On Friends Parting Ways

I’ve noticed that most of the people around me don’t have friendships that end. In fact, they seem to think it strange that someone might. Sometimes they say, “that doesn’t happen to me.” But I listen to them, and I observe that in fact relationships do sort of stop happening for them – they just seem to dwindle to an occasional phone call, a carbon copied joke in e-mail, and then silence.

In fact, what I see is in some sense they’re both correct and incorrect. They’re correct, because of the meaning of those two words – friendship and end.

It’s fair to say their friendships don’t end, because they simply resort to inactivity, and ending is an action. Somehow, this is thought to be better. If they see the person, they exchange the “what are you doing now?” which is very similar to the small talk they made when they first met and the “let’s get together some time”, which they don’t actually mean to do. But, somehow, they’ve escaped the scandal, the shame, or the reality of it ending. They’ve substituted for that an unreality of simple inaction and a preserved fiction that I’m still “cool with” that person.

Likewise, it’s fair to say their friendships don’t end, because the meaning of ‘friend’ is so fluid for them, that at any given moment of thought, someone might be or might not be considered a friend. I notice, too, this goes with a level of patronization that keeps either party from really telling the other what he’s thinking. There are rules about how honest you can be. In other words, the ‘friendship’ or ‘non-friendship’ seems to depend on distance rather than closeness. I notice they don’t have non-friends, though – they have people they “know” but don’t usually ever say “he and I aren’t friends” – it’s considered impolite and absolute and drastic. In other words, friendship seems to be a moving target, a social fiction, and a matter of epistemological boundaries. In fact, if you reach across the boundary, and suggest that it’s about all the opposites of those things, you’re seen as seeking a “lover”, a “gay relationship”, or some bizarre form of family or religious bond.

Friendship doesn’t end with the people I see, because they don’t really end relationships, and they aren’t sure what we mean when say friendship in any categorical or definitive way.

My friendships do end. Either I end them, or the other person does. As drastic and extreme, as socially ill-adapted as that will make me seem to the people around me, I actually like that it happens. Not the pain involved, of course. But I’m not all about avoiding pain. People die, people go away, people become someone else. It’s part of living in history. I like it because it comes from being involved in friendship so much, from being involved with the persons involved. It comes from all the things the people around me say “don’t happen to” them. It comes from a mutual search for truth, a mutual attempt at progress, a mutual affinity for penetrating social barriers and finding the scalding naked person underneath and from remaining staunchly loyal to what we each love in the other person. Hell, it comes from loving the other person.

That’s the other thing: people seem just as appalled by the reasons that friendships end. It may be becaused of irreconcilable ideologies, or incompatible assumptions about the world or about relationships, or conflicting goals. People around me seem to assume these are always a bad thing. Or at least a shameful thing to admit in polite company. I don’t think that way. I may be trying to disarm the world, and my friend to arm it, and we realize we just can’t be together. I may be trying to uplift the poor, and my friend to protect the rich. I may be trying to find the meaning in life, and my friend actively working for a nihilist worldview – a world where meaning is out of fashion. Not that my friend is always the bad guy, if we differ. It may be that I have a violent temper, and he’s a peacemaker. Or it may be less clearly moral – it may be that I like to challenge people, and he likes to comfort them, and we can’t seem to each be active at the same time, and we each need to be.

Sometimes, it’s just lethargy vs. action. Perhaps I’m insisting on changing the world, making war on the world, searching for (and actually finding) the truth, and perhaps my friend just wants to “hang out” and finds all that activity to be a distraction, a burden by proxy, or actually “wrong”. We may not judge one another, but we may find that, except for a few laughs over a few things, we’re actually incompatible.

Either way, for reasons like this, and for other reasons, I find, in my experience, that friendships end. Deep, meaningful friendships the moreso. In fact, the kind that cross from a mere acquaintance into what I would call friendship seem almost guaranteed to have a lifespan, and so I now have begun preparing for them to end, the same way I prepare for the people I love to die one day. It’s much like a death. Seven swans and they all, one by one, fly away.

Sometimes it is more drastic, like a betrayal. This can happen, really, only when deep trust has developed. You see the conundrum. People who don’t develop deep, trusting relationships – what I’d call friendships – don’t have friendships that end. People who prefer social fictions to true endings, let even those relationships wither rather than end. I prefer a clean cut.

I know people who, to avoid this, remain entirely within themselves. They don’t trust. They don’t connect in any substantive way. And of course it goes back to the old adage… “to have loved and lost”. I think it’s worth it. Not worth “the risk” – I’ve given up thinking of it as a risk, and committed to thinking of it as a certainty – again, like death.

Invariably, when you say things like these, someone asks, “Yeah, but is it Christian?” So often, in our culture, religion is thought to be about some hypothetical “ought” rather than an ongoing and involved “is”. I don’t know about that. I tend to be suspicious of religious philosophy – it hasn’t done much but lop off heads and burn people at the stake. When I look at our monastics, they do neither – they deal with the smelly feet of the reality of the world, so to speak. They deal with the leprosy of life. They acknowledge Death.

That’s it, you know. To not allow for friendships that end is to try to deny the reality of Death, and to live in a hypothetical ought that is too pure even for the Son of God. But to live with Death, to acknowledge it and live anyway – not to ‘give in’ to it, but to work to overcome it from within – that’s Christian, in my view. That means loving enough that you always lose something. It’s not only always worth it; it’s necessary for our salvation, I think.

To my friend, who you and I have parted ways, pray for me so that I can be saved by your prayers. And forgive me my frailties and failings. They are more than you ever knew. I’m happy that we each cared enough about something that we didn’t just “hang around”. Go with God.