There is a quote that has been sitting particularly heavy with me lately:

“No one trashes your name better than someone who is afraid you’ll tell people the truth.”

Whew.

That is a loaded statement.

And unfortunately, it’s one I’ve learned the truth of more than once in my life.

I’ve never been particularly good at watching someone mistreat another person and keeping my mouth shut. Especially when that person is someone I love. I don’t enjoy conflict. I don’t go looking for somebody else’s relationship to insert myself into. But when I see someone being manipulated, gaslighted, controlled, frightened, or slowly convinced that they deserve less than they do, something in me refuses to pretend I don’t see it.

There is a reason for that.

I grew up watching my mother go through a terrible relationship. I saw things as a child that taught me far too early what unhealthy love could look like. Then, years later, my own first marriage became an almost mirror image of the relationship I had watched growing up.

Funny how sometimes we spend our entire childhood thinking, I will never live like that, only to wake up one day and realize we’ve somehow wandered into a familiar room.

For me, the moment that relationship threatened my children was the end.

I could tolerate a lot when it was happening to me.

When it reached my children?

Absolutely fucking not.

And I think something permanently changed in me after that.

I know what it feels like to be inside something that doesn’t look the same from the inside as it does to everyone standing outside of it. I know how slowly the walls can move inward. I know how easy it becomes to normalize things that should never have become normal.

So when I see those patterns happening to somebody I love, I speak.

Sometimes that has cost me.

When I was younger, I stood up for my best friend when I believed she was being mistreated in a relationship. Her boyfriend didn’t particularly appreciate having someone around who would put her foot down and say, No. That’s not okay.

It created a divide between us for a while.

Eventually, she and I repaired our friendship and became incredibly close again. Years later, adulthood did what adulthood sometimes does. Time passed. Distance grew. Priorities changed. Our friendship eventually faded for completely ordinary reasons.

Sometimes life just happens.

But years later, I found myself watching something painfully familiar unfold in another friendship, this time with someone who had been an enormous part of my adult life for more than a decade.

And once again, I became the inconvenient friend.

The one who wouldn’t smile and nod.

The one who wouldn’t say something was okay when I didn’t believe it was.

The one who said, “You deserve better than this.”

Eventually, my name was dragged through the mud so thoroughly you’d have thought I’d committed some great offense.

Except my greatest offense was knowing too much.

And speaking too freely.

Because there comes a point when you realize that sometimes the person someone most needs removed from their life isn’t an enemy.

It’s the person willing to say the quiet part out loud.

When You Need a Safe Word

There was a moment in this friendship that changed everything for me.

We established a safe word.

Not a funny little code between girlfriends. Not something silly we could text when we wanted rescued from an awkward dinner.

A real one.

A word she could text or say to me at any time, without explanation, and I would know:

I am scared. I need you.

No questions first.

No convincing me.

No explaining whether what happened was “bad enough.”

Say the word and I would know.

And here’s the thing I cannot get around:

The moment someone has frightened your friend badly enough that she feels she needs a secret way to tell you she needs help is the moment you know something is terribly wrong.

I cannot un-know that.

I cannot erase the conversations that happened before everything changed.

I cannot pretend I never knew she was afraid simply because life became complicated afterward.

And over time, I watched her world become smaller.

Longtime friendships disappeared. Relationships with people who had known her since childhood changed. Family relationships fractured. Her support system became thinner and thinner.

There are always multiple sides to people’s relationships, and I’m not arrogant enough to believe I know every conversation that happened behind every closed door.

But I know what I witnessed.

I know what I was told.

And most importantly, I know why we needed that word.

But I Had to Leave, Too

This is the part people don’t talk about enough when they talk about loving someone in an unhealthy relationship.

Sometimes you have to leave the cycle even when they aren’t ready to.

For my own mental health, I eventually had to check out of the friendship as I had known it.

Not because I stopped loving her.

Not because I stopped caring.

And certainly not because I wanted something terrible to happen so I could someday stand there smugly and say, I told you so.

God, no.

I simply couldn’t continue being locked inside that space with her mentally and emotionally.

There were too many arguments.

Too many crises.

Too many threats.

Too many moments where everything was falling apart, followed by everything somehow being fine again, until the next explosion.

And eventually I realized something:

Being someone’s emergency exit doesn’t mean I have to live inside the burning building with them.

That realization changed everything.

My boundary became very simple.

I love you. I care about you. But I cannot continue being locked in this space with you anymore, mentally or emotionally.

And eventually another boundary followed:

I don’t want to hear about him.

I don’t want to talk about the relationship.

I don’t want the play-by-play of another argument.

I don’t want to analyze what he meant.

I don’t want to help put the emotional pieces back together after another explosion only to watch them scatter across the floor again.

Because every time we went there, I became angry.

I became protective.

I became frustrated.

I found myself mentally climbing back into a relationship that wasn’t mine.

And I wasn’t willing to live there anymore.

She’s Allowed to Make Her Choices

This may actually be one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned about friendship.

Adults are allowed to make choices we don’t agree with.

Even terrible ones.

Even choices we believe are going to hurt them.

Even choices that make absolutely no fucking sense to us.

She’s an adult.

She is allowed to make her own mistakes.

She is allowed to experience her own consequences.

She doesn’t need my permission.

But here’s the other half of that truth:

I am also an adult, and I am allowed to decide what I participate in.

Respecting someone’s autonomy does not require endorsing their decisions.

Loving someone doesn’t require agreeing with them.

Friendship doesn’t mean climbing aboard every sinking ship simply because someone you love insists on staying aboard.

There are choices a friend can make that you simply cannot stand beside in good conscience.

So sometimes you step farther away.

Not as punishment.

Not as manipulation.

Not as an ultimatum designed to force them into making the choice you want.

You simply say:

This is your life, and I respect that. But this part of it cannot keep becoming part of mine.

The Safe Word Still Works

And maybe this is the part that matters most to me.

The safe word still works.

It always will.

We may only touch base occasionally now.

There are pieces of her life I no longer know about. There are decisions she’s made over the last couple of years that I don’t understand and others I fundamentally disagree with.

Our friendship isn’t what it once was.

But if my phone lights up tomorrow with that word?

Everything else stops.

Because my boundary was never:

“You didn’t listen to me, so now you’re on your own.”

It was:

“I cannot keep going through this cycle with you.”

Those are very different things.

I won’t referee another argument.

I won’t continuously pick up the pieces.

I won’t spend another night emotionally drowning in a relationship that isn’t mine.

I won’t keep trying to convince another grown woman to make the decisions I believe she should make.

But if she’s scared?

If she needs somewhere safe?

If that word appears on my phone?

I’m there.

No lecture.

No I told you so.

No requirement that she explain herself before I help.

Just:

Where are you? What do you need?

Because sometimes loving someone means standing beside them.

Sometimes loving them means telling them something they desperately don’t want to hear.

And sometimes loving them means realizing that you have to step away because their choices are beginning to consume you, too.

There is a strange kind of grief in loving someone from a distance.

You miss the friendship you had.

You miss the person who once occupied such an enormous part of your everyday life.

You might even occasionally wonder whether you should have kept trying.

But I’ve learned that there is a difference between abandoning someone and refusing to abandon yourself for them.

So no, I don’t stand on the porch anymore waiting for the next disaster.

I went back inside.

I’m living my own life.

I’m protecting my own peace.

But that porch light?

It’s still on.

And if she ever truly needs to find her way back to it, she’ll know exactly where to look.

Much love and many blessings,
Mrs. B. 🖤