Hindsight is one heck of a teacher. When I think about what it's taught me when it comes to friendship, if there's a little gem of insight I'd like to give to all parents out there, it's this — just because your friends have children, that doesn't automatically mean that your kids should play with their kids.
I say that because the worst "friend" I've had in my entire life (and that's saying something!) is someone who was the firstborn child of one of my mother and stepfather's friends. And she was evil. Pure evil. My first memory of her was of her locking me out of her house, trapped with her big dog and her laughing at me as he tried to attack me.
It was basically the perfect metaphor for the rest of our so-called friendship. Throughout elementary, high school, and even my first couple of years of college, she was the epitome of a bad friend. But because she was my first introduction to friendship, I didn't have a healthy standard. In many ways, as toxic as she was, she set the standard. And so, anyone who treated me even a little better than she did, I thought they were awesome, when the reality is a lot of them simply weren't "as abusive".
Sometimes, when I'm giving relationship advice, I'll use the grades on a report card to drive home a point. "If you're always used to getting an 'F', a 'C' will feel like a 'A'." In other words, if you're used to being treated poorly and someone comes along and does it less than others have, or they do something good for you every blue moon, you might think you're being treated well when really, it's just not as bad as before.
That's why I'm a firm believer that friendships should have deal breakers. It's not about a lack of loyalty or not allowing someone to make mistakes. It's about recognizing when someone isn't being a true friend so that you don't have to put more time, effort, and energy into something that is fruitless.
It's about being a friend to yourself first so that you're able to set the standard — and raise the bar when needed — for how others should treat you.
And just what should some of those deal breakers be? Check them out below.
Deal Breakers In Friendships
1.Consistent Selfishness
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I'm a big giver. I like having that quality. But there have been numerous times when I've realized I'm doing 70-80 percent of the giving in my friendships; not just monetarily but with my time and emotional-investing too. As a friend, when one of my friends are in need, I figure it out. Period.
But what I started to realize is when I needed something, a lot of my friends were unavailable. The few times I would bring up the pattern, they would say things like, "Shellie, if your motive was right, you wouldn't be going tit-for-tat." Whatever. If this friendship was balanced, it would be impossible to do that because the mutuality would be consistent. Selfish means "self-consumed". If you're trying to establish or maintain a friendship with someone who is really only consumed with themselves, good luck, sis. You're gonna need it.
Feature image by Getty Images.
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Those rumors were more than laid to rest when Jodie and Joshua went to the 2023 Oscars together earlier this year, and even more recently, when they celebrated her birthday together last month during the September unveiling of the Lotus Emeya.
Jodie Turner-Smith celebrates her birthday with husband Joshua Jackson at the unveiling of the new fully-electric Lotus Emeya on September 07, 2023 in New York City.
Brian Ach/Getty Images for Lotus
Despite seeming particularly happy and in love, perhaps the writing was already written on the wall even then. In the past, Jodie has been very celebratory publicly about her love for her estranged husband, even boldly recounting their love story for the books in a 2021 interview with Seth Meyers.
When Jodie and Joshua met, it was while at his birthday party in 2018. Their relationship was hot and heavy from the start, with Jodie openly noting that they began as a "one-night stand." During her 2021 interview with Seth Meyers, she jokingly referred to their love story as a "three-year one-night stand." She shared:
"First of all, I saw him before he saw me and when I saw him, I was like, 'I want that.' And then when he saw me, I just pretended like I didn't see him. He had to yell across the room to me, and I was wearing this T-shirt from a movie called Sorry to Bother You and [actress] Tessa Thompson plays a character called Detroit, and she has this T-shirt that says, 'The Future Is Female Ejaculation.'
"And so, he shouts across the room, 'Detroit!' He comes over and… does this really cute, charming thing that he does and just all night -- he just basically followed me around the party."
The couple were together from that moment forth, and even made things "Instagram official" less than two weeks later while on a dinner date. Joshua would later clarify to Insider that the night they met in 2018 was not a 'one-night stand' or a 'three-year one-night stand' like his then-wife joked but instead, it was "technically a three-night stand."
"It was sealed with a kiss that night and then we didn't leave each other's sides for, well, three years now," Joshua continued at the time.
In a July 2021 interview with Jimmy Fallon, Joshua dropped more details about the why behind getting married. He revealed that he didn't know he wanted to get married to Jodie until "the moment she asked me."
"She asked me on New Year's Eve. We were in Nicaragua. It was very beautiful, incredibly romantic, we were walking down the beach and she asked me to marry her."
He added, "I did not know [she would propose], but she was quite adamant and she was right. This is the best choice I ever made."
Joshua Jackson Reveals Jodie Turner-Smith Proposed To Him
Jodie received quite a bit of flack for proposing to Joshua because it goes against tradition and what society sees as acceptable for a woman to do to a man, and proposing isn't one of them. No matter how much time has passed, the viewpoints around who should do the proposing and who should be proposed to are still very traditional.
After being on the receiving end of such backlash, Joshua would later clarify to the media in a separate interview that it wasn't just Jodie's proposal to him that sealed the deal of them getting married, he proposed to her too. She might have initiated it, but Joshua followed through.
"I accidentally threw my wife under the bus because that story was told quickly and it didn't give the full context and holy Jesus, the internet is racist and misogynist," he explained to Refinery29 that same year. "We were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic."
David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images
He continued, "And yes, my wife did propose to me and yes, I did say yes, but what I didn't say in that interview was there was a caveat, which is that I'm still old school enough that I said, 'This is a yes, but you have to give me the opportunity [to do it too].'"
"She has a biological father and a stepdad, who's the man who raised her. [I said], 'You have to give me the opportunity to ask both of those men for your hand in marriage.' And then, 'I would like the opportunity to re-propose to you and do it the old-fashioned way down on bended knee.' So, that's actually how the story ended up."
Joshua and Jodie would eventually marry in December 2019. Shortly thereafter, Jodie gave birth to the couple's first child, Janie, in 2020.
In a recent interview with Elle UK, Jodie shared the ways becoming a mother to Juno helped to heal her of her wounds from colorism she experienced in the past. "It's interesting because I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother and, throughout my life, I always said if I were to have children, I wanted to have Black, Black babies so that I could affirm them as children with the love that I felt I needed to have been affirmed with by the outside world," Jodie shared with the outlet.
She continued, "Then I fell in love with my husband and we talked about having kids. I did have this mini pause, where I was like, 'She's going to be walking through the world not only having an experience that I did not have, but looking like people that, in a way, I'd always felt a little bit tormented by.' Now that I've got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it’s the universe teaching me lessons. I've been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colorism."
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Featured image by Amy Sussman/Getty Images
