There is no limit to the number of ways we humans, women in particular, put ourselves down or beat ourselves up but one of the saddest I have heard recently is someone referring to themselves as “a crap friend” when they had done nothing more reprehensible than being a bit slow to respond to emails and having to cancel meet-ups now and then – more frequently than the average perhaps, but always for valid reasons – because their complex life gets in the way of what they might prefer to be doing.
Living my own life the way I do, I rarely register how long it was since I last heard from someone, unless it gets to such a stretch that I am worried about their well-being – in which case it’s incumbent on me to pick up the phone or drop the short ‘are you ok?’ message. Mostly I am just delighted to hear from my friends when I do – however long the intervals.
I never feel ‘let down’ by someone cancelling, even at the last minute, if I understand their reasons for doing so. For me getting it means that the back-story (which as a friend, I already know) supports what they’re saying. It is as simple as that.
To be honest, I’m more likely to get peeved by someone being late, without reason or apology. That suggests they disrespect my time, and therefore me.
I say without reason or apology – those omissions are aggravating factors, because reasons and apologies are softening. We’re all going to show up late sometimes: the unusual traffic or diversions or cancelled trains, the sudden need to
attend to bodily or domestic needs, catastrophes and inconveniences. It happens. Reasons. And have you noticed how much easier it is to apologise when it’s actually, genuinely, not our fault?
But there are times when reasons and apologies don’t help much. There are people who, I have to accept, are going to be late. At a recent event when waiting for the last person to arrive, a couple of us exchanged the acknowledgement that “she’s never early, is she?” We both knew what we meant by that. “No. She’s never early.”
There is a point where the reasons translate into excuses, and the apologies are just a form of words.
Regularity of tardiness is something I’ve had over forty years of – and it still gets to me. It’s a different person now but the same pattern. And the same pointless response. Irritation. Anger. Passive aggressiveness – yeah, I can do that too, sadly. All I have so far learned in all these decades is the pointlessness of my reaction. It isn’t going to change their priorities.
My latest late-comer doesn’t apologise. Winds me up even more, but at least it’s honest. He’s not sorry. He doesn’t see why it matters. There are more conversations to be had around that – or different ways of relating – like why even discuss timing at all if it’s irrelevant or ignored.
Friendship isn’t about how often you connect, or even how often you fail to do so, it is about how you connect when you do. It is about the ability to be open and authentic with each other. It is only partly about how super-supportive you can be when they are feeling down, which doesn’t mean solving their problems, but being whatever they want/need you to be – shut up & listen is often a good starting point. Sometimes it actually means not showing up, because they’d rather you didn’t.
We’ve recently had a death in the (much) wider family. My first instinct was that I would go to the funeral. Then I read closely the messages my cousin & I were exchanging. They took me back to the conversations we’d had at our most recent meeting. Listening deeper to what we were saying to each other, I realised that I had no strong personal reason to mark this passing and that my presence would not help her through the complicated emotional process of grieving/not-mourning that can sometimes occur, when we know it really was “time”.
I decided not to go and explained my thought process. “My sentiments exactly,” she said, “I would prefer to see you in happier circumstances.” So we will do that.
On the other side of the tablecloth, I also feel that friendship is allowing yourself to be your worst self in the presence of your friends. That is how you find out that they are actually friends rather than acquaintances or something less wholesome: the willingness to show up when you feel rubbish: tired, overwhelmed, sad, angry, exhausted, vulnerable.
Friendship is not needing to be your best self; it is about trusting the other person with your worst.
Quite often meeting our mates when we least want to, is the best thing for us. It can change how we feel. It can validate how we feel. It can make no difference at all. It will rarely – with true friends, never – make us feel worse than we did to begin with.
At the same time, we need to acknowledge when our own self-care means we need to stay home, take a bath, eat with the family, go to bed, pretend the world doesn’t exist, plant cauliflowers, watch hedgehogs, go to an exercise class alone and speak to no-one, binge watch uplifting podcasts, read steampunk, whatever it is that works when you need something to work. Our friends get that too.
I think it was David Whyte who said that the ultimate form of friendship is simply to witness. He was talking about how relationships shift over time, we fall in and out of love, but the shifts don’t have to be absolutes, sometimes they reverse, sometimes (whichever direction) they improve as a result. He was actually talking about the pain of the shift, but I would add that it isn’t always painful.
Colleagues become friends. Friends become lovers become spouses. Spouses revert to friends. Friendships can be outgrown, but they can also resprout or suddenly burst out of mere acquaintanceship.
Platonic friendships are the most malleable of relationships. They are the ones where you can genuinely claim, as a friend-in-the-making of mine once put it: No promises, no expectations.
It is so easy to say, “I’m here if you need me.” But none of us can guarantee that we will be. It may be that someone else needs us more. It may be that we need our own self more. If I can help, I will, is a closer approximation to what we offer, and the genuine intention to be as generous and as honest as we can around the definition of ‘If I can.’ I have in the past and more recently been let down by friends who said they would be there and were not, and learning to let go of that is part of learning to be a better friend. I have also been deeply moved and astonished by the lengths someone would go to for me, literally without a second’s thought, let alone a second thought. There are lessons in that, too.
