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Friendships may be the most complex of all human relationships, because they’re allowed to escape tradition in ways other relationships are not. That is, allowed to transcend boundaries of age and gender and class.
Dear Souseh,
I have been friends with M since childhood. Growing up, our lives were somewhat enmeshed: we lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same high school, and even our moms were close friends and confidantes. It’s a friendship that has lasted decades, outlived divorces, survived familial tragedies — even a cancer diagnosis. It was the quintessential girlfriendship. These days, however, M feels less and less familiar to me. Our friendship seems to have lost something along the way.
In our early 20s, M moved back to the Middle East to start a new life and family with her husband. Naturally, these long lengths of time spent apart —especially in our formative years — created an emotional distance as well. Still, we saw each other every summer when she would come back to our North American city to visit. At first, it was a welcome and fun yearly summer reconnection; we’d go back to all our old hangout spots, reminisce about our rebellious high school days, and talk for hours about all the things that had happened in our respective lives since the last visit.
Over time, the differences became more and more apparent. She married into a very wealthy family, started a family of her own, and lived a much more conservative lifestyle than the one we had grown up with. I never got married or had kids — I’m a single artist with a modest income and a somewhat unconventional lifestyle. Her problems became more and more foreign to me, and our interests completely changed over the years. Still, every summer we would make time to see each other and reconnect.
Now it feels like most of our time together is spent talking about subjects that don’t interest me, and I can see that when I start talking about my own issues, or attempt to discuss my interests, her eyes start glazing over. We cannot seem to agree on what kind of activities we can do together due to our conflicting beliefs and just end up spending what I feel is forced, hollow time together. She still reaches out to make plans and I always oblige, perhaps as a form of respect for the history we shared. But the truth is, Souseh, I genuinely do not enjoy the time I spend with her anymore. I wish there was a clear conflict I could point to or a rift that made this problem easier to address, but it feels like the time has just run out our friendship. I don’t know how or why it should continue when even the nostalgia of it has long expired. Do I tell her this outright? Do I slowly fade away until we both stop clinging on to what we can never have back? Can we still find place for a friendship when our core beliefs are so divergent?
Signed,
Bummed-Out Bestie
Dear Bummed-Out Bestie,
You’re asking one of those questions that the majority of us have contemplated over the course of a lifetime, and, despite that, one thoroughly without a standard or clear-cut answer. Because really, how does one break up with a friend? And when is the right time to do it? In many ways, it’s more straightforward in a romantic relationship, because there is no shortage of cultural information as to the role a partner ought to fulfill our lives. Friendships are so much more nuanced, so much more delicate and complex. They might be the most complex of all human relationships, because they’re allowed to escape tradition in ways other relationships are not. That is, allowed to transcend boundaries, of age and gender and class, in ways other relationships are not. And we are allowed multitudes of them, and, what’s more, allowed to perceive them as multitudinous in our lives, without one friendship canceling the others out. Different friendships bring out different parts of ourselves, tapping into different emotional veins, in turn inspiring different conversations and ways of being. Falling into them is often natural, easy, organic. At their best, the work required to maintain them feels effortless, in fact pleasurable, a form of mental hygiene. A break from, and a balm to, the work required to navigate our parental, professional, and amorous relationships.
But even the closest of friendships can be struck with that affliction from which the greatest pain arises: imbalance. Nothing is more agonizing and destructive to a relationship than a feeling of imbalance. When one person likes the other more, or yearns for something else — time, reciprocity, a certain intimacy — that the other person can’t or won’t provide. This imbalance is impossible to quantify, let alone define, and even when we think the latest trend of therapy-speak has finally furnished us with the exact categories through which to enumerate the emotional shortcomings of a relationship, the essential wildness of feeling will always escape them.
