From friendship to cruel mockery? A situation of discomfort [ENG-ESP]

English

Today I extend once again a big greeting to the members of this great community who vent and express their emotions in a very healthy way through this medium❤️ in this opportunity I have come to make Catharsis of something that has been making me noise for several weeks.

I consider myself a sociable person, I love to make friendships and form emotional bonds with the people around me, and I have always believed in "respect" as a fundamental value of those relationships, but at what point do we distort the true meaning of friendship and turn it into a reason to make someone a target of ridicule?

This concern arose from the moment I moved to a new city, starting a whole new life where I left behind my lifelong friendships. In this new city I found love, starting a serious relationship with my current boyfriend... Now, for obvious reasons, he became my direct entrance to social groups, including me mainly in his closest friendship group... This allowed me to get to know his friends in a close way, and at first everything was super cool, but little by little I started to notice things that I disliked a bit.

The most important of all, and which I will develop in this post, is the constant "teasing and heavy jokes". As I said before, at the beginning everything was super quiet, but little by little I began to notice that it was recurrent in this group of friends the use of "Mockery" as the main means of fun, which did not worry me much at first and we know that it is normal from time to time to make jokes with your friends about them, but there is always a limit that we should not cross. My real displeasure started when they started making me the target of those jokes and teasing.

I may be tolerant and anti-parabolic on many occasions, but that doesn't mean I'm human, and therefore feel and may have issues with insecurities. What really made me really upset one day was when they began to make comparisons of my relationship with my boyfriend, and his relationship with his previous partner, belittling me saying that with his ex he was better off.... Logically I was visibly uncomfortable, and this instead of creating awareness in them, seemed to be the spark they needed to become much more entrenched towards me with their jokes. This generated in me an indescribable insecurity and feeling of humiliation at the time... and made me wonder: Is this really the concept of friendship I am looking for? How much can some people enjoy being cruel to others?

From that moment on, I began to feel uncomfortable and already predisposed towards some of my boyfriend's friends. I still wanted to make amends and try to be mature enough, letting the incident go (obviously making clear my discomfort and that I hoped it wouldn't happen again). Still the situations continued, this time looking for other reasons to make a joke or mockery of me and my relationship, the next "funny" comments were directed at my boyfriend, every time we were together they would say things like:

• Let's go out for a drink Or Heniris won't let you?
• Heniris is a controller, she doesn't let you do anything.
  -Your girlfriend has you on a chain

Which has never been like that, because I have always respected my boyfriend's space and we talked about things to reach a compromise... But for some reason they were amused to make such comments at every moment, to the point that I felt harassed with videos and "memes" on the subject that they always sent, or tagged or simply made comments of "This is Angel with the girlfriend": This is Angel with the girlfriend.

This began to bother me a lot, and one day I decided to tell one of the people who was more intense with the subject that I really did not like those jokes and the constancy with which they made them. I thought he would understand and we would talk about it calmly, but instead, he got upset and stopped talking to me as before because "I couldn't stand anything"... and this made me think the following:

Are we forced to put up with mistreatment, teasing and negative comments from other people, without being able to express our emotions?
Is being a reasonable person who dislikes teasing a reason to dismiss you as a friend?

I really don't understand at what point it became customary to humiliate others under the excuse of "I'm doing it as a friend". But what I am absolutely clear about is that I will never pretend to like someone by letting them do whatever they want with me. I think that the true concept of friendship is based mainly on respect, and on being able to understand the feelings of others, applying EMPATHY.

I know how much I am worth and what I deserve, and the fact that they stop treating me because I don't like the concept of teasing, let alone making me the object of it benefits me and really does me a great favor. Bottom line: we should not allow ourselves to be mistreated just to be liked, and we should always raise our voice to demand that we are respected, and if we are not, it is best to walk away for good.

I feel so much better sharing this with you, I hope you never let others undermine you under the concept of "jokes and teasing" within a friendship. Remember, Respect is everything. Thank you so much for taking the time to make it this far, and see you in a future Post ✨✨.