Competition for Friends - experience of mine

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I've had this on my mind for many years and want to talk about it. It is something that happened to me a few times when I was growing up and I've always wondered about it. Now I can tell my story.

When I was growing up, I had alot of problems making friends, mostly because I was different. There were a few times however, when I did manage to make a friend, but there was a problem. I have an older sister whom I think liked to compete with me for my friends, which made no sense to me because she never had problems making friends and always had alot of friends.

What she would do was if I had a friend over, she'd try to strike up a conversation and try to find common grounds, such as movies they'd seen and I hadn't, books I hadn't read, etc., then she'd try to show my friend how much better she was than me in terms of everything. In fact, she even had my friend saying along with her "don't you listen to any good music" and other such things. Often, I think the idea was to make me feel like a fifth wheel, which I often did.

This bothered me not only because I felt she was stealing my friends but also because there was as double standard at work here. When she had friends over, there was a rule that I was not to in any way disturb them, and it was always enforced by our parents or my brother when he lived at home. I thought the same rule would be in place for her to leave us alone when I had friends over, but it wasn't. I tried talking to our parents, but they did next to nothing. They'd tell her to leave us alone, but she'd get right back in with us again after a while. The only thing that kept her out was if she wasn't home when I had a friend over, but to me this wasn't an acceptable solution.

One time, I decided to try and compete with her in one of the areas she had convinced my friend I was not as good in, musical taste. From what I observed, I discovered my friend had an interest in The Beatles, which I thought I could exploit quite easily. I went to one of my brothers, borrowed some Beatles albums he had and made tapes of them to play when my friend came to visit. I felt this way, my sister couldn't use music against me. Needless to say, it didn't work. I put one of the tapes on and he listened for a little while, then my sister came in and offered what she called some "good music." When I asked what was wrong with the Beatles tape I had my friend responded "Not your kind of Beatles, her kind" which was the sountrack to the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band which featured not the original Beatles, but a bunch of very badly done covers of their songs. Needless to say, that was my last attempt to beat her at her own game.

I had another friend she was also able to steal from me, by chatting him up about fiction books she and he had read and I hadn't. I was never a fan of fiction books to be honest, give me a book on electronics, computers, muscle cars, and I was happy. She did the same thing again, pushed me into the background. It got to the point where he'd come over to see her more than me, which really hurt. My only recourse was to simply not have friends over to the house anymore which fortunately, wasn't hard since I was in private school and the few friends I made didn't live close by.

This issue always bothered me, made me wonder if the problem was my deficiencies or my sister's efforts to steal my friends, both, or even something totally different. I just wanted to talk about it and wondered if anyone else could relate.

Thanks for listening.

It sounds like your sister needed to bolster her self-esteem at your expense. That seems to be a common thing with humans and is the primary reason for bullying, I think. It is sad, but true: NT's are in competition all the time with each other and underneath a very thin layer of civility, that need boils.

That sounded like a tough situation I'm sorry you had to go through that at home.

I kind of thought that too about her not just in this situation but in others, of how she for some reason boosted her self esteem by constantly trying to make me feel inferior no matter what I did. It often seemed like our parents supported this too, often by making excuses for her and looking the other way when she mistreated me, but coming down hard if I did anything to her. My parents were very big on double standards, which along with inconistency, was one of the two hardest things with them I had to deal with.

I also think she was somewhat greedy. Just having her own friends wasn't enough, she had to have them all and see me with none. She was greedy in other areas too. Today I try and keep my distance from her, but my wife still wants me to have a relationship with her. I guess my wife will have to learn the hard way what my sister is really like.

That situation was one I've had alot of trouble with for a long time. I often wondered if it was simply my deficiencies that made it possible for my sister to do this or because she made an effort to steal my friends from me, or a combination of both. The other possibility I wondered about was maybe I was just lousy at picking friends.

Thanks for responding.