When Your Friends Don't Like My Friends

We all have our BFFs (you know, best friends forever). But what happens when you don't like your friend's friends? Or your friend's friends don't like you? How do you get a friend to like you? Do you tell them if you don't like their friends? See, friendship can be complicated!

I take offense when a friend, colleague or someone I hold in high regard likes someone I don't respect.

Take, for example, "Melanie." I adore her. We regularly get together and keep in touch via e-mail and phone when we don't see one another for awhile.

But Melanie has this friend "Diane."

I cannot stand Diane.

She's rude, classless and mean.

Fortunately, Diane lives a good plane trip away, so I rarely see her. But whenever Melanie mentions Diane, I think, "What do you see in her?" (Sometimes I verbalize this. It's no secret to Melanie how I feel about Diane.)

Another person I adore fancies (not romantically) a guy I find to be an abhorrent showoff. The mere mention of this man sends my eyes rolling from Rensselaer county to Schenectady and back.

The belief others should like and dislike the same people we do has a ring of elementary school alliances, yet it's hard not to be bugged by what you consider a poor choice on someone else's part.

We like our friends for many, many reasons. But one of the main things that attracts us to people is respect. We admire actions, thoughts, words. So when a friend chooses to spend time with someone we don't particularly enjoy, we question our own judgment as much as we question theirs.