Friends

So, I’ve had a lot of friends in my life; they’ve sort of come and gone a bit like buses. You know what I mean. Well, ok, maybe you don’t.

Here’s the thing though, I don’t get this lifelong friendship thing that other people keep insisting is all important. I see it everywhere, people who hang on to their childhood friends and feel bereft if they lose them. I have friends on Facebook who get really upset when people they have known for years unfriend them suddenly for no reason. They take it really personally.

But I don’t get that – that sentimentality that some people have for others, because it’s ridiculous. It’s like those people who hang on to every pair of shoes they’ve ever owned, or people who can’t throw away carrier bags, or worse, people who keep memory boxes full of old ticket stubs and passport photos, as if that stuff really means anything. It doesn’t. If you’ve got something to remember, then remember it. I do that and it’s great, fine. But don’t hang on to the remnants of it like a limpet crab, as if you think that losing it will be so terrible that you’ll actually feel pain.

In my view, and in my world, relationships are transient. People come and go and I have connections to them at particular times because we bond over particular things. When I was at school I moved from best friend to best friend in phases. There was the Tanya phase in early primary school, then the Jennifer phase, then Fiona in secondary school. Each of these friendships was important to me at the time, almost entirely exclusive (as best friends tend to be when you’re a kid), and this despite the fact that we didn’t actually have that much in common apart from the fact that we went to the same school and, somehow, had latched onto each other.

With Tanya, I was friends with her because we imprinted on each other (a bit like baby chickens do with their mothers) on the first day of school and we continued to be friends for about four years until it finally became apparent that we didn’t share any interests or even have similar temperaments (she was, if I remember correctly, a complete bitch when she got older). Then Jenny. I remember, I didn’t like her to begin with, and then we somehow became friends because we both hated Tanya. We didn’t have anything in common either, but it became a habit to hang around together. Then, when we were both in secondary school, she emigrated to Australia with her family and I ended up being friends with Fiona. I still remember when I met Fi – I was milling about on my own in the dining hall and she called me over and told me I could hang around with her. It was convenient. We weren’t alike, and we didn’t like the same stuff (mostly I pretended to like what she liked), and we weren’t in many of the same classes because she was in all the lower streams, but we were friends.

When you’re at school, you don’t see that you’re institutionalized to the point of being quite ridiculous. The relationships you form with other people are formed, primarily, because you’re all in the same boat and you have to survive somehow. It’s a political thing, and a necessity. But it’s not real usually; it’s just like people who make friends in prison, or mental hospitals or something. You need someone to talk to, to help get you through it, so you find someone and latch on and then, when you get out, it’s sort of over.

When I left school, I very quickly realized that those old friendships and relationships were not built to last, because the thing that bonded us for so many years was no longer present. We weren’t in the same boat any more, we were all in different boats, with new people and we had to make new friends.

And that’s what life is like. It sounds harsh, but I really think that it’s healthier, in most cases, to say “out with the old” and just move on. I’ve done that with a lot of people in the end. You can spend a lot of time feeling depressed about it, mourning the relationships that have gone by, if you like; but I think it’s better just to recognize that people are not meant to be together forever. People come and go.

There are some people, like I’ve said already, who hang on to their old friendships in a curiously nostalgic and, one might even say suffocating way. A lot of the people I went to school with, from the little I’ve seen of them over the years, seem to be obsessed with keeping up with old school friends and reminiscing about old times – as if school was some great adventure we all had together, or some sort of golden time, when in fact we all hated it to the point of wanting to blow the place up when we left and never look back. (I remember feeling this way even if nobody else does. Everybody knows that high-school never ends, right? It’s not news. But it’s not a good thing either; you’re supposed to at least TRY to move on!)

I’ve been cutting ties all my life. If something’s not working for me, or if something goes bad and I don’t want to have to dwell on it any more (toxic or stale relationships basically), then I move away from it. Even if it’s someone I’ve known for years. Because that can happen too can’t it? You can know someone for years and think that you know everything about them, and you don’t see any of the bad stuff because you get along so well with them. And then, all of a sudden, after years of thinking these people are great, you suddenly see their ugly side.
Everyone’s got an ugly side, I know. But you don’t tend to see it in your friends. You become blind to it. I guess this goes for love relationships too, although I don’t know so much about those. But I’ve done that with friends, certainly, fallen out of liking with them.

