At the dinner party the next evening, Jamie was on a mission – to get an apology from the traitors or renounce their friendship forever. When Carina tried to reiterate her position, Jamie refused to listen and shut her down, telling her to “shut her mouth.”
Meanwhile, Rhi was clearly terrified she’d say the wrong thing and find herself in trouble, and she apologised to Jamie.
But Carina wasn’t a ride or die friend – and, in Jamie’s eyes, that is not a friend worth having.
Geoff Magee/Channel 4
On the one hand, it’s easy to see why so many of us prize unconditional loyalty in our friends. After all, it’s a gratifying thought: my friends will back me no matter what. But as the Jamie saga shows, it’s not always all that healthy to expect our friends to be our own personal army.
In Jamie’s eyes, friends are not there to question or call out our own behaviour – they’re there to fight for us and with us. But… should they? Is that really friendship? Someone who blindly backs you up and never encourages you to be better?
The dinner party is downright uncomfortable. Jamie refuses to consider the fact that her actions might have been inappropriate – in fact, she is blatantly offended when people in the group suggest that she should pause and reflect on how she’s acting. In turn, she turns on Carina in full force. She becomes vindictive, even cruel to her so-called “friends” after they don’t show the ride or die qualities she expects.
But of course, friends are not a personal army blindly following us into battle. In fact, our real and best friends are the people who are able to look at our hardest situations with empathy and, most importantly, perspective, before giving us the hard truths we may not want to hear. No one likes the idea of being betrayed by a friend. But disagreeing with someone’s actions is not betrayal – in fact, it can be the bravest form of loyalty. Instead of enabling unhelpful, unhealthy behaviour and hyping you up to set the world alight, a true friend is someone who will be brave enough to talk us down and calmly draw us away from the battle lines. And unlike Jamie, we have to be willing to hear them.