Poor judge of character

[calumfsinclair]

One of my friends, we'll call him Fred, has, of late, been relying heavily on me for favours; books, pens, arranging meetings, etc. I've known Fred for six years and we've got on resonantly well. This summer I went to visit Fred and his family and I noticed that he manipulates people and is incredibly selfish. I ignorantly thought he wouldn't try this on me, but on Friday when I needed a favour he was quick to hang me out to dry. Now it wasn't a huge favour but a favour none the less. I have noticed of late that many of my friends have turned quite suddenly in some cases into quite horrible people. Is this just my poor taste or can people change their attitudes so abrubtly?

[Tokis86]

1. People can be easily corrupted. It's why i have a no lending rule with all my friends (ESPECIALLY money). There are some things that are best left out of friendships (especially those that arouse jealously/temptation & or create debt).

2. People who are very manipulative rarely have any boundaries (especially with friends, because manipulative people's behavior is often first trained using family- blood is thicker than water and if someone is happy to manipulate family then they are especially happy to manipulate friends).

3. "I have noticed of late that many of my friends have turned quite suddenly in some cases into quite horrible people"

Depends on what you mean specifically by this? (I.e. is there a friendly who you've noticed has become very b*tchy or cold hearted and what is the context etc)

[minniemoo]

I've noticed recently that the people who have tried to befriend me want something from me. This didn't happen to me when I was younger (I am now in my mid30s) and it's only started to happen over the past couple of years. These people didn't have many friends themselves and I was touched by their seeming sincerity towards me and there willingness to become such close friends so quickly. Now I feel as I've been dupped by them and that they were using me. When I could help them they were friendly and when they didn't need me anymore they couldn't be bothered to even communicate with me. I am usually a really good judge of character and so it has thrown me quite a lot. Maybe it's my age or maybe it's something else entirely...don't know....

[calumfsinclair]

I thought he was one of my closet friends and he's been friendly for years but recently I noticed that he's selfish and demanding and will do anything to benefit himself. I think it's more the shock than anything that a trait like that can go unnoticed when I've been such good friends with him

[Tokis86]

^ People do change (for the better & the worse) and i think its probably more of a case that previously these personality traits were small scale but more recently they've developed to an extent where they're now much more noticeable. Also, if you aren't present in situations where your friends selfishness & demanding behaviour aren't shown you are also less likely to not notice them for a longer period of time.

I wouldn't necessarily blame yourself or your Dysphraxia for this though- stuff like this happens to non-Dysphraxics all the time (in fact figuring people out will always be one of life's greatest challenges for many people- we're a very socially complicated species).

[Tokis86]

For me personally, my experiences concerning judge of character;

I lived in Somerset for 7 and a half years and when i first moved there with my guy i was 17 years old and completely unfamiliar with the area. However i very quickly made friends in the first couple of weeks there and out of all the people i met in those early days 2 stood out to me and we quickly became best friends. One was a girl called Vicky and the other was a guy called Harry (we were all the same age).

Vicky: Like Harry, me & Vicky hit it off from the word go. We were both very outgoing people who loved to party, but who at the same time had deeper philosophies & creative interests. Neither of our lives had been straightforward and when we met we both felt like we were on the same wave length etc.

However we differed in that while i was lucky in love, Vicky wasn't, and while i am a totally friendly person (though no pushover), Vicky had a b*tchy streak about her (thankfully though her b*tchyness was never directed at me). Vicky did hold down some long term relationships (when i first met her she was just coming out of a 2 year relationship) but in between steady boyfriends she very promiscuous.
Now, i personally had no problem whatsoever with people being promiscuous- in fact i couldn't care less what my friends got up to in the bedroom with their respective partners. I'm a very liberal/open-minded person. But living in a small country town, you don't have to sleep with many people at all for word to start going around. So many people lost respect for Vicky. But i always stood by her side and defended her if i ever came across any negative gossip about her.

One day age 19 Vicky decided she wanted to go to Uni (in fact it was like there was suddenly a big Uni exodus, as at that age a whole heap of people i knew suddenly went off to Uni). I couldn't go as i was already settled down (and Uni wasn't my plan anyway), but this Uni exodus had the effect that all of a sudden half the people i knew as friends suddenly moved away to other parts of the country (and everybody signed up to 3 year courses).

