If You Can’t Respect Me, We Can’t Be Friends

Anyone ever deal with this situation, where you’re chatting with a friend and something happened in your life that you really just don’t want to share with them? I was recently chatting with a friend and he wanted to know some information, and I was very much not interested in sharing this, and he just wouldn’t let it go. I eventually stopped responding to him and we didn’t talk for over a week. It got me thinking though, as friends, shouldn’t he have respected me when I said “no”?

I mean, let’s think about it, we talk about having respect for others in a relationship all the time, but we don’t always talk about it with friends. But that doesn’t make it unimportant. It’s actually just as important to have friends that respect you and your boundaries as well, no matter what it’s about. There are some times where you just don’t need or want to share all the details with your friends on something. And as your friends, of course, it makes sense they’d be curious and want all the details, but they also should respect when you simply don’t want to talk about it or give those details. Some things just don’t need to be shared, and sometimes when our friends pressure us to share, we either share information that we didn’t want to in the first place or we wind up telling a little lie just to get them to stop. Again, if they’re our friends, shouldn’t they be fine if we just say, no, I don’t want to share? True friends wouldn’t necessarily egg you on with asking what you’re afraid of or why you won’t share this information. The fact that you’re saying no will be enough, especially if you say it multiple times.

The issue here that this brings up is that your friend may not truly respect you. I know that may be difficult to hear, it’s difficult to deal with, but it may be the truth. If we respect someone, then we do things that maybe we don’t necessarily want to do, but we do it because our friend asked us to. Maybe that’s going to meet a friend’s significant other that you don’t like but because you like and respect the friend’s choices, you go ahead and do it anyway. Maybe it’s making plans to meet up and showing up rather than leaving them hanging because something else came up. Respecting others comes in a lot of different ways, and it’s important to remember that.

And this does go both ways, if you in the future have information you don’t want to share, remind your friend of a time when you respected their wishes to keep whatever it was to yourself. Friendship is a two-way street, and it’s super important to ensure that respect goes both ways. So do your best to be respectful of your friend’s opinions and what they do with their lives, and they should do the same for you.