A friend and I, both 68 years old, have known each other since high school. We’ve become closer in the last 15 years and now speak almost daily. My friend has always been less fortunate financially than me, so I have been generous and have included her in my will to make sure she is taken care of in her older age.
Recently, she disclosed to me that she owns rental property that was willed to her 10 years ago by a late boyfriend, which she never told me about. She gets an income stream from the rental property that she deposits in the bank and doesn’t spend. She says she never told me about this income stream because she felt I’d be mad and jealous.
She claims that this rental property is a personal matter that she did not need to disclose. She feels she has not been deceitful in accepting my generosity, but now I feel it has been given under false pretenses. In addition, all our mutual friends know about this rental.
I believe that she did not tell me about her additional income because she wanted me to consider her poorer than she is, continue to pick up the tabs and keep her in my will. The chances are good that I would have done these things anyway, even if she had told me about the rental property, because I’m still significantly better off.
I am relieved that she is more financially stable than I thought. However, I feel taken advantage of and manipulated. My resentment is not about money. It’s about the truthfulness that friends owe each other.
Is it possible to be close to her or ever trust her again, particularly since she can’t offer an apology that includes accountability? She thinks she’s done nothing wrong.
From the Therapist: You have already said that this isn’t about money. The question you’re grappling with is essentially: How do I stay close to someone who betrayed my trust and doesn’t see it as a betrayal?
You feel manipulated because you were. Trust erodes quickly when one person withholds fundamental information and then refuses to take responsibility for the hurt it causes. Your generosity was based on a shared understanding, or so you thought, of your friend’s financial needs. How painful that someone you care about enough to want to ensure her financial stability as she ages appears to have deceived you into believing she had less money, presumably so that you would continue to provide more.
But now, instead of acknowledging the effect her concealment has had on you, she’s presenting you with what seems like a second lie. She says she doesn’t think there was any sort of breach, but how can this be true if she says she intentionally withheld this information, thinking it would make you “mad and jealous”? I don’t know what the jealousy would be about (that she’s had a lifetime of passive income given to her, while you’ve had to work for yours?). But she anticipated your anger, too, which means she knew she was doing something wrong. After all, if the rental income was a nonissue, why were all your mutual friends aware of it — except for you, a very close friend?
Then there’s the timing of her disclosure. Why now? Could she have become worried that you’d hear about it from someone else, in which case you’d be even angrier? In other words, she seems to have known that keeping this information from you wasn’t the right course, even as she denies any wrongdoing and claims the additional income is a “personal matter.”
But do you know what is indisputably a personal matter? Your friendship. There was an emotional contract underlying your giving. The fact that you would have been generous even if you’d known the truth suggests that your giving wasn’t conditioned on exactly how much less she had, but on a sense of emotional honesty between you.
Your money might have been a gift, but trust isn’t a gift. It’s earned and maintained through honesty, humility and care. When someone violates a relationship in a way that changes how we see them, then dismisses our feeling of betrayal by insisting it was no big deal, we don’t just lose trust in them; we start to lose our sense of emotional safety in the relationship. That’s what you’re feeling right now.
If you haven’t told your friend in a heartfelt way how deeply this has affected your sense of closeness and safety in this decades-long friendship that you deeply value, you might approach her from that perspective rather than demand that she acknowledge she was wrong. If your friend can eventually hear your pain without defensiveness — if she can say, “I understand why this hurt you, and I wish I’d handled it differently” — then you can begin to rebuild closeness.
However, if she’s not capable of that, your relationship can still continue, if you wish, with all of your shared history and whatever enjoyment you get from each other’s company, but it will be a different friendship: not as close and not as trusting. Losing closeness and trust in a meaningful friendship can be devastating. While you grieve the loss of the trust you believed you shared, you will have to find the line between self-protection and continued companionship as you navigate what this new version of the friendship looks like.
Want to Ask the Therapist? If you have a question, email [email protected]. By submitting a query, you agree to our reader submission terms. This column is not a substitute for professional medical advice.
Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and the author of the best-selling book “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.” She offers readers advice on life’s tough questions in the “Ask the Therapist” column.
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