Let this be a lesson to everyone out there (myself included) who hates confrontation: If you hold back too much, it all just gets bottled up and explodes in one huge confrontation later that’s much worse than any of the little ones you were avoiding.

I don’t want to get into too much detail about the situation, because I’m not sure how Tim would feel about me just posting it for the world to see. The thing is, though, that he’s having a major falling-out with someone who was once a good friend, and a lot of the problem seems to be that she was so afraid of confrontation that she never communicated to him anything that was wrong. Very nearly every issue she’s bringing up as we’re working through “who did what” involves some problem that Tim wasn’t aware of, and she never made clear to him that it was serious, so he didn’t think it was a problem. Not everything, perhaps, but most of it.

The thing is, confrontation is painful and awkward when it happens between friends. It’s just how things go. And I can see not wanting to get into it over what seems, perhaps, like a minor issue. But, you know, if you don’t speak up about at least some of it, the little things become big things. Then the big things become huge things. It’s like the fuzzy green mess in the back of your fridge–if you don’t deal with it, it’s not going to go away. And when it doesn’t go away, you get a situation like this one where instead of having a calm, reasonable conversation, you have a big messy blowup that splatters all over everyone connected to the friendship.

Do I have a point? Nah, I’m just ranting.

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