I'm at a loss of what to do when I encounter a Debbie Downer. You all know one or two. They invariably suck. They bring their raincloud over every conversation and love to attack. I was at Karaoke last night and this one girl in the group without fail slammed every person that went on the mic. It became so frustrating I wanted to scream at her. I mean it's Karaoke, no one is good, the whole point is to foster an environment where you shouldn't be afraid that you don't have Freddy Mercury's voice. I mean how can someone insult a Karaoker when she herself refuses to sing a song. Hell, my voice is awful and I sang stone-cold sober. So please, get off your high horse and laugh at yourself.

Normally, in cases like the Karaoke one I'll just easily ignore the person and never initiate friendship. But sometimes I'll make friends with a person who is outwardly cool and open only to find after I realize I enjoy their company that they really are miserable downers. It's at this point in the relationship that normally I'll leave before it evolves into a close friendship. I'll slowly back out of my responsibility as a friend and pretend like it never happened. I wonder if this is an alright mechanism to dealing with these people?  I'll analyze and analyze and analyze their personalities and decide it's just not worth it to continue.

I'm thinking of one case in particular where I let the friendship evolve into a close one. But as we got closer I saw things that I didn't like, specifically with the way she acted with other people. She had a tendency to "shittalk" on people behind their back. Now I never let her do this with me because it's a characteristic I can't stand. At the beginning she would try and confide things like this in me, but she learned quickly I had no ear for it. Even so, it was a characteristic I couldn't curb in her, especially when we were in a group of people. I let a distance grow between us and now, though we aren't on bad terms, we hardly speak.

I guess then my question is how do we know a person, a friend, is worth going through more effort to maintain? If I was to continue this friendship I described, I would have felt the strong desire to change aspects of her character. But although I liked her a lot, staying friends would have required a lot of effort and ultimately might have proven futile anyways. So when is it reasonable to back out of a relationship and/or at what point in the relationship should I feel compelled to stay and work at it?