Friendship is odd

[persimmonfrost]

 Yeah I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Unless you’re twelve, of course, and haven’t figured out that the friends you’ve got now are friends of proximity who, in twenty years, will be people you once knew, whose names and faces you barely remember.  If you are twelve, or you think that your grade school friends will be with you forever, let me let you in on a fact of life: Unless you and your childhood friends never change, never grow, never really mature, you probably won’t have anything in common with them by the time you hit thirty.

There are always exceptions.  You might be fortunate and find a lifelong friend who shares enough with you that no matter how you both change there’s still a strong bond between you. I don’t really have any friends left from those days.  My oldest “friend” stays in contact rather peripherally, but I find that whenever we have even a ten minute conversation she annoys the piss out of me.  It’s not so much  that we’re different people now, and don’t really have anything in common. She’s been married and divorced, raised a child, and turned to Jesus.  I’ve done none of those things.  I respect them all, but don’t share them.  Alas, I get the feeling through both subtle and not-so-subtle hints that she doesn’t respect my choices.  I once had occasion to say to her (during a conversation about why she didn’t let the kids in her class read the Harry Potter books because they were about witchcraft) that I didn’t see that reading had harmed either of us.  Her response?  ”You read more than I did.”  I’m really trying hard not to take that as a cut; either way I was amused by it, which pretty much means that I don’t care what she thinks.

But more than that, it’s the you’re-not-a-good-friend messages I get from her that annoy me and make me dig in my heels.  Last time I ran into her, in an effort to be friendly, I said, “You should stop over some day.”  Her response was along the lines of: I will when you’re ready to call and invite me.  Okayfine.

Yeah, they’re nuts, too.

Maybe I am a bad friend.  Or maybe I just know that if we were in the same room, there’d be nothing to talk about but the past, and I’m WAY over that.  I’ve never been to a high school reunion.  When asked why I explain that if I could think of ONE person I would see there who I 1) wanted to see and 2) couldn’t see any other time, I’d go in a hot minute.  Couldn’t think of one.  I have one friend left from high school.  I actually count her as my oldest friend.  The others are all acquaintances now.  People I used to know before I became me.

Fandom and the internet has opened up a whole new arena for friendships.  Meeting people long distance allows you to get to know their minds before anything else, and while I used to think this was terrific, amazing, a way to get to know the real person without a lot of baggage, now I have to confess that it’s not as great as it sounds.  The thing is, you can get on with someone like crazy online, but if you end up in the same room, sometimes there’s just nothing.  Dead air.

Then there are people you don’t get on really well with long distance, but in person?  Man it just sparks, it’s exciting, you have tons to talk about and you just love being together.  The thing is you just never know how it’s going to play out until you give it a chance. Or in other words, some people are better at a distance or in very small doses.

Friendship is probably as much chemistry as romantic love is, and there’s simply no accounting for why it works with some people and not with others.  Yeah you have to have things in common, but there has to be some sort of spark, some sense that the two of you are more fun together than you are individually.  You have to trust that a friend, whether long-distance or in-person, will make you laugh, offer sympathy when you cry, and that you’ll usually have something interesting to say to one another.  Not always, sometimes a friend is someone you can be silent with and it’s not icky or uncomfortable.

A friend is someone who you can be apart from for months or years and when you get together with them again, it’s like no time has passed.  I’m blessed with friends like that, both near and far.  So while I do think friendship is an odd thing, I think it’s a wonderful thing, too.  Everybody needs friends.  If you don’t have them you end up being the guy who shoots people from the clock tower.  The one who “keeps to himself.”

Don’t keep to yourself.

Comments

[sphinxfictorian]

Yeah, pretty much what you said. My best friend from high school and I are miles apart, distance-wise and in some crucial ways, lifestyle-wise, but somehow we've always been able to just pick up where we left off. She's more like a sister than a friend. I think I even had a crush on her for a while when we were both at junior college.

The online friend thing is interesting. I have some that I've connected with astonishingly well, both on and off-line, and some where we met and the friendship almost instantly went away both on and off-line. (I have a feeling that if you and I ever actually meet, it will be the former situation, but I could be wrong.)

The most disastrous thing is when a friend from the old days finds you on Facebook. One of mine did, and I've tried to be friendly with her, but she's gone seriously Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian, and my gay-ness kind of bothers her. We clashed about that a few days ago, and I really toyed with unfriending her on FB, but my silly soft heart wouldn't let me. But I've been sharing lots of pro-gay posts ever since, to sort of get through to her that this is an important part of my life, and she can like it or leave me be.

Anyway, sorry to go off, but I found your post touched a subject much on my mind at present, for all sorts of different reasons.

[persimmonfrost]

I get that. You don't really want to cut her out of your life but you feel the need to make sure she understands that you are who you are and she has to respect that.

Along similar lines, I have to say that the next person who tries to end an argument/discussion with "I'll pray for you." is going to get two fat slaps.

[sphinxfictorian]

Exactly. Luckily she lives in the UK, so I don't actually have to see her in person. It's a weird situation anyway, because when we had last seen each other, I ended the friendship because she'd treated me very shoddily on several occasions. But it had been 25 years, so lots of water under the bridge, and I let bygones be bygones. But her heavy-handed, holier-than-thou religious attitude can be hard to take. So I mostly just let her FB posts go by. But she posted a link to a Pan-European campaign against same-sex marriage, and I just couldn't let it go by without telling her how I felt. It all worked out, basically by agreeing to disagree, but I left her with the knowledge that I would not let that sort of thing go by without comment.

And, oh, I so agree. One of my good friends is very Christian and I bite my tongue every time she says that to me. Luckily, she sort of gets that it bugs me so she doesn't do it often.