FutureDad 10: Even Your Best Friends are Temporary
Long ago, someone said to me - ‘Friends are only friends when it suits them.’
The words landed with such a jolt that the context has vanished from my memory. I do know it wasn’t a comment about my specific friends because he didn’t know them (or me) very well. Nonetheless, it was a devastating statement. He said it to me when I was fourteen, admittedly when I was quite impressionable. I spent a lot of time in my mid-teens seeking out wisdom and wisdom-adjacent ideas from older people. This one definitely qualified. Now that I look back, it’s such an big claim that it must be deconstructed and re-examined. I will start with the mental steps I went through afterwards to process it.
My first assumption was that he was hurt by a friend and he was bitter about it, so my initial response was to reject it. Then it triggered further realisations, based on limited examples in my own life. It explained some things I’d experienced myself at that point so the idea ricochet around my head for days afterwards. I found it increasingly hard to dismiss the claim. Conversely I couldn't whole-heartedly accept it because it was such a bleak outlook. Looking back, my resistance to it may have been a coping mechanism but more simply, at the time I just couldn’t construct a rational basis to assess its truth. I didn’t have the data, so I just kept thinking about it. What it came down to was this; if true, what did it say about my current friends? If true, is there any point to making friends in the future?
By my twenties I had already begun to notice that even great friends come and go. Even friends that I knew and trusted for a long time - their life situation changed, their priorities changed and so our friendship was never the same. Even if they did want to remain friends, life almost always got in the way. Geography, among many things, completely kills a friendship. People sometimes say ‘friends are the family that you choose’ but that appeared more and more like a coping mechanism for people who had an unhappy family life.
As more and more years rolled past, my eyes were increasingly opened to its wisdom. The idea was like a tiny little rope attached to a large heavy curtain. Despite initially seeming improbable I kept on pulling it and pulling it. Each time I observed people’s behaviour, the more I pulled on it, the more daylight filled the room. I began to see the world as it is, not as I wanted it to be. Eventually I couldn’t not see the room I was in. And eventually, with enough supporting examples, I began to see the idea for what it was. True.
If you step back and look at it honestly, friends appear then fade away with alarming ease throughout your life. It’s a feature, not a bug. Many times these ‘surrogate family members’ disappear from your life in a way that throws doubt on the value and importance of that friendship in the first place. Remember when you used to share everything with some old, closer-than-close, buddies back in the day? Well perhaps now you don’t even know - or perhaps care - if they are dead or alive.
The same applies even more acutely with long-distance friendships. These are second-only to long-distance relationships in their utter uselessness. Friends, like lovers, must do things together. It doesn’t matter if they text. It doesn’t matter if they call. Unless you are sharing and making experiences together, both practices are a pantomime.
A handful of years ago, a close friend was emigrating for good from London to a country very far away and he threw a party to celebrate. There was music, there was drinking, there was dancing. What they used to call ‘merriment’. I labour that point because half-way through the evening I was asked for my opinion on the event and I said, ‘there’s nothing to celebrate.’ I felt the echo from the past as I said it. The questioner knew my reputation for dropping brutal truth bombs, so he chuckled and retorted with the up-beat ‘C’mon man ... it gives you someone to visit whenever you go there.’
What!? The opportunity to visit him one day makes it a happy occasion somehow? I should be satisfied that, although he is going so far away that the friendship is effectively over, there’s a tiny chance that I may see him, if I ever visit his location? I grimaced at the thought-turd that it was and turned away, shaking my head.
But it got me thinking. Why do we attach meaning to friendships when they are evidently temporary? Do they serve a purpose during a phase in life when you search for meaning appropriate to that period? If so, when the friendship stops, the meaning is yours to keep and take to the next phase of your life. It is a reflective, philosophical outlook and perhaps the only healthy response to that reality. The philosophy of Stoicism is worth heeding on this (see ‘FutureDad 9: Superpowers Part II - Stoicism’).
In effect a good friendship can be thought of as a milkshake. It makes you smile when it comes your way but it can give you a headache if enjoyed too enthusiastically. It almost always ends quicker than you hoped for and afterwards you may think, ‘oh, was that it?’ But no-one wants to be the buzzkill and say the milkshake won’t last. Even if it’s true. Because it’s true. Especially if it goes off and becomes bitter, whereupon the best thing to do is push it away from you. But ultimately, despite all that, it is pleasant if enjoyed during the time you have it. With wisdom you realise that that time can be remembered with fondness. It doesn’t require significance beyond that memory.
So savour your friendships. Reciprocate the joy and warmth that people give to you. Enjoy the friendship slowly and don’t let it change you at all. Don’t grasp it tightly, it won’t be any more under your control if you try. It will only hurt when the glass breaks. Eventually, in time, you will have to let it go. When it’s over you will realise the friendship didn’t belong to you, it was just a thing which happened. Then you will only feel pain to the extent that you compromised your values to change or prolong it. When in fact, as the passage of time invariably demonstrates, it was simply something you enjoyed for a series of individual moments.
FutureDad