Today’s Globe and Mail ran an article on friendship – female friendships – noting that “While the dissolution of a romantic relationship can be hard, the break-up between best friends can be even more difficult.” Perhaps more difficult still is not having the gift of friendship.
I’m not really sure why the subject of friendship is so preoccupying to me lately. If I scratch the surface to ferret out what may actually be troubling me, I suppose it is a few things: recent contact from high-school friends via Facebook; the increasing oppressive presence of my in-laws that has me dying to explode in a safe space with a venomous self-pity monologue about all the crazy ass things they are doing and saying; ageing.
I often chalk up my neglect of friendships to the huge extended family that I have – there are innumerable aunts and cousins about who I know I can turn to for help, advice, solace. They have known me forever, know my family dynamics, are trustworthy, and care. I don’t need to see them or speak to them all the time – but when the chips are down, we are all there for the other, no questions asked. It is the ultimate safety net. But it isn’t only that many of the personal needs friendships fill are for me filled by family…it is also me. I don’t particularly fare well in the demands of friendship. I suspect I internalize too much, feel too hard, empathize too intensely, and ultimately get burned out. I also suspect that the relationship with my extended family, where contact and check-ins are not part of the equation to love and support, means that I am a bad friend…I figure I am there if you need me full stop, but not so much for the casual chat. And the art of the casual chat, it seems to me, is the basis of many friendships.
I suppose too that I haven’t ever been comfortable in groups – circles of women who meet, share, support and have fun. I never was. Even doing gender studies in university and graduate school did not change my aversion to anything that smacked of “group sharing” – I seem to recoil from exposing myself in any meaningful and honest way at all to a group.
So why does the subject of friendship interest me so much lately? Surely it isn’t just because of a few voices from the past, the pressures of in-law cohabitation, or feeling mortal. Maybe it is being at a stage in my life where I am finally quite chuffed with life – I love (while also hating) my career, I have an amazing, funny, smart and drop-dead gorgeous husband who I adore, I am a Mom to the bestest little boys ever - and who ever thought THAT would happen! - my life has become what I never, ever thought it would be. So maybe it is simply that, when I managed through no planning or good management on my part to have everything I long thought was out of reach, I have relaxed enough to wonder how others, how those who long ago or not so long ago crossed my path and whom I remember kindly and fondly, are.
Or maybe, for the first time in my life, I am in sore need for a girls' night out and have no idea how to go about having a girls' night out, unless it is taking Fan the dog for her last walk of the day. Any ideas out there?
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What an interesting post. Friendships are difficult because they require work and commitment, if you're not the casual chatting type, or the type to enjoy superficial friendships (I'm not that either, and can get hurt easily in a relationship). While I am always concerned about how much I'm giving and receiving in a friendship (because I don't want to create false impressions or become too beholden), I nonetheless find my friendships one of the most important and sustaining aspects of my life -- important because the fulfilling family life that I have now (like you) may not always be so fulfilling, for any number of reasons, and so my identity outside of it seems critical to maintain.
ReplyDeleteI have long related to my family of origin and extended family the way you describe -- little contact and no check-ins -- just a knowledge that they're there, and that we'd be there for one another if the necessity arose. That is the kind of relationship I now question. It does not seem good enough to me, I guess because they have not really been there for me, ever. Yes, they'd scoop me off the street, take me in, give me money, and be at my hospital bedside, and I suppose that is worth a lot. But with some exceptions, I do not like the majority of people in my biological family, and as I get older that seems quite definitive for me.