What you have here is a friendship where the old balance that once sustained it is no longer. It is a friendship where one party (or perhaps both, we don’t really know) wants less time. Or perhaps the kind of time where you’re not trying to force a version of intimacy that no longer applies. But it’s hard to recalibrate intimacy without throwing everything into turmoil. Moreover, I’m not sure if that’s what you want to do at all. You ask several conflicting questions in your letter — as, I have come to discover through the course of writing this column, most querents do. Let’s start with the final one. Can we still find a place for a friendship when our core beliefs are so divergent? In the abstract, yes, provided those “core beliefs” are mere differences of lifestyle and opinion and not fundamentally clashing values. Friendships can be built on many different foundations, and nostalgia is a pretty solid one. There is also immense value in a friendship we’ve managed to maintain since childhood. While being known in that way can be constraining, it can also be a measure against which to consider our different iterations of self over the years. Yes, there is only so much reminiscing one can do, but if you get together once a year at most, then there’s no harm in that either. And for someone with children, like her, there’s something particularly special about being able to introduce your kids to those who’ve known you since childhood. While this might not be the most compelling argument for your own considerations, it remains meaningful. Note that I’m pointing out these things only in light of the fact that this is a friendship you don’t have to think about or tend to on a frequent basis. That said, your entire conundrum really just boils down to one sentence, which is: I genuinely don’t enjoy the time I spend with her anymore. And your other two questions, which precede the final one, are both asking for ways to disengage from this relationship. Though interestingly, they aren’t asking for permission (and again, experience has taught me that this is another thing that many querents tend to do). Which means that, not only do you know what you want, you’ve also largely resolved a lot of the guilt behind that desire (since asking for permission from someone to feel what we actually feel is really just a way of reconciling with guilt). And so: you want to break up, and the question is how.
Friendship breakups are hard enough to manage as is, because, like I said in the beginning, there’s no clear role that a friendship is expected to fulfill, and thus no script for addressing the ways in which a particular friendship might have failed us. And here, it is the failure of a friendship as a whole rather than one friend failing another because, as you said, there’s no rift, or fight, or specific shortcoming on her part that has precipitated this dilemma. It is rather the slow drifting of continents away from one another without the upheaval of felt seismic activity. In a case like this, my advice would be to follow and embrace the slowness of that movement. It isn’t a relationship causing you destructive pain, or hurting you via sharp judgment or clashing values. If you feel pain here, I would wager it’s largely a kind of growing pain, the pain of all change — even positive change. Your moving apart is painful evidence of how far you’ve moved away from childhood, perhaps from your own childhood expectations, perhaps from parental ones, from cultural roots, and quite simply from a particular kind of intimacy, which, like all intimacies, is irreplaceable. There is always pain in change, because change is the evidence of time’s passage. Let no one tell you otherwise.
But, I have a question for you, Bummed-Out Bestie. On a material level, what is the maintenance of this friendship costing you? “Life is too short,” we are told by therapy-speak trends, to “waste time” on “relationships that don’t serve us.” I’m going to avoid opening the Pandora’s box of further questions raised by the phrases within each pair of those square quotes. Instead, let’s assume this equation as is. And so I ask you again: what is the maintenance of this friendship costing you? It sounds like only a few hours of your life every year, in which you must endure a greater share of boredom, awkwardness, inconvenience, and perhaps some judgment (albeit mild, going by your description). On the other side, what would be the cost of openly ending this friendship? Especially since, from what it sounds like, it’s slowly breaking up of its own accord. You’re less and less close, spending less and less time together. The end seems natural and organic, though advancing perhaps slower than you’d like. It’s ok. Let it be slow. There’s little to be gained in this case by actively hastening its demise. Because life is short indeed. Too short to needlessly hurt those who have done us no wrong. Old friendships are beautiful and rewarding and precious because they are very much like family. For that same reason, they can also be infuriating and tedious and sometimes feel more obligatory than not. In such cases, whenever feasible, they must, like family, be limited in order to ultimately be endured.
What a charming letter from Bestie and insightful advice from Souseh. It touched me deeply on a personal level having had experienced similar situations over the extent of my expatriate life. Friendships formed then dissolved over time due to distances.
But the sweet memory of shared intimacies, the joy of togetherness, and the added value friendship bequeathes to our lives will always be cherished.
Thank you for making me smile today.