Struggling Friendships

My friends were good friends. Life friends. The people that I spent time with and shared myself with were - are - people that I enjoy and trust and really, really like. There aren't a lot of them. Acquaintances come and go, and I assumed that I would have a lot less contact with acquaintances once the mother ship landed. But my friends, I assumed, would understand that I would no longer be able to dash out for coffee or spend long, lazy evenings drinking wine and chatting. Not for a while, anyway.

So I was gobsmacked to read, in a recent e-mail from someone with whom I have been very close friends for over a decade, that I had been neglecting the friendship and that, accordingly, she viewed the friendship as dead. We had been exchanging e-mails and occasional phone calls, but it wasn't, in her view, enough. So that was it. It was over. "I've already mourned the loss," she said, "don't e-mail me back."

There's much that could be said about this, about the shock and hurt that accompanies the sudden and unexpected death of a friendship....

I get this. Sort of. Which is to say, I would get this if I had been the sort of friend who regularly confided secrets and fears. But I wasn't. Oh, I would, certainly, regularly catch good friends up on what was going on in my life, things that were bugging me, that kind of thing. But I've never been the sort of friend who easily shares her anxieties and fears and griefs....

I can't change that. I don't want to change that. I am very, very sorry that this makes my friend unhappy. I didn't want the friendship to end; any perceived neglect was unintentional, the result of the circumstances of a new, strange life, a life that is no longer fully my own. But that friendship could only live in these new circumstances under the terms of these new circumstances.

[via Her Bad Mother, HT: Sarah and the Goon Squad]