Edit 60: On Adult Friendships and Not Keeping Score
When a friendship starts to feel more like competition than community
In early September I received a message on Instagram. This Life, Edited reader remarked how she missed my monthly On Adult Friendships series and hoped when I resumed I’d cover something she’d been struggling with. I was touched by the strength it took this person to be so vulnerable with someone she’d never met, and to acknowledge this I promised them when I picked my proverbial pen back up, I would. Their name would not be mentioned, only a given moniker and their situation, and with it my suggestions for a solution.
So without further ado, I give you the first installment of Dear Life, Edited.
Dear Life, Edited,
I have a friend I genuinely like. She’s smart, funny, ambitious. I enjoy spending time with her and often feel quite inspired after. But lately I’ve been noticing something about our friendship that I can’t un-notice.
If I mention work is busy, hers is somehow busier. If I tell her about a trip I’m really excited about, she tells me about the more exotic one she has coming up. If something good happens professionally, she always congratulates me—and then, almost without fail, tells me about something bigger happening for her.
None of it feels intentionally unkind, and if I touched on any single conversation I’d sound ridiculous complaining about it. But thinking about them altogether I’ve started to feel as though everything I share becomes the opening salvo in a competition I never agreed to enter.
This is why I feel bad. I don’t want to compete with her—I’m not trying to compete with her. I’m happy for her wins and like hearing about the good things in her life. Every once in a while I just wish something could happen in mine where it didn’t immediately become a bridge back into hers.
What can I do about a friend who always seems to need to go one better?
Not Keeping Score
Dear Not Keeping Score,
First, resist the temptation to start doing just that—keeping score. Because there is a very simple way to deal with a person who always needs to one-up you: let them.
Their story isn’t better, your accomplishment doesn’t matter less, and you certainly don’t need to make yourself smaller to keep that friendship comfortable. Let them “win” because this is a game you were never playing.
I know this may be hard to hear, especially since you were the one who shared the good news first and wanted that moment of joy reflected back at you.
And it sounds simple until you are actually sitting across from someone who has just taken the thing you were excited to share and somehow turned the focus around to be on them. In that moment there is a real temptation to reclaim what I’m going to call your “story territory”. Maybe you add another detail or clarify that the opportunity was bigger than your friend seems to understand. Suddenly, there are two grown adults who presumably like one another, engaged in a competition neither is going to want to admit is happening.
The problem with one-upping is that we can’t always know the reason behind it. It could be insecurity. It could be competitiveness. It could also be how someone chooses to connect with another person. For example: you tell them about Italy, they tell you about Spain. You tell them you had a hard week, they say wait until you hear about mine. What may be their way of saying I hear you and I understand can begin to sound like You think that’s something?
One of the best things about adult friendships is that we don’t have to always figure out which one it is. Yes, we can notice a pattern, but we don’t have to look deeper into it every single time. We can take a conversation at face value and decide that a momentary irritation doesn’t necessarily mean we have to confront it, and imperfect friendships do not have to end over them. Simply…edit.
For me, the edit means I’m not going to make my news bigger than it is to compete, nor will I make it smaller to accommodate. And here’s why: when we begin dampening our enthusiasm around someone who always seems to have the bigger trip or busier schedule, we start to go down a very slippery slope. We begin to diminish our well-deserved joy.
Share your news! Celebrate it! Be delighted when you’re delighted and proud when you’re proud. If your friend responds with something bigger…let her. Her success doesn’t make yours smaller and you don’t need to include any “add-ons” to put yourself back on top.
A part of growing up in our friendships is learning that not every one gets access to every part of us. Some friends will share in our happiness and give us that moment to shine; others may be wonderful friends in a hundred different ways, but they may not be the first people we call when something exciting is taking shape.
That isn’t keeping score—that’s knowing your audience.
And maybe that is the real edit, your edit: don't make the friendship smaller, and don't make yourself smaller either. Someone else’s instinct to compare doesn’t have to be yours as well.
Let her have the bigger story if she needs it. Yours is still worth telling. So tell it, with all the joy you deserve.
