Strengthening a friendship before its collapse

Hey all,

This is my first post, I would not consider myself an INFJS but this seems like a legit forum and would like some perspective on a certain situation. I'll attempt to be as brief as possible although this appears to be a drawn-out process, so I'll do the best I can.

I have a friend, let's call her Jen, that is a good friend of mine. I met her about a year ago through mutual friends and we hit it off right away because we had very similar senses of humor. Anyway, right after we met we became good enough buddies that she would call me every Friday & Saturday night asking what I was up to, and most times we would meet up and have a few drinks, usually with mutual friends but ocassionally just us. Just to be clear, we both thought of each other as friends and nothing more than that; I thought it was a rare instance where there was no sexual tension between either of us. (If it matters, she's a bonafide "10" with a boyfriend, who I am also friends with. Her boyfriend is in a band that takes him out of town every weekend.)

Recently, I felt the dynamic started to change. She'd continue her standard of texting me each Friday/Saturday asking what I was up, but then she would always follow up of "who are you hanging out with?" Personally, I feel this is extremely insulting. It seemed like she would base her decision on what to do based on who I was out with, as opposed to trying to hang out with me.

She mentioned awhile back that she didn't prefer to be the only girl out with us, but I don't think that ever actually happened and it never seemed to be an issue. Her best friend is married to my good buddy, and we'd usually have "wine night" at my place when the best friend's husband wanted to have video game night at his place, since I'm not a gamer. Wine night usually turned into us just getting piss drunk and having a good time, no harm done.



As time went on and her continual "who are you out with?" messages kept coming, I became more frustrated that she was judging me by my company, and eventually came down to whenever she texted me that question, I stopped responding. I'll give you that it's not the best approach, but I know she's socially intelligent enough to get the picture. It used to be us making the plans for our clique, and now it was her trying to make plans based on who I was out with.

It's been a couple months of that now, and I wouldn't say it was a big deal tonight but tonight I met her out, she actually didn't invite me out but I ended up being there with mutual friends. They had been at a restaurant and bar-hopping and we showed up later. She's a little girl and was quite drunk, and at first there was some obvious tension; no words were exchanged but I am good enough at reading people that I knew what she was thinking. A bit later it came to words when she "jokingly" called me a d-bag in front of HER friends, I responded "I don't know what I've done, but I'm leaving anyway" and her friends actually defended me. She backed off and was like, just kidding I love you, but it was apparent that it was to save face and not cause a scene, because she's a socially intelligent person. She was really, really drunk, which I definitely feel explains everything.

Hopefully that describes that current situation, my question is, how do I approach this situation? I definitely value our friendship and I think she's a good person, but the dynamic has certainly changed since a year ago.

I'm thinking my approach should be to talk to her her next time we're out and say something like, hey I know things have been a little different lately, I'm just insulted everytime your first question is who I'm out with. But I don't want to be a melodramatic girl about it, which I feel that approach is.

Do any of you have any other suggestions?