Vicky was dating a guy called Matt at this point (it was already long term) and she decided to go Uni in bath to do some sort of food technician course. She was always going on about how happy she was, and i had no reason to believe anything was amiss (even when i went down to see her, she was going on about how happy she was). She seemed to have it all- a great guy, a dream course, a nice shared accommodation student place to stay at, new friends etc. So when i went back home, i thought i had nothing to worry about.

But then a year & a half into her course she suddenly turns up back in town, and she looked terrible! So pale & thin, she looked like a shell of her former glowing & bubbly self. Even her personality seemed dead. She had gone from being a very talkative & outgoing person to someone who barely uttered a word.

Over the following days i garnered that everything had NOT been well for a very long time. Despite all the happy talk, she had actually been miserable in her relationship with Matt and he had dumped her.
He had come from a very rich family and he was a golden boy in his parents eye's, but in reality he smoked a ridiculous amount of pot that his parents were oblivious too. When they found out about his rebellious behavior, they automatically blamed Vicky for it (even though she had nothing to do with it and was actually against his behavior too). He didn't stand up for her and let her take the blame. She had also not been getting on well with her flat mates and after she got dumped she quit her Uni course and came back home.

I was very shocked to see what had become of her and more than anything i just wanted my friend back. But she was in deep depression and didn't want to leave her mothers house and didn't want to talk to anyone. I knew that staying at home all day & being isolated all the time was no good for her, and so i made an especial effort with my guy to invite her out wherever we went etc.
And gradually she started to get better (and i thought to myself "Yay i have my best friend back!").
But literally as soon as she was back on her feet (the moment her depression subsided she started renting her own place) than she started dating again. She is very dependent on being in a relationship to feel good about herself, and i was worried that everything was too soon as she had only just become happy & independent again.

Then she started dating this guy that i'll call Dom.
I hadn't really known Dom before (like maybe met him a few times, never really knew him) but apparently Vicky and him went way back. Before i knew it they were in a serious relationship, and i saw very little of Vicky. But i didn't worry about it as when too people get together in a passionate relationship it's pretty common that they forget their friends and devote every waking moment to each other etc.
But as the months rolled by Vicky didn't start seeing friends again. And when i asked her out she started to become reluctant to.

But i still wasn't worrying.

But one day when she came out with me & a bunch of friends, she was acting strangely. I had seen her around a bit, but now she was acting quite B*tchy and deliberately trying to humiliate me in conversation by only replying to me in one word answers or ignoring me altogether. I was stunned!
She had always had a b*tchy side to her personality, but it had never been directed at me before. And it wasn't that she was becoming more b*tchy in general, it was becoming a lot more random. For example i remember one time we were in the pub sitting at the back when a random girl came up to us and politely asked us for her coat which was next to us. I happily gave her the coat and thought nothing of it, but as the girl was walking away with her back turned Vicky just gave her the finger and smirked ! I asked her if she knew the girl and she said no. It was totally random!

I saw other changes in her too.
While before she had always taken great pride in her appearance, always putting on makeup for a night out and always wearing nice clothes etc, now she increasingly didn't bother with makeup, wore clothes that looked very frumpy and old beyond her years, she didn't bother with her hairstyle anymore and she started gaining weight.
To me all these changes were very shocking and after a while i started asking her about the changes, but every time she brushed me off or said she was fine & totally happy etc.

But i knew in my heart it was the Dom guy. On the outside he seemed like a pretty good guy- he had a very (literally) loud personality. He was a couple of years older than Vicky and was obsessed with Frank Sinatra (he was always singing his music). He was very friendly & outgoing, but had an annoying habit of needing to be at the center of attention all the time (when everyone was interested in someone else, he would suddenly break into song to get everyone's attention back again). But all these radical changes had happened in Vicky while she had been going out with him and while she tried to go on about how happy she was all the time and how her life was great etc, she didn't seem that happy.

And she started coming out a lot less. She would always agree to come out but would always cancel it last moment ("Ohh i have a headache", "I'm skint", "i'm tired", "i have a stomach ache"). It got so bad that only about 1 out of every 5 or 6 times she would agree to come out, she would actually come out. Hmm...
And this is all coming from someone who loved to socialize & to party, who took great pride in their appearance, who was previously a very open & honest person.

