Jacob Lawrence, The Lovers (1946)

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January 16, 2005:

"My girlfriend says she's disappointed in you."

This is the detail which goes farthest up my nose. It was the button which triggered my explosion.

It's disloyal to badmouth friends to other friends. The closer you are with someone the more disloyal it is. I hate it with the special passion of wounded experience.

Here's a story. Long time passing I had a lover I adored who used her girlfriends as sticks to smack me with. "My girlfriend says I deserve better than you." Their disapproval was a weapon, and it was an artificial one built from misstatement and exaggeration and spin, so that a picture formed in these friends' minds of me as some sort of cartoon monster. I resent it to this day.

The worst experience was with her sister. She badmouthed the two of us to each other, her sister to me and vice-versa, so that I developed a sense of her sister as a mouse without identity apart from the peculiar vicious streak aimed at me. I don't want to imagine what she'd been led to believe in return. Later when we met under independent circumstances I discovered that she was one of the very best people ever in this world, generous and loyal and absolutely incapable of lying, and since then I've always loved her with a special gratitude. And I've resented my former lover for her destructive pettiness, to the point that this behavior is probably the single strongest flashbutton on my emotional control panel.

I'll illustrate how seriously I take this. In college I had a very close friend. We spent those four years glued to each other. One day several years afterwards he sat me down to deliver a well-intentioned lecture about my lover of the time. He told me that he and my other friends distrusted her and disapproved of the way she treated me. This was from observation, mind you. He encouraged me to end the relationship and seek greener pastures. Instead I dumped him. I felt that my loyalty belonged to my lover and for all practical purposes I never spoke to him again. I wouldn't badmouth her myself and I wouldn't tolerate it from others. I'm not claiming to be Saint Francis, rather to illustrate how strongly I feel about this.

There's a simple moral. Shut up.

I don't want to hear what your friends think. Not unless I ask them myself. That is, place them in a position from which it might be possible for them to have some kind of glimmer of a clue about the context and the motives and the situation. Otherwise their views have no basis, in my opinion, except destructiveness deliberately fostered.

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