Finding The Meaning In Friendships That End

I remember the first Christmas break after I came home from college.

My high school friends and I had just seen each other at Thanksgiving. Everything had been fantastic. Lots of reminiscing. Laughing about someone sporting a new beard or talk about who was still liking who.

Something had changed. We had more time to be together but there was less to talk about. Just how many times could you tell the same funny story?

Maybe a handful of us still felt close. But the vast majority? Not really.

Friendships. Some abide through thick and thin. No matter what happens in your life. No matter if you go through a time when you are not all that easy to love. That friend is sticking around.

We revere those relationships. I watched the movie “Good Will Hunting” with my son the other day. Matt Damon’s old friends were the ones yelling at him to get the heck off the job. Use the superior intelligence he had been given.

The famous book “Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood”… About friends who have had each other’s backs all their lives.

These kinds of friends? Of unmeasurable value.

But what about friendships that fade away? Perhaps the friendship doesn’t survive losing the context of how it began. Or something else. Something unpredictable. Jarring.

Maybe you don’t even know what happened at all. One of you slams the door. Walks away from what were years of laughs. Confidences. Tears. Fights. Forgiveness.

There’s a new anthology out. “My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends“, compiled by Jessica Smock and Stephanie Sprenger. About female friendships. It includes essays by women who were left. And women who did the leaving.

This has happened to me. Once, by someone whom I thought would be sitting by my side, me at 90 and her 91 – (always an important detail…). Laughing and cussing that we couldn’t hear each other. Going for walks. Or if one of us hadn’t made it, still sensing the other’s presence somehow.

My kindred spirit opted out with no explanation other than, “I (meaning her) am a bad person”. No other explanation. She’s not a bad person so I, like many of the wonderful writers featured in the book, was left to sop up my heart that had burst all over the floor. Over years and (to my embarrassment) after a couple of angry, pleading phone calls, I divorced her too.

It remains a mystery to me, but so be it.

I was intrigued to read about what others had to say on the topic.

What I found was more comprehension. More perspective. Of both my friend and me. It was such a wise choice on the editors’ part to include stories on each side of the dynamic. As you travel from one story to the next, you hear the pain of being either person. The self-doubt of the one left behind. The guilt of the one choosing to go. The darkness that might have always existed in the friendship. Or those where the light, that was so bright at the time, weakened in its intensity. And so the end.

An emotional dilemma seems to be discovering the meaning in a relationship, even after it ends. Not seeing it as a “waste of time” because it’s now over. That’s true for divorce. For intimate friendship. Not using fury or shame to demean what it stood for in your life. What you learned. How you grew.

I have been told by Alyson Herzig, one of the featured authors, that many of the friendships described in the book have been reconciled due to the story being told. And read by the other involved. Perhaps that’s a statement about the idea that time heals. Or that misperception and misunderstanding can be resolved. With responsible effort and sincerity.

Other friendships that are lost won’t have that chance. They have to be grieved.

Their time has past.

And that can be okay.

You can read more of Dr. Margaret on her website, http://drmargaretrutherford.com.