Everchanging Forest of Friendship

Friendship... Yesterday, today, tomorrow, forever... or not... 

I recently read I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women's Lives by F. Diane Barth. It struck a few nerves, well, more than a few. As I read about other women's experiences with friendship I couldn't help but remember friendships throughout my life - friendships with similar circumstances to those discussed in the book and ones that didn't come close to matching those circumstances.  I started thinking about friendships that last and those that are fleeting as I discussed in a previous blog post, Friendship: Forever or For Today?. 

When I weighed the joy my friendships brought me against the heartbreak my friendships have brought me, there was more heartbreak than I expected. I've lost far more friends than I've kept over the years, which I suppose also means I've had more friendships than I initially realized. Some of those friends and I drifted apart as circumstances took our lives in different directions. Others didn't have such pleasant ends. Some of those friendships have found their way back into my life, but others haven't. 

Then I thought about the friends who stayed, the ones who picked up the lantern - and re-lit it if necessary - when I dropped it, the ones who loved me when I wasn't very lovable, the ones who stood beside me when I refused to conform to someone else's expectations, the ones who cried with me even as they dried my tears and laughed so hard with me we forgot what we were laughing about, the ones who held my hair back while I puked... And I remembered the idea of quality being more important than quantity.

In a world obsessed with quantity, we often forget the value of quality, even in our relationships.

As I thought about my friendships, I felt a tug toward romanticizing them. I wanted to believe they were all better than they were, both the best of the bunch and the worst of the bunch. I wanted, just for a moment, to recapture those friendships as they were then even though some of those friendships are even better today and other friendships I left behind are better off in my memories than in my present.


Yet, there are moments when those betrayals creep back in and break my heart all over again.

As I looked back over the friendships that have populated my life, I remembered a particularly painful betrayal and wondered why I'd worked so hard over the years to bridge a gap with someone who clearly didn't value me the way I valued her. I remember all too distinctly the moment she showed me her true self and I chose to ignore it because accepting it meant putting everything I thought I knew and loved about her in doubt. Instead I focused on all the good things about her and our friendship and ignored what I didn't want to see. I pretended her betrayal wasn't important even as it ate away at my heart and our closeness. Our friendship was never the same. A few years ago I attempted to reconnect with her in something more than the superficial relationship our friendship had become over the years only to have her demonstrate once again the attitude toward my life experiences that had created the rift in the first place. I realized in that moment, that defining moment hadn't been a mistake or immaturity or lack of awareness. She'd meant it. As I sat across from her fighting tears, she looked oblivious to the impact of her words.

I took a deep breath as this memory surfaced and gave myself some space. I needed to work through the emotions that surfaced. In the end, I released not only the friendship but any hope that friendship could ever recover. I was surprised at how liberating it felt to no longer care about fixing the unfixable - and what was never my responsibility to fix - even though I hadn't given the friendship itself much thought since that attempt to reconnect. Apparently, the roots of that friendship were still holding on in my heart. I finally decided to believe she was the person she had shown herself to be all those years ago.

We all change. We gain experience and we learn more about life. Sometimes we allow that experience to let us grow into our better selves and sometimes we don't. Perhaps it's because this belief or that attitude has become so ingrained in us we can't face what it would mean to change it or perhaps it has something to do with who we are at our cores. As we change and grow, our friendships change and grow into something stronger than before, or they wither leaving us with memories of friendships past, friendships that can be far too easy to romanticize given the softening created by time and distance.

I sometimes miss the way my friendships, my college friendships in particular, used to work. I miss having the time, the energy, and the connection that allowed us to sit about and talk about nothing, to not need a reason to call, and to get together spontaneously. I miss the friendships where the intense and the mundane were woven together in our own unique tapestry, whether we were having intimate conversations walking around campus, studying quietly together in our sweats in a residence hall room, laughing at the absurd, crying over lost romances, or going out dancing as a group.

The more I thought about my friendships in the context of the research presented in I Know How You Feel, the more I realized that in every stage of my life, my forest of friendship has always grown around me even at times when it's been hard to make friends and maintain the friendships. I'm extremely grateful for the friends who have been there, either for a period of time or for a lifetime. They have all brought something to my life that otherwise wouldn't have been there.

Friendships change over time as our needs change. Life changes and takes us in different directions and what we need from a friendship changes. How we adapt to those changes often determines whether or not the friendship survives and even thrives.

Friendship survives and thrives when there's ample amount of understanding, compassion, empathy, and forgiveness to nourish them regardless of where we are in our lives.