Los Angeles, California
When you are left alone in a life you thought would be shared, many challenges present themselves. My loss was complicated. After decades of marriage and many attempts at rehabbing it, we were at a major crossroads when he passed away. But setting that aside, I know others who have been widowed, and in fact, I come from a long line of them: my aunt; my mother and sister, and several friends. And the hard and painful issues faced when this happens to you should not be anticipated lightly. You will need your friends and will be grateful if you have kept them close.
One of the benefits of not being on parasocial sites is that you can't be unfriended. But in real life, friendships can hit rocky times and sometimes you will crash on those rocks and watch the friendship wash out to sea. I recently read an article in The Atlantic. The title of the article, written by Jennifer Senior, is It's Your Friends Who Break Your Heart. And that article heartily resonated with me. Someone (and I think it might have been Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters), said that the heart is a very resilient little muscle. And if you have suffered loss and heartbreak in life in some variety of means, and gotten through the darkness of those experiences, you will know this is true. Time does heal all wounds. But, as the article points out, friendships can be harder to heal than other broken relationships. There is no binding commitment in friendship. It is a voluntary coupling. Endings require no legal filings. The friendship might just disapparate. And should you be invested enough to work through a break up, and get the pieces glued back together; you might perhaps value your relationship all the more for the mending, or you might constantly see those cracks as reminders of its painful vulnerability.
When you lose your lifetime partner, whether that comes through death or divorce, you will sometimes need to look to that majority group, couples, for socializing, as they are the friends you had together before you lost your spouse. If you still want to travel, the generosity of those couples and single friends, will be appreciated if you don't relish the prospect of traveling alone. Three months after Tom passed away, I traveled to Arizona with a group of married and single women for Major League Baseball's spring training. Until the pandemic, I went every year with varying companionship: Lynnette, her sisters, Connie, and in the early days, Lydia.There's been other travel before the pandemic, and for various reasons, I have turned down invitations including trips to Hawaii, Mexico, the east coast, and several trips to Europe. I am grateful that I have been offered these opportunities. At the same time, for many years I have at times struggled to understand why another friend, someone I have been close to and actually met when we were traveling with our moms several decades ago, has turned down all of the invitations I have offered to meet and spend time somewhere together. I can't think she doesn't like my company, as she and her husband come to visit every summer, spending days by my pool, sharing conversation and meals, and a raucous card game each night. And during the many years when I rented a home for month in Carmel, they often came to stay there. I had thought maybe the events I offered were too spendy. But wouldn't that elicit suggestions of more affordable events or destinations? Maybe they only enjoy traveling alone? But they travel with other friends. As it has been an unsettling mystery to me I finally decided to raise the issue after my recent ‘big’ birthday. When her same ‘big’ birthday occurred a few years ago, I had traveled alone to her town to celebrate with her family. So when I opened my email inbox that day to find she had sent me an ecard, I felt a bit crestfallen. And here is perhaps where I made my mistake. Three weeks after my birthday, I included, in a text reply, my wish that they could have shared in a celebration of this "big" birthday. It would have meant a lot. She emailed a response regarding the e-card and e-gift card she had forwarded to me (Believe it or not, you are not an easy person to buy for). I couldn't shake this slight off and, as these things sometimes will, I found it tenaciously frustrating that I couldn't let it go. We are in a pandemic. And she has ongoing family issues. Be gracious, I kept telling myself. But still my funk lingered.
It is not one of my favorite things about myself that I will go along and go along with a situation that doesn't feel right. And then I will hit a wall. It has happened in other relationships. It happened in my marriage. My therapist urged me to address rather than push down feelings where they might simmer or fester. Instead, my tendency is to let things run along, thinking things will get better, until the point where I surrender to the reality that they haven't. And they probably won't. Only then do I address, with hope that expressing my feelings will be met with empathy. But speaking up is not always well received.
I responded to her email, thanking her again for the wonderful and generous gift to me, but I risked sharing that as I had taken a complicated trip to northern California to celebrate her same birthday, the e-deliveries I found in my inbox had felt comparatively perfunctory. And, I then asked what I felt was an important question: How did she conceptualize our relationship? Her response was As good friends who live apart.
I have at long last accepted that you cannot expect anyone to change. I can make changes in and for myself, and that is challenging enough. So, with my friend's response, it became clear that I needed to lower my expectations. After all, good friends who live apart can mean pen pals. When I talked to my friend, Lynnette, about this she remarked: It sounds like you're coming to the end of your friendship with her. But I didn't think so. I just thought it was a bump in the road which we would weather with the tweaking of my expectations. And then, I got ghosted.
