Let’s Discuss The Friend That Hops From Clique to Clique – by @BtSquared2

This blog was submitted by Brandy (@BtSquared2) and I definitely wanted to share it with you guys. Couldn’t have written it better myself. Read below:

As children, we switch friends like clockwork. Your bff one day can be a sworn enemy the next and your play sister later that week. We see life as endless when we’re young so changing best friends/cliques is not that big of a deal. As we go through the adult maturation process, we tend to eliminate unnecessary riff raff and individuals from our lives and allow those people that will literally be your friend until the end to make their presence known. I’ve always said that you should never trust anyone that doesn’t have at least ONE childhood friend (there are variables to this as some people moved around a lot as children and that’s understandable). Or even one friend that’s been around for at least 5+ years. Let me explain…

Long time friendships, in my opinion, speak volumes to one’s character and their ability to be stable; consistent, if you will. Most importantly it shows that they are able to make, maintain and nurture healthy friendships with people. The purpose of this post is to discuss the ones that don’t have this ability. For the sake of comparison, we’ll call them Socialized Hermit Crabs. If you don’t know much about the nature of a hermit crab, it’s very simple: they outgrow or become tired of one shell and move on to the next. Sometimes if there is a particular shell that they really want, they’ll wait around until an opportunity for them to take over said shell presents itself. Sometimes going so far as to claw and force their way into it. I’m sure this is already starting to make sense to you.
There are people that, for whatever reason, are unable to maintain friendships and simply hop from one clique to the next. They talk very badly about whatever old friends they do have and this in and of itself should be a red flag. How and why would you continue to associate with someone that you don’t have anything good to say about? These friends are usually not mutual friends and I’m sure you almost never see or hear about them with those friends and if they do, it’s few and far between. So because you’re never really given the chance to interact with their “other” friends, you can’t determine for yourself if all of the horrible things they say about them are even true.
This individual is very easy to spot because they’re incredibly charming. I mean, you do enjoy being around this person as they are a ton of fun, but you’ll pick up rather quickly that something with them is amiss, as charm is deceitful. The first thing being how incredibly dedicated they are to friends they’ve just met. I get that sometimes you just have that connection with people, but this connection seems to be overbearingly unnatural. Almost codependent. They fix themselves to be in a position to be wanted, needed and desired by everyone around them.
They work very hard to make it into that shell group of friends, so they’ll proverbially fight to maintain their standing with them. And by “fight” I mean create drama and eliminate individuals that they perceive as a threat. Yes, you read that right. These people will purposefully create chaos among lifelong friends to manipulate the outcome of said friendship. And the first friend to go is usually the one that caught on to their bullshit early on. Grown ass people just don’t behave this way, so if you have a keen eye and are not captivated early on by this person’s presence, they’ll pick up on it rather quickly. They’ll receive the fact that you’re unimpressed by them as an insult, identify you as a threat and begin the process of elimination. It starts out with them speaking on your established friendship with authority as if they too have been there all along. Remember, they sought out this group of friends, observed them and wanted so badly to be included. So now that they’re sitting at the cool table, they feel it’s their right to lend their unsolicited opinion on those friendships and playing it off as genuine concern. It starts with a light sway and ultimately ends with them making it no secret that everyone, like them, should not associate with you anymore.
The key to this type of person is simply their need to belong to something and included in everything. And when they feel that they’re no longer getting that attention, they wreak havoc and move on to the next. The interesting thing is that the attention stops once everyone catches on to them and they’re conniving ways. And just like every group of friends before, people start paying less attention and opting not to be around someone so toxic. Like I said, this person is fun so a complete cut off rarely happens the way it normally would, but the desire to be around them as often diminishes. Without an audience or something to latch on to, this person can’t flourish or even function.
At this point it’s clear to see why this person has been unable to keep friends. For one, they don’t know what it means to be in a healthy relationship of any kind. Seriously. They wouldn’t know what to do with a healthy relationship if it came out of their womb and called them “mommy”. I find that people like this tend to be cursedly single with entirely too much time on their hands; being a part of something IS their identity.
If you’ve ever fallen victim to or are currently dealing with a situation similar to this, there’s no need to worry. The universe always balances itself out and eventually others will realize that this person who has said and done everything to convince people of the contrary is, by definition, a loser.