Like everyone, I’ve had friendships come and go in my lifetime. Sometimes people drift apart organically, over time, and for me, most of those were situational friendships to begin with. Catching the same school bus, gathering on the same university lawns, working from the same massage parlour, getting high at the same parties, living in the same houses. We shared something that kept us spending incidental time together with little effort on either of our parts. I think of the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, saying that he deliberately separated the main characters of the show because only when they were no longer sharing the same office could you see how strong their individual relationships were. Some friendships that begin situationally, endure. Others don’t. But they end without fracturing—I could run into any of the people I have drifted from and have a pleasurable catch up.
I only have a handful of friendships that ended with a definite falling out, and all of these came down to values. One friend, I fell out with over Palestine. Another, I fell out with over her dating of men who were publicly known to treat women badly. A third, I fell out with because of her hypocrisy. I’m sure they would all have their own interpretations of these fallings out, with their own reasons for them, but ultimately we weren’t compatible. It was not possible for either of us to sustain the friendship without feeling like we were compromising something about ourselves. (I don’t count fallouts that were misunderstandings, because these were all eventually repaired—which is when you discover that it was a misunderstanding.)
I feel strongly that friendship shouldn’t be held together by obligation or history. To me, friendship is two people continuing to choose to spend time together because they enjoy it and care about each other, with no greater motivation than that. And that is what I think is beautiful about it—that the choice to continue the bond is made consciously and actively, not simply out of habit. I also believe that you have to meet people where they’re at, that you can’t hold them to your expectations and that you have to accept them for who they are without criticism. For example, I have friends who always run late. I know that about them and I accept that about them, and I never expect them to be on time even though I always am. If I couldn’t handle that aspect of their personality, I wouldn’t be friends with them.
I have learnt over time that not all people see friendship this way, though. Some see it as a series of obligations and a rigid contract. I owe you this and you owe me that. I had one particularly memorable falling out with a friend that demonstrated this different view of friendship. She told me I was to be maid of honour at her wedding. I understand that to her it was a marker of esteem and status, a compliment bestowed. But where she saw the “honour” , all I saw was the maid and, because I wasn’t asked, I felt even more trapped. I eventually explained my reservations, which were mainly that I didn’t feel able to fill that role when I don’t believe in marriage (I am a real misogamist—I don’t even believe in gay marriage) and I felt it would be disrespectful to her wedding and false to myself to do it.
This could have all been fine, except for the fact that to her it was non-negotiable, something I couldn’t say no to. She believed that there are things you do for a friend if they ask, even if you don’t want to. I firmly believed that you should never even ask a friend to do something that you know they would hate doing. The difference in our perception of friendship was insurmountable. I saw a whole life unfold in front of me where I was required to do certain things with no freedom of choice—and where is the joy in doing something for someone because you have to, not because you want to? I want every favour to me to be given freely, not forcibly. She probably saw someone who was a bad friend, not meeting the responsibilities of friendship. The only incontrovertible truth though, not up to interpretation, is that our values were incompatible and so the friendship ended.
