Never Follow The Recipe

For those of you who don't know, I'm part of an amazing team comprised of producers, writers, researchers and best of all, friends over at www.friendingpodcast.com.  I'll be putting up some of my pieces that I've recorded for Friending here, for those (like me) who like to read words as well as listen to them.  This was for our latest episode, The Death of A Friendship.  Subscribe on itunes if you'd like to follow along a bit more closely. 

Not being able to ride a bike at 35 might be unique to me.

Hating cereal with milk, also, might be unique to me.

Lamenting the loss of a friendship, however, has a universal label.  I’d put money on it.

There are all kinds of reasons a friendship dies.  

People are crazy, you know?  Myself included.  You add crazy plus crazy and it doesn’t take a CPA to figure out something’s going to go down eventually.  

But I’m not going to talk about all the reasons, whether they’re good or bad, why a friendship has to die- and not just, you know, end.  I’m not going to go on and on about the nuances and intricacies of personalities and about boundaries and healthy confrontation and how to maintain open communication to ensure that this never happens again.

I’m not going to do this for two reasons.

One, I’m not the Friendship expert on this podcast- I’m just a teacher and a writer and a wife and a mom and a sometimes ok friend.

And, two, it will.  Happen again.  It will always happen.  

I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but friendships will always die.  Here is not where I interject with how death leads to new growth and life and all that shit- it may be true, but no one wants a non-friendship expert to talk about that.

What I will talk about is this:

Almost all of the friendship deaths I’ve experienced haunt me to this day.  

I use that word haunt intentionally.

As in, I am 35 and I still remember the exact perfume I was wearing (clinique’s happy, obviously, hello 90s)  when I received a phone call that broke my friendship when I was a sophomore in college.

I’m a strategic speaker- meaning, I rarely ever fly off the handle, speak out of turn or out anger, but the friendship grievances that weigh heavy on me were the times that I just cut out of someone’s life without explanation.  The times I couldn’t recognize a healthy boundary until it was too late.  The times I didn’t show up.  The times I showed up too much.  The times I was manipulative or selfish- deceitful without even knowing.  I shoulder half if not more of the blame for the ones I’ve lost.  

It’s easy, if not uncomfortable to recognize these things later in life and I’ve had the fortunate experience of bearing witness to some of these friendships being mended in recent years.  We’re all older now- have kids of our own.  Perhaps we’re a little more inclined toward grace because we’ve seen some things or done some things that we can’t take back, and we realized, we’re not saints either and life is so much better when you have more people rooting for you than against.  

The thing is we’re all assholes, and we’re all going to change.  This is the basic recipe for friendship death.  

Good thing I never follow recipes.