An old friend – we first met over 50 years ago – used to be kind, supportive and good company. But she has become a self-absorbed and petulant know-all. She is the centre of her own little world, and all her friends – me included – are expected to run around after her and cater to her needs.

She constantly brings up her health issues, disregarding the fact that other people in our friendship circle also have health worries. The label “narcissist” has been mentioned by some!

In recent years I have taken deliberate steps to reduce the amount of time I spend with her. But other friends of mine, who don’t know her, have been urging me to drop her altogether. I don’t want to do that as I know she would be terribly hurt, but she would never be able to acknowledge that her behaviour is the root cause of tensions between us. I am constantly biting my tongue to avoid the tantrums that erupt whenever I remonstrate with her. Should I go for a clean break or just put up with the bad behaviour?

Eleanor says: Decades-long friendships have to braid a person’s past together with their future, which is tricky, because people can change a great deal in that time: the person we became friends with all those years ago might not feel the same as the one who keeps dragging down your birthday dinners now.

The past you shared together does matter. The whole point of long friendships – long relationships of any kind – is that the time you’ve spent together takes on its own moral weight. You don’t evaluate the other person anew each day, as though they’re standing in front of you for the first time and you’re considering whether to begin a relationship with them. The frustrations and irritations we have with someone in the present get tinted with patience and consideration from the years they spent being supportive and good to you.

Equally, though, their past doesn’t buy indefinite access to your future. Friendship is also, always, about what you think will come next. Nothing kills a loving relationship faster than thinking that a person has exhausted their capacity to surprise you; that you can already predict what they’re going to say and do, and you don’t much like the look of it. It sounds as if you might have hit that point with your friend. You’re pretty sure what you’re going to get from her: more of the same.

The question is, when someone’s past and future conflict, which version should you respond to? The one you knew, or the one you’re tired of knowing?

For whatever it’s worth, I think the problem of figuring out whether to be led by the past or the future is a fairly common one with old friends: sometimes parts of our personalities get stronger and more concentrated over the years, turning once mild sources of tension into all-out conflicts.

I’m inclined to think you don’t drop her unless she really wrongs someone. If you drop her, you’d be cutting off the possibility that she ever surprises you again. Once you’ve mitigated in the way you describe – reducing the amount of time you spend together, managing your own emotional reactions, making it clear to other people how you feel – only a relatively small amount of friendship remains. That little bit might be a libation to the time you did enjoy together, or an offering you make to the possibility she might change. Unless those vestiges are totally intolerable or objectionable, I don’t know that they have to be thrown out just because you wouldn’t strike up a friendship if you met her now.

But equally, if you’re keeping up with her only because it’d be too hurtful not to, that’s not quite the same as staying friends. I think Aristotle was right that there can’t be real friendship except between equals. If you’re looking at her with pity, or contempt, it might be more accurate to think of her as an acquaintance you interact with because of your history, rather than a friend.

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