And then one day, she came over to my place alone.
And she opened up to me & my guy about everything.
And it turned out my suspicions (that Dom was the reason for all her changes) were true.

It basically turned out that despite Dom's big appearance of being a very confident person, underneath all the bravado he was actually a very insecure, paranoid & controlling person. Before getting together with Vicky, in his previous relationship he had been with another girl for over 2 years. The relationship had gotten very serious and they even became engaged to each other. But it turned out that not only was she cheating on him, she was having an affair behind his back. And if i remember correctly she cheated on him with not one person but two different guys. When Dom found out this shattered him as an individual- he had trusted her so much yet in reality she committed breaches of trust that he never would have even imagined her capable of of.

The relationship broke up, but he turned into a very paranoid, insecure & controlling individual. After a long time being single, when he got with Vicky he was still this way, and even though Vicky totally wasn't the type to cheat, it was a fact that she had a very promiscuous past (she had not only slept with a great deal of guys in our age group around town, but many other people elsewhere- in fact by the time she was 22 i know for fact that she had slept with well over 60 different guys). Not matter what she did to reassure him or however long they were together, he felt very insecure.

He didn't accuse of her cheating but he did try to control her in every other aspect.
The first step he took was to "ban" her from seeing any of her guy friends. Initially this was just the guys she had had intimacy with, but it quickly extended to every guy (and it got so bad that he even became jealous of her spending time with my friend Harry who is a 100% gay). He didn't allow her to keep a Facebook account and made her delete a lot of male friends from her phone list. And even when she came out, he preferred to be with her at all times and tried to restrict how much she came out in general (this was why she wasn't coming out much and was always cancelling nights out etc).
He always controlled her clothing- he didn't like her wearing sexy clothes (whether it was a short skirt or a low cut top etc, he wasn't cool with it) and so this was why she was dressing so frumpy. He didn't even like her wearing makeup and wanted her hairstyle to be as plain as possible- whenever she put any effort into her appearance he would say "Who are you trying to impress?" and make her feel guilty about it.
They even had a big argument once because she wanted to dye her hair and he didn't approve of it.
And in the stress of everything, she had been gaining weight, loosing her confidence in herself and lashing out at those close to her (like me).

So all of a sudden, every thing made sense! I thought to myself "THIS is why she has been behaving like this, THIS is why she has changed so much!" etc. I suddenly realized that my friend had fallen into another miserable relationship and she needed my support & understanding to help her change things. When she left that day, we were on very good terms and i was feeling more hopeful than ever of "getting my best friend back".

But when she returned things quickly fell back into the old routine. Cancelled nights. B*tchyness. Dom everywhere. Frumpy clothes, weight gain & more personality withdrawal.

Again, after a couple of months she came around alone again and we had a similar talk. Again we left on optimistic terms. Again things fell back into the same pattern.

And this went around & around.

And during this all, she was becoming moodier. Previously when i had managed to get her out alone she had been pretty cheerful and i got an impression that she felt released (especially by this point i was the only person trying with her- all her other friends had long since abandoned her). But now when she came out she was always in a bad mood and would just sit sulkily there with things obviously on her mind but she was impossible to talk to as well. And the b*tchyness was getting worse on top of everything.
As much as i wanted to help her, this had been going on for well over a year now and my nerves were being tested- i was happy to help her out, but i'm not a doormat and i was becoming increasingly offended by her behaviour.

One day i invited her out for some daytime drinks at a local pub. She came along and sulked the whole time. I tried to lighten the mood by telling some stories & jokes, but she then b*tched at me for unwittingly telling her a story i had already told her before. She started making jabs at me about my life (saying i never did anything with it etc). I tried to keep my cool. But i got so p*ssed off that i drank my drink, told her i was leaving and left.

I was very angry. I had helped & been there for this girl so much, yet i was being treated with complete disdain/disrespect. I don't need this!
Vicky had never been someone to EVER take criticism well (even minor & tactful criticism would cause her to quickly become very angry & defensive etc- i saw it happen with other people & her), so previously i had always avoided criticizing her. But i was so angry now i immediately started texting her as i left the pub, opening up about all my grievances with her.

