Yeah, I guess I'm asking, "how bad does it hafta be?" The neo-Nazi example is clearly in the realm of "bad enough" -- but yeah... where are the lines?
I think I'm reflecting on my own habits of being angry at my friends. Any time I'm annoyed or disappointed in a friend, I always start thinking about cutting ties with them. Okay, not quite *any* time. But I wonder if it's too frequent.
So maybe the question I'm really asking is what are people's experiences with reasonable and unreasonable divorcing from friends?
I frequently think about cutting ties with friends I'm angry or disappointed with, but usually I think of that as saying more about me than about the friends. That is, for me, fantasizing about cutting ties is one of my habitual ways of dealing with negative emotions. It's an escape fantasy. I fantasize about it a lot more than I actually do it.
I notice that what I feel like cutting ties over varies depending on my mood and on what sort of role the person plays in my life. If it were really about principles, it wouldn't vary so much, IMO.
The only time I've felt that cutting ties with someone was the right thing to do, was when they had done something I felt unable to "agree to disagree" with them about. I didn't feel that I could hang out with them, without constantly thinking about how I disagreed with them over this choice they made. And that would lead to a false basis for friendship since I would have to be keeping my mouth shut all the time about something that mattered to me.
I've cut ties for other reasons too but mostly I think they were kind of immature reasons, and/or the person wasn't that important to me and I no longer wanted to make efforts to hang out with them, so I used some incident as an excuse.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-02 09:04 pm (UTC)I think I'm reflecting on my own habits of being angry at my friends. Any time I'm annoyed or disappointed in a friend, I always start thinking about cutting ties with them. Okay, not quite *any* time. But I wonder if it's too frequent.
So maybe the question I'm really asking is what are people's experiences with reasonable and unreasonable divorcing from friends?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-03 08:36 am (UTC)I notice that what I feel like cutting ties over varies depending on my mood and on what sort of role the person plays in my life. If it were really about principles, it wouldn't vary so much, IMO.
The only time I've felt that cutting ties with someone was the right thing to do, was when they had done something I felt unable to "agree to disagree" with them about. I didn't feel that I could hang out with them, without constantly thinking about how I disagreed with them over this choice they made. And that would lead to a false basis for friendship since I would have to be keeping my mouth shut all the time about something that mattered to me.
I've cut ties for other reasons too but mostly I think they were kind of immature reasons, and/or the person wasn't that important to me and I no longer wanted to make efforts to hang out with them, so I used some incident as an excuse.