I know lots of people – through my writing, through my heritage consulting, through my travels, even through my schooldays fifty or so years ago. The number of individuals I would count among these folk as friends – true friends – is however very low in comparison.
Facebook’s subversion of friendship is insidious. It teaches us to value quantity over quality. My ‘friends’ on social media are simply people I know or with whom I share a mutual interest. I like most of them, enjoy the company of many, but real friendship involves that icky-sticky hard-to-pin-down basic human need – love.
I love my family and my first and second husbands dearly. That goes without saying. I also consider them my friends (and yes, that includes both husbands). There are just five or six people excluding family I would consider to be close friends and, yes, I love them dearly too: I will spare their blushes here, for they must surely know who they are.
Losing friends one has grown to love hurts and as I grow older, bereavement becomes a grim fact of life. Many of my closest friends have been decades older – and the gaps their deaths have left in me will never heal. To me the dead are not lost or late, they are gone – from here at least. It is a lonelier world without them.
Making new friends for me is a slow and layered process. Friendship is rarely instant. As a child I suffered badly whenever I moved school or when a friend moved away (dear Fiona W. from Inchmore Primary circa 1970, where, oh where, are you now?).
Losing living friends through fallings-out or (worse) for reasons unknown I also find acutely painful. I tried recently to analyse all the friendships where we have drifted – or torn ourselves – apart.
Friend 1 (the underappreciated friend?) was the person I called the day of a traumatic rural accident in which I broke my wrist. My husband was away and so I asked F1 to look after my daughter – her own daughter was a frequent playmate. She was a single mum and often came round for meals and company so I thought she would not mind helping me out. She agreed to collect my daughter from the waiting ambulance. I thought I had thanked her adequately for her help once I returned from hospital plastered up, but perhaps not.
Somehow, after that day, F1 became cold and distant and never returned my calls. I moved away and never heard from her again – but once, on a recent whim, I made contact with her charming now-grown-up daughter on Facebook and she offered to put her mum in touch.
In the end, though, I could not face following it through because of the elephant which would have been sharing the conversational sofa in the room: why did you drop me all those years ago? I would have walked over hot coals to help you.
With Friend 2 (the exploited friend?) it was more clearly my fault: I broke the golden rule of never employing an old friend, did so hoping to help her, and ended up losing her friendship because I did. The consulting contract we were working on as a team of three expanded hugely after commission but the fee did not: I was too inexperienced to do anything other than soldier on and we all shared the financial hit. F2’s refusal to talk what happened through or to resume our friendship ever since still makes me very sad.
Friend 3 (the fickle friend?) was a delightful neighbour I considered a permanent part of my life. I chose her – very carefully – as Godmother for one of my children, but once I was no longer living on her doorstep F3 just seemed to sever all contact, never once picking up the phone and not returning my own calls. When a letter went unanswered too I thought enough was enough. I would find it difficult to renew acquaintance with her now because of the impact of her unaccountable neglect on my daughter.
I then stumbled across evidence that Friend 4 (the opportunistic friend?) was rather more interested in my husband than in me. She brushed off the message I had intercepted accidentally – a seismic shock to me – and has never given me an adequate explanation for what happened: F4 had however been through a recent painful divorce, and I had been supportive, or so I thought, during that time. Just telling me properly what had happened (and how, and why) could have helped mend some of the damage.
We still see each other from time to time socially but I never feel wholly relaxed. Now that the fundamental trust (on which I realise my friendships have to be based) has been broken, I am not sure how to recover it.
Friend No 5 (the embarrassed friend?) may, I think, have felt exposed because I inadvertently witnessed a very public row between her and a loved one. I cannot think of any other reason why I should be slowly marginalised. I do not think I am dull company and I try to be a kind and supportive, but who knows? Maybe F5 is choosing to withdraw from our friendship for some other more personal reason I cannot fathom, and so I simply need to accept it. I just wish she would explain, rather than leave me in the dark.
Feeling under-appreciated, exploited or embarrassed – or behaving in a fickle or opportunistic way – are of course all valid reasons for the permanent ending any relationship or friendship. I have had serious misunderstandings with other friends and family members however which have been resolved amicably through grace and kindness on both sides and (crucially) a genuine desire to forgive. And it is in my nature to try to mend things: people as well as pots.
In trying to work out why it is that I care about a friend now missing from my life (in one case) for almost 30 years, the answer has to lie with the autist in me. My hamster-in-a-wheel brain likes to resolve things but this, this proves insoluble. That one of the happiest moments of my life in recent years was when the old friend (who would have been No 6 on this list) reached out to make peace says a lot, I think.
That the others have not wanted to do the same – or could not be bothered to – I find unfathomable.
One of my grown-up children gave me an enlightening tutorial recently on different gender preferences and sexuality. One category I had not come across before is demisexuality: those quiet souls who love rarely and deeply and who can grow to love only those they already know well. This struck a chord, and explains perhaps why I have remained good friends with my first husband. I wondered if the same might go for the making and sustaining of deep friendships.
Perhaps you are reading this post and thinking ‘oh, for goodness sake, woman, so you have lost a few friends over the course of a lifetime? Everyone does! Stop brooding about it – just go out and make a few more!’ And you may have a point, although making friends is never something I can accomplish easily or take lightly.
I miss these people. I always will.
Perhaps writing this blog can in some way draw a line under my grieving for five living – yet, so far at least, lost to me – friends?
Vee Walker is an author who lives in the Scottish Highlands. She is also an editor specialising in memoir with Jericho Writers in Oxford. Her award-winning novel Major Tom’s War is available in paperback and ereader editions from http://www.KashiHouse.com and her second novel The Patiala Letter is approaching completion.
Vee Walker writes... 