And she was replying back (strangely though she seemed very miffed at my anger & annoyance, almost like she had no idea i felt the way i did, even though IMO the things she did & said would have angered & annoyed anyone). But as i was texting away, i realized that if i was to be REALLY honest (as my opening up was on that verge of brutal honesty) she would just get really angry. It was guaranteed. And as i thought about our friendship i thought to myself;
a. Her getting angry will not achieve anything. She will not take in anything i say and we will just have a massive argument & fall out. And;
b. I realized that she had changed as an individual. This may have been down to Dom, but i realized that if i was ever going to get back the Vicky i once knew, it would have happened a long time ago.

In essence i realized that i had been doing that old saying "You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink" to the fullest. For so long i had been trying to help her, but although every now & then she would offer me a glimmer of hope, ultimately the change had to come from her. And as much as she winged & moaned about Dom sometimes, she wasn't doing anything about it either. And i realized that this could go on forever. The old Vicky i knew was dead and i would be a fool if i beat this dead hose any longer (because all the evidence pointed to now was that the old times would never be resurrected).
Vicky had changed and those changes were for good. I did not like this new person- she was moody, bossy, arrogant, a show-off, snobby, a very conflicting & contradicting individual.

So on the point of a big explosive blowout in our friendship, i just thought "screw it" and stopped texting. I never finished what i wanted to say, and let the friendship fizzle out by way of ignoring her. And it did.


And that's how i lost one of my best friends.

[Tokis86]

On the plus side though, there were a few positives;

1. I had spent such a vast amount of my attention on Vicky for so long that over time i had completely neglected all my over friendships. Once i cut Vicky off from my life i suddenly realized what a big part she had come to play in it and i suddenly realized with much urgency that i need to really start paying attention to my other friends & other people much more. Because of her i had gone from someone who had led a very socially diverse life and who regularly made new friends, to someone who led a very limited social life and hadn't made any new friends or met new people for a very long time.

2. I realized i needed to change my own life & move out of town.
When i first moved to that small country town in Somerset, i had immediately made many friends and had a very active social life. Even though the town wasn't that great in itself, there were many people there around my own age and so the place felt very active & happy.

But over the years more & more people moved out. In the Uni exodus many people who had left for Uni never returned as they felt in love with city life etc. The local economy also wasn't that great- even when the countries economy was strong, employment opportunities were very limited in the town (basically factory work or supermarket work) and education opportunities were nil. If you wanted to make something of your life career-wise, then you had to go elsewhere. So many people moved out for better jobs.
Then the recession struck and made even the few bog standard jobs less in quantity and many small local businesses went out of business. The high street became very depressing, a death trap for small aspiring businesses. Even when the recession got better and the economy picked up as a whole in the country, things didn't change in the town. I saw sooo many businesses go out of business....So people moved out for the urgent need of jobs in general.
And then there were just those who got bored with small country town life in general.

And because i had been so focused on Vicky all this time, i hadn't even really noticed how bad the social situation was getting in town. I've always been easily able to socialize with people of all different ages (particularly much older than myself) but at the end of the day you still ultimately need people in your own age bracket as the core of your social circle if you're to do normal things for your age with other people etc.

However, out of the people in my age who were still living in town, when i started socializing with other people more after cutting Vicky off, i quickly realized that these people weren't exactly the "cream of the crop". Some people were very cool and were only in the town because they were financially stuck there, but most of the people who got left behind in the town were of the un-proactive type who didn't care for anything interesting in their lives, while the people who left the town where mostly cool interesting people who had diverse interests and wanted more in life etc.

So try as i might to socialize, i wasn't really hitting it off with that many people. There was a small circle of people i regularly hung out with, but i quickly realized they weren't going anywhere. One situation that regularly occurred- we'd sitting around a table at a local pub when the subject of how s*** & boring the town would come up. Everyone would have a good whinge. The town had indeed become s*** & boring. But you see i'm a proactive person- i was bored as everyone of the place and desperately wanted to do more interesting young stuff. So i'd i propose big night out in Salisbury or some other active happening place. And everyone would agree. We'd do the maths and realize that to afford a taxi to Salisbury we'd need X amount of people. And because everyone apparently wanted a good night out, it seemed easily doable.
But for a big night out like that it needs time & planning to ensure everyone has the time & money to do it. But as the weeks & days rolled closer to the big night out, people would start dropping out. "Ohh i'm skint", "Ohh i can't get time off", "Ohh i accidentally arranged something else", "Something expected come up" etc. Before i knew it, the amount of people left who were actually still up for the big night out were so few in number that the trip was no longer financially viable.
And so soon enough we'd all end back up at the pub, sat around the same old table, in the same old town, with the same people whinging about the same old things.

