"As we move through life we make friends for every occasion — college friends, work friends, mom friends, climbing-gym friends, divorce friends. We are told to nurture old relationships even — maybe especially — when new ones are formed, to 'be there,' no matter how busy, or uninterested, we find ourselves... There are scandalous transgressions or betrayals that can kill a friendship. But more often, there’s no accounting for a friendship’s demise. The atmosphere changes; a sense of duty creeps in. Conversations that were once freewheeling shift into that less than enjoyable territory of 'catching up.'... My old friend eventually reached out to me, several months after she’d disappeared. She said she didn’t know why she needed space, but she did, and she was sorry. I told her that it had been painful but I understood. We saw each other a few times after that, but it was different; we’d come apart. Out of respect for friendship’s sanctity, when the magic dims, the best thing to do is let go...."
Writes Lauren Mechling in
"How to End a Friendship/The rules governing romantic love are clearer. But few relationships are meant to last forever" (NYT).
A comment at the NYT:
The loss of a friendship, whether it ends abruptly or just fades away, is always disappointing and disconcerting. It inevitably leads to feelings of self-doubt and alienation. I have suffered through this condition, as we all have, my share and have found neither a cure nor a prophylactic. My only advice is this: avoid if possible the desire to force-maintain a dying friendship, or to imagine that you can mount some kind of argument for the relationship. Nothing will add to your misery more than grasping after something which you can no longer possess. If you can simply let the friendship go, it sometimes returns in surprising and often quite meaningful ways. Some friendships do really die. Others are just in a coma.
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48 comments:
The loss of a friendship, whether it ends abruptly or just fades away, is always disappointing and disconcerting. It inevitably leads to feelings of self-doubt and alienation.
Always?
Home > Middle School > Teaching Guide: Friendship
To have good friends you must be a good friend. Here are some of the ways good friends treat each other:
• Good friends listen to each other.
• Good friends don’t put each other down or hurt each other’s feelings.
• Good friends try to understand each other’s feelings and moods.
• Good friends help each other solve problems.
• Good friends give each other compliments.
• Good friends can disagree without hurting each other.
• Good friends are dependable.
• Good friends respect each other.
• Good friends are trustworthy.
• Good friends give each other room to change.
• Good friends read the New York Times for moral guidance.
I just lost a friend, of long standing, to death. That makes me want to
revive some comatose friendships, or friendships in suspended animation.
Narr
If possible
Yeah I got one like that. I worked hard and got her into a good place after she broke hip and had to move. She hated me for it, and kept putting down my religion and my politics even though I never talked about that stuff.
Yet I feel like I should call her today. Gah.
That's why their used to be thousands of social clubs. Elks, DAR, BPW, AmVets, Sewing circle, IOOF, Bible Study, Last Thursday of month poker. Polka Club, Camping Group, Saddle Club.
Its endless.
Today?
We need the govt to organize midnight basketball.
Part of today's issue, parents investing every free moment they have attempting to make their kids believe their happy. We need to recenter society on adults.
What navel gazing! Ugh.
Fernandistein
Good friends accept each others faults, failings, and character flaws. Find a person like that, and return the favor.
Friendship circles are built for a season, and then things do change. Not every friend is worth keeping forever. The few that remain faithful to us and we to them become special ones.
Sharing community rituals are one key to keeping faithful friends. Those are called the Church Calendar
My old friend eventually reached out to me, several months after she’d disappeared. She said she didn’t know why she needed space, but she did, and she was sorry.
It used to be that my first thought when I hear about something like this happening is that the person may be suffering from depression. Now when I hear about it, my first thought is that they or someone they love likes Trump and they're tired of the daily "orange man bad" BS coming from the dropped friend.
With some friendships, all it took was Trump.
Ditto @MadisonMan. Grow up, people.
A friend of mine once advised "a poor friendship is worse than none at all". It has proved itself many times over.
When my wife laments and wonders about not hearing from a friend, I always tell her, "Your friends will clearly define the nature of and depth of the friendship for you; you don't have to ask." If you wonder about your friendship with a particular person, that friendship *as you know it* has ended. Don't fight it...it's over.
I think a lot of people who seem to be friends want you as a connection for something they are trying to get for themselves. It's not you specifically, but what they see themselves getting through you. If they get that thing or you stop being useful as a connection to it, you may find that a bond that seemed to you about the pure condition of friendship is gone. Even if you recognize that the friendship is over, it's painful because your idealism is wounded.
The free market applies to friendship every bit as much as goods or services.
Friendships and commerce should be entered when both parties judge themselves likely to be better off if they consummate the bargain.
If, over time, both parties are not better off than they would have been without the friendship, they will no longer continue as they had.
IOW, if after the fact either side proves to have been wrong about the future benefit.
Further, sunk costs should not affect future decision making.
Althouse -- idealist?
