The best way for a friendship to end, I’ve found, is when two parties gradually grow apart. Instead of their being any bad blood, it’s just kind of understood that your interests are no longer the same, the place of importance in one another’s lives has fallen, and you’re just different people. But more often than not, friendships end because of disagreements, questions of loyalty, and just flat-out disrespect. Sadly, when relationships end in a less than positive way, things can get really ugly.
The obvious example of that would be the dissolution of Kandi Burruss and Phaedra Parks’s friendship. If you’ve watched Real Housewives of Atlanta over the last few seasons, you saw that things between the two women started to go sour when Parks’s marriage to Apollo Nida was coming to an end. She felt that Burruss, whose husband, Todd Tucker, is friends with Nida, wasn’t being a support system for her. From there, drama continued to surround the friendship. That drama included Nida’s belongings in Burruss’s garage, Tucker’s request for reimbursement for the workout DVD he did with Parks, opinions over her sons visiting Nida in prison, Mama Joyce inserting herself into things, whether or not Parks started a new relationship before her estranged husband went to jail, and Parks helping Burruss’s former employee sue her for alleged unpaid wages. But I don’t think anyone thought the end result of their discord would be the former besties going at it over allegations that Parks put in motion, which accused Burruss of wanting to drug and take advantage of Porsha Williams. It was an all-time low, even by Real Housewives standards. but it was a true slap in the face considering the lie, which Williams kept going, initially came out of Parks’s mouth — Burruss’s former BFF.
Despite the fact that Parks said she didn’t spread the lie because she was angry with Burruss, it seems obvious that that was the case. While some people choose to avoid any mention of their former friends when things fall apart, Parks, who felt some type of way about Burruss’s mother talking about her and that Burruss put it on blast that she was dating someone before Apollo went to jail, thought that by pushing what she thought was a little lie, she could find some form of retribution. She, however, didn’t expect that lie to get so big, eventually becoming a major part of the storyline in Season 9 and blowing up in her face by the finale.
Seeing Burruss’s confusion and wondering why someone who was once her friend would do something that could be so damaging, I thought about a former friend of mine who, in her anger, did something I never saw coming. She tried to get me fired from my job.
In my early years of writing, I published a story about dealing with the pain of a friendship ending unexpectedly. I told my side of the story, but included no names and no slander. In my side of the story, I expressed that I believed that the stress of trying to find work after college, along with the fact that no one shared her anger at one of the women in our friend circle (anger which would eventually be aimed at the entire friend circle), caused her to want to distance herself. I had no interest in trying to drag her through the mud, but instead, wanted to speak on the work I’d done to move past being dumped by one of my best friends. I was just doing what writers do — using my life experiences as subject matter. She, however, saw it as an attempt to publicly embarrass her.
Again, I didn’t say her name, what she looked like, where I knew her from or any details that people outside of the folks who knew the situation in my personal life might know or find. But somehow, she took it as the ultimate insult and drafted an email to the company I worked for. In it, she basically said I’d attacked her name and character and literally asked that I be given some form of “punishment” or even be “terminated” for speaking about her.
Because I never mentioned her by name, she had no proof that I’d attacked her. When my boss asked her for that proof, she never replied back. Still, it was something I didn’t see coming and was very hurt by. I knew that she was upset, but I never thought she would take things to that level. As I told my sister, who encouraged me to “cuss her a– out,” I wouldn’t have done something like that to my worst enemy. But instead of reaching out to give her a piece of my mind, it ended up being the closure I needed. I could forgive the low blow, but I knew we were done. We all make mistakes, but she proved herself to be a person of faulty character by coming for my livelihood.
I can’t say I know how Burruss feels exactly, but I know that being betrayed by someone you used to call friend is a very painful thing. However, if anything, it does provide the confirmation you need to know that if they would stoop that low, they weren’t a true friend in the first place.
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