Why Must We End This Way?

Something I still don't get about friendship: ending.  I hate ending things, with anybody.  Even when it isn't messy it usually is.  There are, I suppose, many different ways of ending a friendship.  The cowardly, passive-aggressive method seems to be the most popular.  You simply stop being in contact.  You invent excuses for not getting together, you make phone contacts and face to face visits shorter and more infrequent.  And then you're gone.

This is actually a lot worse than fighting.   By not confronting things together we are declaring that we are unwilling to be challenged, that we have no interest in changing, no interest in growing.  It is, as I said, cowardly and passive-aggressive.  It is a way of telling the other person that she is not worth the effort, that he doesn't matter enough to want to work towards reconciling and rescuing the relationship.  It is a subtle and very nasty way of shitting on someone.

I don't buy this horseshit that all friendships have a shelf life.  This is simply a lame excuse for treating others as user-friendly.  It is a consumerist, and I would say selfish and narcissistic approach towards friendship.

This isn't to say that we have to be friends until death-do-us-part.  It isn't like being married to each other, and really, how many marriages ever last?  I like the idea of flexible longterm friendships.  The kind that go on and on: you might see each other every day for a while, perhaps live together; then you fall out of orbit: you leave the country, get involved in a new career and new social circle, you marry above or below your station in life, or simply one of you, or both of you, get too busy to stay in contact.  Then one day you run into each other on the street.  The connection remains.  You go for coffee, you see each other once or twice a month; then one of you gets sick and dies.  Or something.

Not everyone can be friends.  Some people just are not designed to occupy the same room.  There are others we might see regularly in the store, the coffee shop, in the bar, in church or wherever.  We might not even know each other's name.  But we like each other, or at least there is that incandescent connection of two good wills touching each other.

I like the idea of being a friend.  I have friends, some very dear and close people.  Some I see often, perhaps every week or so, others less often, perhaps every month, or maybe once a year.  We never stop being friends, I think because we share in common that attitude of being friends, not necessarily to all and sundry, but perhaps to anyone who shares with us the same good will.  I think that if more of us would cultivate this mentality, treating others as being somehow part of our lives, perhaps we could help reduce the sense of social isolation that plagues so many, especially in cold unfriendly cities like my own lovely Vancouver.  Even today on the bus I had a conversation in Spanish with a Venezuelan and his little daughter and his father.  We may never see each other again, and yes, we are now friends for all that.  It isn't that hard to be friendly.  Once we get used to it.  And once we drop our expectations and fears.