Every time my sister and I talk about our friendships with other girls, it always end with "women are complicated" with a shake of the head and an eye roll. Now don't come for me Ladies, I am complicated as well. Just maybe. The thing is I haven't really been so fortunate in girl friendships. Keeping up in the relationship is quite a struggle sometimes. I meet a girl, we matched each other's vibes and all that, 2 hours later we're tagging ourselves Besties, relating to every TikTok video about girl friendships, only to stop talking because of one silly reason that still won't make sense no matter how much explanation is given. Maybe everyone has their own definition of 'forever' because my then Bestie used to tell me "forever is the goal" only for the 'forever' to come barely a year later.
So I noticed that Karen has joined us twice for the two christian meetings we usually have in a week and I reached out to her, from chatting after every meeting we became so close, Besties even, as we love calling ourselves. Not too long after, my sister joined the geng, we always shared our friends so it wasn't a problem. We became the favorite trio. She was quite older than the two of us with some years difference, though she has a petite body figure but it wasn't a big deal for us, we were Besties. I am well aware that adding titles while addressing older ones is a big culture for us, so I never called her by her first name while addressing her, I always added "sister" before her name if I don't want to call her Bestie, or probably when I'm talking about her to someone else.
As usual we started off on a good foot with all the good friendship vibes. She was really a social bee unlike us, she was regular with the saturday visits and sundays sometimes if she couldn't make it on a saturday. We visited her as well, texted, called and all those stuff. Everything was okay, we were killing it. Before we started vibing, she had this other girl named Gift she used to sit with at every meeting, you could guess they knew each other well from the way they were always together.
Fast forward when she became friends with us, I noticed that Gift didn't like the idea or she was pretending to be cool with it. In several cases, Gift would walk up to where the three of us are chatting after the meetings and after talking with Karen in particular, she would say to Karen before leaving,"you're always joking around with little kids". She made sure to stress "little kids" at every occasion, she was also older than my sister and I so we didn't take any offense, we always laughed it off. In her defense, Karen wasn't supposed to be hanging out with us because she was older, that was just it. Maybe she was just jealous that she was getting replaced, unless that, I don't buy that idea.
To cut the long story short, after a while Karen withdrew from the one nice friendship we used to enjoy. She stopped visiting, stopped saying hi after the meetings and stopped hanging out with us entirely. We tried reaching out to her to find out what's wrong but she'll always say nothing happened.
We stopped trying and accepted the fact that she didn't want the friendship anymore. Since she didn't give us any reason to hold on to, we concluded that she took Gift's words to heart. We still see her twice every week but she doesn't like holding conversations, so we stayed on our lane. The funny thing now is that Gift has relocated to somewhere new, and might have probably made friends there but Karen is left behind to a ruined friendship. Karen has been trying to be nicer to us but, I don't think the vibe will be the same as it used to be.