The Toxic Friendship I Defended Because She Needed Me

I met Petra in Bratislava at a work conference when I was 25 and we became friends quickly in the way that can happen when two people find each other in an unfamiliar environment and establish a shorthand that feels like recognition.

She was entertaining and perceptive and had a quality that I am now more cautious about finding attractive in friendships - she was entirely without self-doubt in a way that I, prone to over-examining everything, found briefly enviable.

Within six months I had become aware of a pattern that I spent the next three years finding reasons to excuse. Petra had a remarkable gift for positioning herself as the wronged party in every difficult situation she encountered. Colleagues were threatened by her. Managers were intimidated by her ability.

Former friends had betrayed her in ways I heard described in detail and that, I eventually noticed, grew more elaborate with each retelling. Her romantic relationships ended because the other person was unable to handle who she was.

I listened to all of this with sympathy that was genuine in the beginning and became, over time, a performance of sympathy maintained out of something closer to exhaustion than conviction.

I started to notice the moments when her narrative did not add up - when the account of an argument she had described as unprovoked did not quite match what she had previously said about the person involved.

I noticed that the concern she expressed for others was always in the framing of how their situations reflected on her. I noticed that when something good happened to me she was briefly warm and then quickly redirected the conversation.

I noticed all of these things and defended her anyway to the mutual friends who raised them, because I had invested three years in the story that she needed me and that I was one of the few people who understood her.

The friendship ended not with a confrontation but with a gradual withdrawal on my part after I finally, honestly, wrote down the ratio of what I gave to what I received across the previous year. The numbers were not close.

What I carried away from it was not bitterness but a more specific kind of self-knowledge: I had a particular vulnerability to people who framed their need for me as a recognition of my uniquely good understanding. It was flattering in a way that blinded me for longer than I would like to admit.