No matter how many times i tried to arrange a different night out, the same old cycle of events happened and i eventually realized that as much as people liked to whinge & moan, that was it- nobody was actually interested in doing anything about anything.
And this p*ssed me off. I felt like i was the only person who actually wanted to do anything with their life. I was sick of the whinging.

A change of scene wasn't easy for me though. I did a back to college course in the mean time, but i had bought a house in the town (back from when the days were good & optimistic there) and had been living there for some years already. My guys job was in a local town and it was the best job he'd ever had. But our escape presented itself one day when another company bought the one he was working for, and long story short, ended up asking him to work in Southampton at the companies new base. And we leaped at the opportunity!
Sold that house, got stuck on a chain waiting to move into the new house for a while, but eventually moved to Southampton.


And that's how i escaped from Somerset .


I think that perhaps if things hadn't turned out so badly with Vicky, i may have stayed in that town for much longer, because it took me some time to realize that what had initially made the town so great was the people there, and that when the people i knew started moving out, the town started going downhill and i started seeing it for its true colors (a boring dead-end place with poor local economy, no opportunities, a place where people had kids or retire but nothing in between etc). If Vicky had gone back to her former great self and we had remained best buddies for many years, i may never have (or taken much longer to) notice how **** the town was (and perhaps still be stuck there to this day).

My moral of the story: You should never live your life for your friends or depend on your friends always being there for you, because you never when friends will change or if they will go. Friendships can grow, blossom & fizzle out (even the best of friendships can die through no fault of your own). And this isn't a Dysphraxia issue.
Friends can offer you great happiness in life but sometimes they can be a drain on you, so no matter what's going on and however good things may or may not be socially, you always need to be self-aware of your OWN life and take steps towards ensuring that its always moving forward in a positive manner.
Sometimes as Dsyphraxic's we find it difficult to notice changes in people, but no matter how concentrated we become on noticing the changes in other people, we should also make sure not to let any lack of change in our lives pass us by, because then your life can become stalled and stuck in a rut (< been there done that!).


My life has worked out pretty well so far. It's not perfect though and i do have some regrets though (which is why i have taken the time to share my experiences here);

1. I stayed for far too long in that town. For all the 7 and a half years i live there, only the first 4 were any good. the last 3 were extremely uneventful and a real drain, and although i moved out of there in the end (to a much better life in Southampton), i should have really moved out there MUCH sooner than i did. I will never get those last 3 years back, and i'll never be able to change this fact.
It would have been trickier to move of there sooner, but this is no excuse as i could have moved out of there sooner if i had been more decisive and put my mind to it. But whats done is done (and at least i'm no longer leading a life full of such regret).

2. I should have called off things much sooner with Vicky. While my loyalty to friends is unchanging and when a friend is in need i will still always try to help them, i did become a bit of a doormat in the friendship (especially in the last 5-3 months of it). If you let people treat you with disrespect then this does nothing good (nor for your coolness/reputation, not for your friendship, not for you).

It's really only no.1 that's a real regret though. I'm over Vicky and i'm a strong person- i'm not about to get all teary eyed or meak! If anything both experiences have helped me get my act in gear and see back then with much more clarity what my problems were in life and what i needed to do about them. I learn from my mistakes and i certainly won't be repeating those mistakes again!

[calumfsinclair]

Thanks, it's comforting to know I'm not the only one that this happens to and there is light at thee end of the preverbal tunnel

[williamsuk]

ive always felt that i'm a poor judge of character..but I think it's more likely to be that the majority of ppl in this world are either fakes or muppets, orientated by money and status to the point that they will happily do or/and take whatever they can to 'get on' in life!

try this..never a borrower or a lender be
try not to divulge ur weaknesses to ppl
keep the things that you love safe/close to you
don't judge/criticize others
don't assume everything on the surface is what you see
sali x (hark at me giving advice when I struggle in this world too!!! lol rofl)