Ill-Starred

A Lady Writes:
Dear Gin and Gentility,

Some years back, during my university days, I entered into a friendship with two other young ladies of my own age. While our first several months of acquaintance passed happily and without incident, one of these two young ladies, who I shall call Miss A, soon proved to have abominable taste in women.

To wit, she became entangled with a neurotic dancer.

During the course of this unfortunate tendresse, Miss A’s behavior became quite inward and distraught, but I and the second young lady, our mutual friend Miss B, put it down to her unfortunate romantic circumstance. After all, when one is constantly coping with a neurotic (and rather sadistic) dancer, one has little time for other concerns.

Luckily, in time this interlude passed, Miss A recovered, and Miss B and I breathed a sweet sigh of relief. The happy days of our friendship returned, and we even came to room with each other.
Indeed, Miss B and I found it a hopeful sign when, a year later, Miss A fell head over heels for a promising young female pre-medical student, and we gladly encouraged her.

Unfortunately, once happily ensconced in a relationship, Miss A’s behavior deteriorated once again and as to rooming with each other - she left us in the lurch. She even had the temerity to ask us to make an appointment to enjoy the pleasure of her friendship!

Needless to say, the acquaintance cooled. But neither Miss B nor I had the heart to cut off relations with the friend of our youth.

After several years of only contacting Miss B in order to protest her romantic woes when things with the lady medical student were going badly, or to use Miss B as a source of useful trivia in the fashion of an almanac, Miss A has apparently used up the last of Miss B’s patience. Miss A appears immune to all gentle hints by Miss B on the subjects of etiquette and time spent on the gentle joys of friendship.

How may I assist my friends in resolving this difficulty of communication? How does one deal with a young woman who is convinced she is the star of a romantic drama?

- A Perplexed Correspondent

Dear Perplexed Correspondent,

Miss Verity apologizes deeply and sincerely for the time it’s taken her to post anything in response to your dilemma. She hasn’t, she wishes to assure you, been ignoring you. Rather, she’s been puzzling over how best to advise you. Because this is, she confesses, a problem she has faced before, and she has never quite found the perfect solution.

The current vogue to encourage people to believe they are “the stars of their own lives” is, she believes, largely to blame. Society would benefit hugely if people would leave off such overinflated notions and consider the humbler but worthwhile possibility that they are, in fact, minor walk-on characters who may still, by doing their very best, win the accolades not merely of the sympathetic circles of friends that surround them but even of that Eternal Critic whose review matters most in the end.

The problem lies in convincing self-crowned drama queens that their co-stars deserve their share of stage-time and curtain-calls–and that friends are co-stars, not merely convenient people to send running for extra vases when one’s dressing-room is filled to overflowing with roses. Reminding her of how very much you value friendship because it allows you to discuss other things than love affairs might work, particularly if you write it out in a note she could be encouraged to tuck into her mirror-frame (or have it tattooed on her hand, possibly), but in extreme cases such polite hints often go unheeded.

And so Miss Verity is throwing open the floor to her colleagues, and asking them to assist in suggesting solutions.

~Miss Verity