Birkel -- realist without a question mark.
"A friend of mine once advised "a poor friendship is worse than none at all"."
Better than nothing is a high bar. Even (maybe especially) in people.
Only a woman could write something like this. I've found that the older I get the less I need friends. Of course, I have a husband and children. That means I'm quite busy all ready. We moved across the country last year and I realized I am not lonely. My kids have found friends and that's important to me, but I'm fine. It helps that communication is easier, but I don't communicate to my old friends very often. It's just not necessary for me.
I don't get lonely. My friends are people I enjoy being with, but I enjoy alone time just as much.
It's not you specifically, but what they see themselves getting through you.
That would be all my friends, actually.
Original Mike said...
I don't get lonely. My friends are people I enjoy being with, but I enjoy alone time just as much.
Me as well. I have a good number of friends but we communicate and get together when there is something to talk about or do. A couple of these friendships go back to our childhood. We talk rarely and get together maybe once per year, at most. But they are good friends and we always have a good time when we get together.
I've never had a friend engage me in a conversation about the nature of our friendship and whether or not it is somehow a burden to them (or me). I have had friends fade away, mostly because we no longer shared the thing or things that made us friends in the first place.
This article exposes me to people and a way of thinking that is completely foreign. There's been a lot of that lately here.
Friends. Meh.
I never got really close enough to people, especially of my own sex, to make good friends. I had acquaintances and people that I liked well enough to hang out with, share stories, play games. etc. But not what most people consider good, close, life long friends.
Probably due to my early childhood where we traveled extensively for my parent's work (and because my father had wanderlust). The first 10 years of my life we moved several times a year or more often than that. I think I went to 4 schools in various parts of the country in 3rd grade. The only constants in my life were my Mother, Father, Brother and some occasional relatives we might visit with while in Tennessee, Michigan, Oregon, California, Texas etc (all in one year.
There was no point to making close friends in school, or any other situation, since I was never going to see those people again. So. I made "friends" but there was no point in getting really attached.
I do have "friends". Just not close friends. I don't need or want people to be clingy to me.
Probably many Military Brats have similar situations?
"I've never had a friend engage me in a conversation about the nature of our friendship and whether or not it is somehow a burden to them (or me)."
Me neither. And somehow that means there's something wrong with us.
Seems like only yesterday when it was hip to say that polyamory is a lot like friendship.
That script flipped quickly.
Distance kills pretty much all casual friendships, especially if you don't have other reasons to visit the areas where those friends live- it is rare to have such a close friendship for which you travel specifically (I have had only one such friendship, and that person is dead many years now). I could reconnect with most of these people via Facebook, but I don't really see the point.
"Friendship is the bread of life, but money is the honey"
- Ancient Chinese Secret
"As we move through life we make friends for every occasion — college friends, work friends, mom friends, climbing-gym friends, divorce friends.“
That one sentence illustrates the most common, yet often least recognized aspect of friendships: they are most often formed within a single context. The context can be an environment (work, church, gym) or a stage of life (youth, motherhood, divorce). Single context friendships have little to sustain them when that context changes or ends (you change jobs, your children grow up). So the single context friendships fade or change as well.
Through conscious effort, single context friendships can be extended into other contexts (work friends that you meet with socially, or vacation with). This makes the friendship more durable... more able to survive changes in one or more of it’s contexts. But age and the passing of time changes almost everything in a person’s life. Even the most robust multi-context friendships can eventually find themselves in a place where there is so little room left to execute in that it fades.
I have made e-friends online since about 1994 or so. Are those real friends?
I've been online with them through deaths, divorces, retirements, religious conversions, everything that happens to meatspace friends.
Once in a while I googog someone I haven't thought about in years and discover they have a big footprint online, which helps me remember whether we were friends then, or could be now. Usually, not.
My experience is almost the opposite of Military Brat. I've lived 99% of my life in a goose-egg maybe 4 miles across; a lot of my friends have moved though.
Narr
Central position
A C.S. Lewis’ quote reflecting on the results of the loss of his friend Charles Williams:
“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald…In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying “Holy, Holy, Holy” to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have.”
"I think a lot of people who seem to be friends want you as a connection for something they are trying to get for themselves."
I think that's one of the advantages of making friends with people totally unconnected to one's work.
My mother always told me to love my sister because she is one person who will always be there for me. Friends have come and gone but my sister is still by my side (sometimes in a manner I don’t appreciate but there nevertheless).
The girl that told me to....."Never kiss her again!!"....on prom night, and was-immediately-taken-home has just reached out to me on Facebook.
Her Dad was a federal judge (emeritus today) appointed by Nixon. Even a stupid 17-year-old with a dick harder than Chinese arithmetic knew not to push his luck.
