A couple you always thought of as your closest friends, a friendship you never questioned, are acting oddly distant to each other during a vacation in a beautiful rented house. After a few days, tensions are turned on you and one of them rages at you, glaring with a laser beam of hostility for long minutes, in a display of anger you haven’t seen since your father was alive. You endure a sleepless night after a door is angrily closed.

In the morning your friend drags his wife out to apologize to you. She is humiliated, apologizes with enough caveats to render the apology meaningless. While she is apologizing your friend coldly observes that you catalogue and remember every offense everybody’s ever committed against you, in spite of your claim to the contrary.

You spend an entire year afterwards, agonizing about why it is so hard to make peace with these two suddenly implacable friends. They are intent on never talking about anything, acting like everything is fine. Everything would be fine, they insist, if you’d only shut up. In the end, after months of silence and ongoing displays of indignation and anger, one of them suggests mediation.

Mediation, of course, can only work when both parties are interested in compromising. Here there can be no compromise: the only solution is that you are a hurt child who cannot accept that people who love you sometimes act in an abusive way. They are planning on the professional, impartial mediator being able to point out to you that you are acting like a hurt child and that you must act like an adult.

The proof of this is that they will agree to nothing prior to mediation. You point out that the mediator can only work with the facts we provide, the things we agree about, the things we disagree about. The mediator must know our respective positions. Although you are clearly in a terrible conflict, you are hard pressed to identify positions beyond “I’m hurt” “No you’re not!”. Instead of agreeing to a set of facts, your friends fight you like devils until you are literally banging your head against the wall.

It becomes clear that mediation will not help. You tell them so. They respond with another month of silence. One rainy Friday afternoon you get a phone call from your one time close friend telling you that his therapist told him he must tell you that he is not willing to be responsible for fixing things. He wants to be friends, he says, but he’s not going to take responsibility for fixing a broken friendship. After a moment of honesty on your part he tells you he’s going to hang up the phone now.

Now comes the horror: everybody you know in common accepts the story that you are an unreasonable, childish, unforgiving sadist with a pathological need to upset people by acting like an immature, self-righteous asshole. Not only did you refuse to accept numerous apologies, not only did you keep venting the same babyish anger over and over, you rejected a good faith offer for mediation and, in the end, when your friend gave one last effort to make you understand how much you were loved, in spite of being such a difficult person, you used the f-word and the c-word. What kind of fucking cunt does that make you, pal?