Resolving Interpersonal Conflict

“I’m going to be late.”  Up until about a year ago, if I were to be given a dollar coin every time I heard this phrase, let’s just say my piggy bank would be well fed without much effort on my part. This is because I had a friend who just couldn’t seem to integrate the concept of punctuality into her personality. I didn’t hate her for it, in fact she was and still is one of my best friends, but this only made addressing her bad habit more complicated than if it concerned a complete stranger.  Before her late-coming was resolved, I developed my own bad habit of letting her tardiness slide because while I yearned to tell her enough is enough, I was fearful that the confrontation might change the dynamics of our friendship. Hence I was always side stepping the issue.  I got used to having to wait for her for 15 minutes, an hour, sometimes even an hour and a half. The problem was that it was getting on the nerves of the other people we regularly hung out with.

The straw that broke the camel’s back occurred last April, when this friend, let’s call her S, myself and our other friends decided to get together to celebrate one of our birthdays. We were going to have a picnic and S was allocated the all important task of buying the cake before joining the rest of us in the park.  When the day finally came, it was no surprise that S was nowhere to be seen at the appointed meeting time. However, we decided to wait a little longer before giving her a phone call to obtain her whereabouts. After 20 minutes had passed, my other friends were getting impatient and so one of them, let’s call her K, placed the phone call.

After 3 unsuccessive attempts, K finally got through to S. However, to our horror, S informed us that she was still at home. And perhaps the heat had gotten to our heads, but a shouting match then erupted between S and K over the phone. While I did not manage to catch S’s side of the conversation, I distinctly heard K use words such as irresponsible and tardy, and after yelling at her to grow up and start respecting other peoples’ time, K hung up in a huff. And as though as an afterthought, she proceeded to send a text message to S telling her not to show up for the picnic, nor any of our gatherings for that matter, until she could manage to be on time. At that point, I felt like we all shared K's sentiments, yet I was speechless at how brash she had been in handling the matter. Needless to say, S didn’t reply. She also refused to show up for our gatherings for a good 2 months, and even when she did, it took another month before she warmed up to K again.

Thankfully, the curtain has fallen on that chapter of our lives and we have since resolved this interpersonal conflict. But there is no doubt that K could have handled the situation better instead of yelling at S. In fact, I could have handled the situation better as well, instead of evading the problem and giving it the opportunity to escalate to such proportions.

So how do you think K or myself could have better resolved this situation?