a political slant or negative connotation. My wife and I would start to joke when I got home from lifting, “What’s the latest Brian story now?” There was almost always a story, and if there wasn’t it was the exception. I also realized over the months I had been nodding along with Brian and these stories, implying I agree with his stances. I dug my own self this hole, and didn’t think I could suddenly change it for fear of judgement by him or losing a friend.
I decided to start to taper the conversations, and inject more of what I truly believe. This probably ended up being drastic in his point of view, but I didn’t know how else to transition out of an echo chamber I’d become. It started simple, “Hey, I looked up _blank_ you mentioned the other day, and I couldn’t find the exact statement on their website you said was there?”, Brian: “Oh, they must’ve taken it down then due to backlash.” Two days later: “Yeah, they took it down, it DID say that though.”
Lifting may have only been 7-8 hours per week, but what it had me bring home with me was at least that, if not double with conversations with my wife. Now that I saw the problem head on, what was I to do about it? I got some extra opinions, just in case, from my brother and mom. My brother knew him for years, so he had some really good insight but saw the troubling signs as well. My mom doesn’t know him at all, but was concerned about me hanging out with someone like this. I was so torn. I had known Brian for several years and had a friendship built up over the years. I decided to leave things the same for now, but then came the tipping point one weekend.
Brian wanted to go to the casino to play some blackjack with me, we’d done this a few times before, and I was excited. I went into that day full of joy, ready to hopefully win some money and hang out with my friend. By the end, I was mentally exhausted and joy-less. Brian had blamed another player at the table for him losing $100 at blackjack. The other guy did make bad plays, and in hindsight, yes Brian would’ve won that $100 if the player had made the “correct” blackjack plays. But, like many things in life, hindsight is always perfect vision. The player could’ve actually helped Brian, just as much as hurt him in play. The cards come out of the deck at random order, so it really doesn’t matter what players decide to do.
Brian would not let this go, and would keep saying, “Man he’s losing me money!” He was quite angry. I said along the lines of: I know man, but let’s just move on and not play at this table if you’re worried about him messing up your hands some more. Brian played a few more hands then decided to be done for the day, he ended up winning $125 (came out ahead). “That’s great!” I said, “Man, it’s always great to win huh?” Brian: “Yeah, but that guy cost me $100 with just STUPID plays. There was no reason to double down on a 16 against the dealer 6, STUPID.” I reiterated that we should just learn from this and move on. He dropped me off back at home, and life went on… or so I thought?
Fast forward 2 days, came lifting time. I got there, and almost immediately Brian said, “You know, that guy on Saturday actually cost me $200! Because you have to look at the money I would’ve won and not just what I lost!”… dude it’s time to let it go, move on with life? At this exact point in time, I knew I had to make a change. How can I do it though? This guy depended on me for a lifting partner, and he thought I agreed with him on almost everything. In his eyes, nothing could be wrong right?
After many more conversations with my wife, and waves of guilt flooding through my body, I decided I needed to at least scale back lifting to get my mind away from this toxin. I told him one evening I needed to lift just 2 days a week. He didn’t take this well, he said things are going so well and what caused me to want to scale back? I told him it’s personal and I didn’t want to talk about it. He accepted that answer. He didn’t look me in the eye the rest of the night. This was very tough to do, and uncomfortable. The thing that helped me get through it was my wife and brother. They told me I really don’t owe him anything, and that’s completely true. They said values sometimes diverge and moving on is okay, also true.
I did the 2 day lifting weeks for a couple weeks, but in my heart I knew I had to cut him out of my life completely. They say you are the average of the 5 people you hang around most, and let me say from experience this couldn’t be more true. Friends should uplift you, energize you, give you joy, support you. Friends should not drag you down and make you a worse person. Ultimately you have to do what’s best for you, and that’s what I did in this circumstance. I told him a couple weeks later that I was done lifting, and I told him to his face the real reason. I said I’ve noticed I’ve gotten so negative lately, and I didn’t blame him, I said it’s mainly on me and my own mindset. He apologized and said he saw this coming, though I don’t think he expected the reason behind it. I thanked him for what we had done so far, and the great weight lifting progress. That’s the last I’ve heard from him in 4 weeks since I made this choice.
The weight off my shoulders was something I didn’t expect. I felt free, I felt empowered that I made a choice to better my life. It was HUGE. Absolutely no regrets. The moral of this whole story is that you don’t need to maintain something just because it’s what you’ve done in the past, or you’ve invested in something up to this point. This is the sunk cost fallacy (look it up if you haven’t heard of it). For your benefit, choose great friends, and keep an eye out for the toxic friends in disguise. If you notice them it is time to use the metaphorical scissors to cut the toxin from your life, remembering you need to do what’s best for you.
Liquid