We can talk about unconditional love all we want, but the bottom line is that it does not exist. All love is conditional. It is conditional on us being who we were, or on being more (rather than less) of who we were when we made the promise. It is conditional on the other person being who they were, or an acceptable variant of the person they were, when we made that promise. It is also conditional on a host of externalities. We are not all hard-wired to love people through the traumatic depths of what life might throw upon them, or upon us. Much as we might want to.
We tend to think that friendship is less intense than what we think of as love – by which we normally mean romantic / sexual love. We sort-of assume that the platonic love in friendship doesn’t need to be unconditional in the same way
and yet when we are let down by the thoughtlessness of our friends it can wound us even more deeply. Because we did have expectations, even where there may have been no promises.
How would it be if we could found those relationships more firmly on the premise of if I can help, I will – no promises – no expectations? Perhaps then the ‘conditionality’ might become less bothersome, by becoming the ‘given’ state of affairs. Acceptance. Tolerance.
It devolves to: you can always ask and I will always be honest with you, and sometimes my authenticity and self-need means that I may have to say no.
Just how scared are we to say that to someone we really care about?
Just how willing are we to own the reality of that being, ultimately, how we all feel?
Friendship, I’m coming to understand, has three fundamental requirements: honesty and vulnerability – and you can’t have one without the other – and the third one is reciprocity.
I prefer ‘reciprocity’ to ‘balance’ because sometimes circumstances dictate an imbalance. Time. Money. Emotional resource. All of these can impact on the scales, on the flow from one to the other and round again. I come back to the Yinyang symbol and the fluidity implicit within it. Sometimes we give more, sometimes we take more.
The problem is at the very outer edges where we are only giving or only receiving. We cannot stay there for very long. That is the danger zone where the ‘crap friend’ appellation might acquire validity if the situation is allowed to persist. That is the place where you have conversations which are all about you or all about them, with no inquiry into the other party’s reality. Not just right now. Not just once. Not just now and then. But all the time. I have rarely deliberately terminated a friendship, but in hindsight my reason for doing so has invariably been: I’m giving and getting nothing back.
Note the precision in that. It’s not that I’m giving more than I’m getting; it’s I’m giving and getting nothing back. That is unsustainable in any ecosystem. It’s soul-destroying in what purports to be a friendship.
Another note: this isn’t a value-judgement on them as a person, or indeed on me as a person, purely that the intersection between us could not longer sustain itself, and I was willing to cut the cord rather than wait for the long drawn-out rotting of
it. Where I have needed to do that, I am sorry that it was necessary, but not sorry that I did so. And thinking back, where others felt that same necessity to step out of my life, I have a better understanding and more compassion for why that needed to happen.
Today I have a dear friend with whom I regularly exchange messages and often we each apologise for the one-sidedness of it – but often isn’t the same as ‘all the time’. We listen to each other moan. That’s not a conversation, but it is reciprocal, and therefore it’s fine. And when we recognise the depth of the other’s struggle we shut up and try to listen more closely. Turns and turns about as our different lives indicate. We’re not perfect friends, we don’t always succeed. But we are friends, which means we keep trying. We also go through spates of instant responses and then flows of longer
interludes. That is also just the nature of it.
Friendships are like rivers. They spring, and flow. No two are the same. Sometimes they feed into lakes where they seem to be going nowhere - because they're not - and that is also ok - but then sometimes they flow out of those same lakes and go on further journeys over different landscapes on the their route to the sea. Sometimes all of the exhilaration of rapids and waterfalls is in the early mountain stage of beginnings, but maybe it won't appear until the white waters of the canyons way downstream. Maybe there won't be such a turbulent exciting stage at all. Maybe it will be one of those quiet streams that emerges unseen in some boggy landscape and just slowly winds its way along. I suspect that the landscape of a life needs all the different kinds of friendships. The deep and the shallow. The long and the short. The white water rainbow waterfall oxbow lake mere and meandering ones...and the simple straight mile-wide slow moving ones.
I am grateful for those I have...and for having had those I've lost or given up on.
That other friend, the one who brought me into this reflection, because she feels she is wayward in her ability to meet up and slow in her responses to messages, is one with whom the call for apology rarely exists but is never ignored. When we talk (on line or in person) it is never one-sided. She apologises most with least reason to do so. She has never said I’m here for you…because she knows she is not. There are too many others for whom she is there, and must be, and will be. We meet in the spaces that remain. Yet she is one of those who give me the most in-depth insights into other ways of seeing the world and thoughts on my own prevarications and provocations. I’m willing to wait for that! Just as we have waited, unknowingly, to become friends. We have known each other for the best part of thirty years, maybe more, but only in the last few have we begun to connect.
Perhaps some of those rivers I was talking about, need to start from different springs and only come into being a long way downstream when the tributaries meet.
