asked my best friend to be my safety call and she was weird about it

did the responsible thing and it has gone slightly wrong.

i have a first meet coming up in a fortnight. wanted somebody to know where i would be, so i asked my closest friend if she would be my safety call. explained what it meant, told her i would send the details, said i would text when i got home.

she has known me twenty years. she was not unkind. but she went quiet and then asked, twice, whether i was sure about all this, in a tone i have never heard from her before. and now there is a slight weather system between us that was not there on tuesday.

what i think happened is that the request was not really a request, it was a disclosure with a task attached, and she got both at once with no warning.

i do not want to drop the safety call. it is the one bit of advice i have taken from this board without arguing. but i also do not want this hanging over the friendship.

has anyone had this land badly? did it settle? and is there a better way to ask than the way i asked.

Two things happened at once and they got tangled. You asked for a small practical favour and you also came out to her about a whole area of your life, and she is reacting to the second one while you are talking about the first. Give it a fortnight. In my experience the reaction to the second thing changes a lot once people have had time to think and have not been asked to respond on the spot.

the phrasing matters more than it should. i is this safe lands very differently from here is where i will be and when i will text you. the first invites her opinion on your life, the second just gives her a job

And she may simply be frightened rather than judgemental, which sounds similar from the outside. People who know nothing about any of this have a picture of it assembled from television, and that picture is alarming. A friend who says are you sure about this is often saying I do not know how to tell whether you are safe, and the fix for that is information rather than reassurance.

That is probably it. She asked two questions and both of them were about whether I knew what I was getting into rather than about the actual arrangements.