Christmas passed. New Year's passed. I wrote two more emails wishing her a happy Christmas, and then a happy new year, checking in and sharing what was going on in my life with no reference to the prior issue. Still, I heard nothing for a month. Nada. Until early January, when she emailed that she was hurt that I had found her gift and card unacceptable. Bewildered that I had thought it was ok to tell (her) in no uncertain terms that (she) had failed as a friend. And the coup de grâce came as And now we can lay this matter to rest. No more needs to be said. I do, however, need to take a step back, as I'm sure you will understand.
I was stunned (and, frankly, those last two sentences rang a bell in the back of my mind, like, when I was sent to my room and grounded). I had felt that I could adjust my expectations and move on past the conflict. But clearly she could not. So, I acknowledged her email, apologized again that she had found my raising this issue hurtful, but also pointed out that I had never said nor did I feel that her gift was unacceptable, nor would I ever tell her in no uncertain terms that she had failed as a friend. And I pointed out that she had made assumptions which are clearly neither in print nor in my intent. I ended by writing that I would respect her needing a time out. But I did think to myself as far as no more needs to be said... Uhhh, really? And I noticed an unfortunate pattern here. When she hadn't liked something I had written on my blog, she had prefaced her complaint with I'm not going to read your blog anymore. When I shared that the e-delivery of my birthday gift had felt perfunctory, she responded that we should stop exchanging gifts. And now, this. The easiest way to not make an effort in a relationship is to remove whatever it is that requires effort. And, you can quote me on this.
I will say, at this point, that this post has gone through a more thorough editing, marinating, and editing some more, process than any other post I have ever written. For the first time, I have let others read it before it was posted, and had then posted it for 48 hours, before taking it back down for more editing. But I feel that there is a value in sharing this experience of a friendship unraveling, even if it makes me or both of us look petty. While the friendship was coming apart, I read the article in The Atlantic which was about two women writers whose friendship turned vitriolic and ultimately ended during the course of a published written exchange between them. It was a profoundly intimate sharing of emotions and frustrations which I found illuminating. And it helped me to understand why this relationship wasn't able to weather the conflict.
I have always valued my friendships, and I especially valued this friendship. But I feel that relationships need to operate on some semblance of level ground. And, in my experience, close relationships can have hiccups when there is a sustained imbalance. I see myself as a generous friend, but not an uncomplicated one. I will extend generosity, hospitality, support, as well as an ear and a shoulder to all my friends at all times. Even when I was married, my husband understood that my fristers played an integral part in my life and were never utilized only to fill a space when he was not around. While I work at maintaining my friendships, all relationships require effort on both sides. And close relationships require keeping open the lines of communication, even though that is challenging and has emotions attached. These are difficult times, and we are all raw and strained. And while this may seem like an entitled, petulant tift over a birthday slight, it was rather an accumulation of years of disappointment while I failed to realize that my friend's efforts in our relationship were to provide an occasional ear for each other when family or life's problems overwhelmed us, and to travel from northern California with her husband once a year to be guests in my home (and, in prior years, in my Carmel vacation rental home). The failure was mine and, once realized, it was time to make adjustments on my end. I can’t require that my friends provide more than what they wish. Rather I should require of myself that I recognize the limits they have set. Otherwise, with a desire to be equally valued, it can be jarring to realize that one of you is consistently putting out more effort in the friendship. And maybe because I try to be that friend who I want to have for my own, that realization can land heavily.
Over the weeks while I wrote and edited this post, I questioned whether I was using my response to this issue to lift the lid off the pot of my boiling anger and frustration at years of Trump, the pandemic, and the rampant display of rude behavior flaring all around us. But no. I don’t feel angry about this, but rather resigned and sad. For I truly believe that when an issue of conflict arises, a discourse between socially-evolved friends should not end in a ghosting and a gag order. I don’t accept that as an emotionally mature response. While I think a time out can be a valuable period of reflection, it would have been better for it to be agreed upon, not decreed in parental fashion.
Clearly, through the pandemic, relationships of all kinds have suffered. I am aware of marriages that have broken up. The Atlantic article particularly struck me as many relationships have suffered or dissolved during the pandemic. This was not the first I have read on the subject. It has been a long haul for us all. I have profound gratitude for Joel and I making it through, and would be distraught had my fristerships as well as my relationships with all the frothers, not survived. I feel blessed by having the friends, both close and less so, who bring meaning to my life. But sadly, in this relationship, a shift has occurred, as well as a grounding in more ways than one.