I lost my best friend to...I don’t know what. Just one day she didn’t pick up the phone. In today’s terms I’d say I was ghosted. We were stationed in Germany at the time, she was back in the states. I don’t think we were good enough for her husband. It was crushing. 20 years later after my husband retired from the military we got together a few times, but it wasn’t the same. I don’t trust her and even though she visited me in my city, I passively aggressively made sure never to visit her in her city.
With some friendships, all it took was Trump.
Yeah. I've experienced some of that. People I've known since high school (40 years).
But I quickly realized, if that's all it took? We weren't that good of friends anyway. Plenty of other friends who are on the other side of the political aisle and - gasp! - we don't talk about politics.
I do think this article makes having long term friends sound harder than it is. My husband still has close friends from grade school. One of my closest friends has been one of my closest friends for my entire adult life thus far. Some friends become more like family.
Freeman, I agree. And my friendships that ended because of Trump were of relatively recent vintage. Some of the friends I still have are from 20 or more years ago. Real friends don't let politics interfere with the bonds that were formed by more enduring issues.
I successfully ended a friendship of about two decades by "ghosting." It was one of those friendships that began by the two of us being neighbors in a rooming house, but even in the beginning it seemed he was more drawn to me than vice versa. Him finding me a job when I needed one, and vice versa, drew us closer together in a way, and we ended up working together for several years. But as the years went on I found him creepier and creepier (his office nickname was "Creepy"), and it also bothered me that every time I would have even a brief conversation with him, I would come away depressed. I was relieved when he found another job, but then he would keep calling me and wanting to go places together. When I moved and switched from a landline phone to a cell phone, I simply did not tell him my new address or new phone number.
I've heard "ghosting" called rude, but would the alternative--telling him that he creeped me out and depressed me (and not just me but nearly everyone who knew him)--been kinder?
My only advice is this: avoid if possible the desire to force-maintain a dying friendship, or to imagine that you can mount some kind of argument for the relationship. Nothing will add to your misery more than grasping after something which you can no longer possess.
No. I was going to say that maintaining a long-term friendship requires work, just like a marriage. But Freeman upthread is more accurate - it's like family. I think the author gives up too easily.
I have a Big Sis I briefly dated in college, fell in love with (still am, even though I married happily), and developed a deep friendship with over a 40 year span. We've had our distancing, and I had to put in some work to re-establish connections, and while some of that was miserable there is joy too.
Right now she just went through a horrible divorce. He left her for another women. She needs a rock, a male in her life that she can still trust. I don't care how much it hurts me, I've accepted we will never have the life together that I wanted (and my wife and our marriage is almost perfect) but I'm going to do whatever it takes to stay in her life, because I love her so much. Because she is like family to me now.
But I quickly realized, if that's all it took? We weren't that good of friends anyway.
Yup. My wife and I were "best friends" with a couple like that in our archery group. Holly & Jeff. They wanted me to bear false witness against another couple (who actually introduced me to archery and taught me the basics). I refused, they turned on me and spread all kinds of malicious gossip about us. We ended up leaving the group.
But it never hurt me, which I thought weird until I realized two things:
1) what kind of "friend" would ask you to betray another friend?
2) what kind of "friend" would trust you after you betrayed another friend?
So I realized I had not lost anything. It's the same with "friendships" ended over Trump.
Oh, bonus round, the other couple I went through all this for because I would not betray them? They have no idea what went down, and I hear they roll their eyes whenever my name is mentioned. LOL. No good deed... Thank God virtue is it's own reward :)
Surprised there has been no discussion of the question posed in “When Harry Met Sally”: Can women and men be friends?
It takes just one person to be in love (with another). But it takes two to hold a friendship. I ended a friendship with a former high school girlfriend after 40-plus years because it wasn't reciprocal (she never married so that wasn't a conflict). Why bother?
THEOLDMAN
"I do think this article makes having long term friends sound harder than it is. My husband still has close friends from grade school. One of my closest friends has been one of my closest friends for my entire adult life thus far. Some friends become more like family."
My best friend and I met in 2nd grade (he says. I don't remember him until 5th.).
Not all friendships are like an armoire. Some are like nightstands.
Am I lucky because my friendships are ending with the death of my friends? One of the things that sucks about growing old is how many funerals to attend.
we throw babies in the trash, we 'unfriend' with the click of a mouse
----
this holds for friendship as well as marriage:
The question was asked to an elderly couple that was married for decades--
"How do you keep the relationship going?"
The old-timers answered:
"In our day, if something was broken, we fixed it, we didnt throw it out"
the only way I relate to this is that trying to make friends as an adult is like dating. It is a ton of effort, and after expending the effort and not having it reciprocated (everyone wants someone else to come to them) it seems less worth it each time.
My childhood friends seem to have found more interesting things to do than put in an effort to maintain friendships, and social media allows them to flake out when something more interesting/less effort comes along.
He's dead. It's OK to use the word dead.
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