…in other words, that stupid email. I finally wrote and sent it this morning. I will be dreading checking my email for the rest of the day.
\nI wonder sometimes if I have an unrealistic expectation of friendship. When I was in college I thought that I would stay in close touch with many of my friends there. In a matter of months I found out that wasn’t going to be the case — that for whatever reason, most of the people I thought were my good friends were not going to be making the effort to maintain our friendship by keeping in touch, whether by letters or phone calls (this was before email was common — you may commence the dinosaur sound effects.) Was it because they didn’t know how to keep a friendship going? Was it because they knew how, but just didn’t feel like keeing it going with me?<\/i> Either way, the net result is the same — no more friendship.<\/p>\n
\nI do think there are different levels of friendship, each with its own gifts and satisfactions. There are casual, superficial friendships that are tied to a time and place, like the friendships you might have with coworkers or the people next door. These friendships are fine, but you can’t expect too much of them — most will soon wither after you leave the job or move away.
\nMost, but not all. Some of these friendships will hang on — you’ll stay in touch with people you worked with, going to lunch once in a while, or you’ll visit your old friends when you’re back in the old neighborhood. Sometimes I think of these as “Christmas-card friendships” — there’s no animosity, and you keep these friends current as to major events in your life (births, moves, etc) and get together when you can, but at the same time there’s not a true intimacy. And that’s not bad. These friendships are what they are.
\nThere are other friendships that start off at around the same level — you get together once in a while, maybe even once a month or so, and you feel free to talk about issues of some substance, though you may not be ready to bare your soul to these friends. Maybe you know them from church, or through other friends. Maybe they’re the parents of your childrens’ friends.
\nAnd then there are your best<\/i> friends, your soul mates, those you can truly confide in. What a treasure this kind of friendship is! If you’re married, hopefully your spouse is a friend of this kind. At the same time, there’s still a place in your life for your other close friends (I’m thinking of close friends of the same sex.) Sometimes these friendships can bring you joy for years and years. Sometimes they break up in anger, with pain that seems to be that of a trial-size divorce.
\nAnd sometimes they just… wither away. It can happen without anyone’s noticing it at first; one person is just “too busy” to get together or even call. The weekly chat turns into the monthly briefing; the monthly briefing lags to every other month; suddenly one of the friends realizes that an intimate friendship has become nothing more than a Christmas card friendship.
\nTo me, the last scenario is the saddest of all. And that was the subject of the email I had to write. A friend that I had once been quite close to — someone I could share anything with, from the depth of my soul to the topmost froth of my frivolous mind — had been slowly growing more and more distant, more and more “busy;” she had stopped initiating contact; we haven’t seen each other since last May, even though we live just seven miles apart from each other. At first I had chalked it up to her “just being busy again.” But then weeks turned into months, months began to stretch past a year. Messages went unreturned, possibly even unread. Was she just too busy for anybody? or just too busy for me? Had our friendship become a burden, a chore, an imposition? Or was she just no longer interested in being friends?
\nShe finally dropped me an email detailing how terribly busy her life has been (and to be fair, it really has), catching me up to the major events of her life, asking to get together after Easter, hoping that we were still friends.
\nThe difficult email I had to write was my reply, in which it was finally time for me to say, “I don’t know. Are we still friends?”
\nSome people have told me about friendships where they don’t see someone in five, ten, twenty years but they just start talking again and it’s just like old times<\/i>! Maybe I’m just not old enough, but I just don’t see that, unless the “old times” friendship was convivial without being particularly intimate. That’s five, ten, twenty years spent without communicating with that person. So much can happen in just five years! How can you catch up on that kind of thing without staying mostly on the surface? Staying on the surface isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it has its pleasures — but it is what it is.
\nTo me, this fits in with the discussion in St Blog’s about marriage. One can take friendships for granted — including the friendship with one’s spouse — and then suddenly wake up and realize that the friendship isn’t what it used to be. It’s devolved, withered. The other face, once so familiar, is suddenly the face of a stranger. And the intentions don’t matter as much as we wish that they did — whether it’s due to indifference, or anger, or distraction, the result is the same: a neglected friendship will sicken and can even die.
\nTo me, friendships are built on little things — on frequent or at least consistent communication, no matter how trivial the topics might seem at the time. That’s the way we learn about each other, and learn to trust each other. Once the friendship is established, it’s imperative to keep it up. Maybe that’s part of the appeal of blogging: for the blogger, it’s Wow! Someone is interested enough in what I have to say to actually show up every day and read my blog!<\/i> For the reader, it’s Wow! Someone is interested enough in what I think to offer me something to read and a place to comment!<\/i> Blogwidows and blogwidowers, take note!
\nSo that was the difficult email I had to write: Are we still friends? Is my friendship distasteful or uninteresting or burdensome to you? What kind of friendship do you want to have?<\/i>
\nI was thinking all day yesterday about how I was going to say this, mulling over how I could say such a thing clearly yet gently. And then I got one of the most astonishing letters I’ve ever received in my life.
\nIt came in the mail, so it was an actual letter with a stamp. And it was from one of the college friends that I’d once been especially close to, one of the ones I’d hoped would keep in touch but who instead quickly became just a Christmas-card friend.
\nIt was a letter of apology, in which she detailed and apologized for every slight she accused herself of ever having giving me — going all the way back to 1991, stuff I’d never even thought of: I’m sorry I never thanked you for that present you made me. I’m sorry I never kept in touch after I graduated. I’m sorry I didn’t make any effort to come to your wedding.<\/i>
\nI am still flabbergasted. I’m not sure how to reply to this letter, but I’m certainly looking forward to writing back. I don’t know if we’ll ever be as close as we once were, but — just like that — it’s that much more likely that perhaps we will.
\nAs I write, I see I have gotten a terse reply to the Difficult Email: I’m pondering what you’ve said. Your comments are fair<\/i>. An apology.
\nI have hope for after Easter.
\nI will leave it to others to spell out how all this is true on the supernatural level as well as on the natural. It’s a lesson I’m learning well this Lent, though not yet well enough to write about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…in other words, that stupid email. I finally wrote and sent it this morning. I will be dreading checking my email for the rest of the day. I wonder sometimes if I have an unrealistic expectation of friendship. When I was in college I thought that I would stay in close touch with many of… Continue reading On friendship<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-christian-life","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}