Look What The Catty Dragged In

After I got a new boyfriend, a friend started making frequent passive-aggressive jabs at me. Lamenting her datelessness, she sniffed, "At least I'm not one of those people who need to jump from relationship to relationship," knowing full well that I got into my current relationship a month after ending my previous one. There are reasons I can't just boot her from my life, so is there a way to get her to stop? If I called her out, she'd just deny it.

--Dissed

Close friends tend to leave stuff lying around in each other's life -- but stuff leading to questions like "Hey, did you forget your phone on my coffee table?" not "Hey, did you leave your knife between my T4 and T5 vertebrae?" You probably can't change her way of seeing all you have through the prism of all she doesn't. (Really, she couldn't be happier for you -- that is, unless you fell down the stairs.) Where you went wrong is in letting that first nasty comment wriggle past you, which was like making it a little bed out of shredded newspaper so it could give birth to a whole litter of them. Since the direct approach would likely lead to snarly denials and ill will, shut her down by consistently jabbing back, but in a jokey tone -- "Oh, you mean like my relationship..." -- and she should get all sputtery...no, that's not...no...she didn't, blah, blah, blah. By calling her out indirectly, you two can maintain the polite fiction that she hasn't been going all mean drunk on you and maybe get back to some semblance of friendship as it's supposed to be: that when a friend alerts you that you have something in your teeth, it's because she wants you to look good, not because her shoelace is caught.