Friendships and family ties break up over the dumbest disagreements now.
I have ex-friends who de-friended me because they felt I was too ‘right-wing’. I hadn’t moved to the right; they had moved so far left that I was now closer to the center, which looked to them like ‘insufficiently liberal’. Because, you know, friendships should live and die on whether you believe Trump is a 100% irredeemable evil in the world (Oh, c’mon, Elizabeth Warren totally deserved to be called ‘Pocahontas’! He got off a good one on her) or whether women should ever take responsibility for their personal safety.
When a former friend de-friended both myself and my friend Melissa, it made us both more insecure about friendships overall. So we devised a Sheila Agreement named after the Mean Girl to guide how we’d handle and negotiate conflict and disagreement. Then I introduced it to others, and it works quite well!
The 'Sheila Agreement': How To Manage Conflict Like Big Girls (And Boys)