I had a friend called Claire, who I still think was mostly pretty great (if I’m even remotely capable of love, I think I loved Claire – in every way EXCEPT the sexual!). But I remember, towards the end of our friendship, I really started to not like what I saw in her. The attitude, the opinions, the people she hooked up with. It just wasn’t her – or not the her I knew. And that was the time to stop being friends, as far as I was concerned. Because I’m not someone who’s going to tell my friends that they shouldn’t be who they are – people change, that’s all, and when they do, you have to accept it and decide if the person they’ve changed into is someone you still want to be friends with. If not, you move on, because you have to change and grow up too. That’s natural. I don’t have any bad feelings towards Claire, I just don’t ever want to see her again. (If that makes sense.)

And it doesn’t even matter how much time has gone by in a friendship. I was friends with a guy for ten years; I thought I knew him really well, we had a similar sense of humour, and I could talk to him, you know? He was one of the best friends I’ve ever had because, if I was upset, I could tell him. If he had something to say, it would be me he would want to say it to. I met him in a totally bizarre and random way (the details of which I won’t go into because it would probably be quite tedious and bore you senseless) the day before my 18th birthday and the occasion became a memorable anniversary for us.

(I’m making this sound like we were deeply in love, which was not how it was. I don’t do love, it’s not for me. I only do serious friendship – those are my relationships. That’s as far as I go. He did tell me he loved me, but it wasn’t THAT kind of love, it was something else.)

But, anyway, my point was that he and I were really close for ten years and we were properly in each other’s lives, you know? Even though we had very different lives, we were still kind of on the same page.

And then, suddenly, this year, it was like we weren’t any more. He has children now, I think he’s married too (he didn’t tell me about that but I saw a reference to an impending wedding on his FB page and I assume it was his) and his life is just a lot more complicated, whereas my life has changed too. I’m not just some girl doing A Levels and working in a shop any more (which is more or less where I was when I was 18) and he’s not just some guy dicking around working in a pet shop and memorizing all the monsters and side-gags on “Buffy”. We’re adults now. We’re different. And when I tried to get in touch with him earlier this year it was just a bit sad, because we really had nothing left to say to each other. It was like we were strangers.

I didn’t cry about this, or get upset, or take it personally. I just accepted it, the way I have accepted the death of all my other friendships. It happens. Nothing lasts forever. So, when he unfriended me on Facebook and I didn’t hear from him by mail or text, I just dealt with it.

I’ll probably never see or hear from him again and I suppose that is the way it should be.

Now, I have friends in the sparsest sense of the word. They are a motley collection of people that have, somehow, managed to survive the cull – some of them are people I barely knew at school or college but who, for some reason or another, I have managed to find something in common with now. Other people are friends I made during my PhD (relatively recent) and I don’t know if they will go on to be lifelong or even just long-term friends. We’ll see. I suspect that eventually I will have nothing to say to most of them, since they are now all academics with well established careers and a list of publications to their name. And who am I? Certainly not an academic if the grand finale of my PhD is anything to go by (I left it under a cloud, never to go back). So I think they will get bored of me sooner or later when I cease to be of interest to them. Or I will get bored of them, and then that will be that.

I only talk to people on Facebook now really, and I think that can be deceptive can’t it? Because it fools you into thinking that you know people when, in fact, you know nothing about anyone. It’s almost like courting people to be your friends, because you can find out what they like so easily, it’s all in the newsfeed or on their timeline. So you just latch onto those stupid details and make them reasons to be friends. But if you spent all day together in real life, or if you had to work with them, would you really get on? No, probably not. So my friends are not really friends. In fact sometimes I question the fact of my ever having HAD friends at all.

I do this sometimes when it occurs to me that all of my greatest and most important friendships in life have just been built on nothing – just little things like liking the same TV shows or music or something – stupid things to bond over because they’re so fleeting and meaningless; the trends change and so do people’s tastes, it’s not concrete. But does that matter? It doesn’t to me, really, but then I marvel at the way that other people think this nothingness can be made to equal substance just by dint of them saying that that’s what it is.

Really nobody has anybody, do they? Nobody really has anybody forever. That’s just life.