Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [17]
Like an unrequited love, the terms of a friendship like Jess and Merry’s aren’t always equal. One friend may be more committed to the relationship than another and one may unilaterally decide to break off the friendship for a host of reasons. If you consider someone your best friend and she doesn’t rank you among hers, it usually destroys the relationship. One woman I interviewed told me that when she overheard her best friend tell a member of her monthly book club that someone else was her best friend, she felt as if she were impaled because the remark seemed to invalidate her friendship.
All friendships, even those between best friends, have their highs and lows, and can present friends with unexpected twists and turns. Yet the fantasy of Best Friends Forever remains pervasive. Jess learned how perfect a friendship can be at the beginning and how imperfect it can turn out at the end. Adding to the pain was her inability to ever figure out what happened.
Clearly, best friendships are richer and more complicated than as portrayed on TV or as implied by the BFF acronym that has been used so flippantly over the last two decades as a kind of shorthand for female relationships. Pop culture has deemed that best friends are forever—reinforcing the very best friends myth at the heart of our collective consciousness. Tragically, generations of women grow up with that idea and either stay in toxic relationships or feel confused, pained, and taken off guard when a relationship ends.
CHAPTER 3
WHY FRIENDSHIPS FALL APART
“One who looks for a friend without faults will have none.”
—HASIDIC SAYING
With the high hopes and expectations we place on female friendships, the loss of a friend is nothing short of an emotional jolt. When two women who were once intimates, a comfortable twosome, suddenly feel separate and very ill at ease, it’s normal for each woman to be left questioning whether she really knew the other at all.
When friendships end, regardless of how or why, there’s a profound sense of disappointment over the loss of a relationship that once felt like it was meant to last forever. We tread so carefully at the beginning of romantic relationships, getting to know someone before gradually trusting them to get emotionally close to us, and resisting pinning hopes on that person until we have passed through a series of relationship hurdles. But with a female friend, we tend to barrel into a relationship assuming that it never has to end. Although breakup-like scenarios between best friends are fairly common, we are not, for good or ill, culturally encouraged to tread carefully or fear fallout. Instead, we’re taught to assume the very best. After all, if either woman in a friendship had ever anticipated an eventual demise or dissolution of that friendship, the two never would have been become so close.
The emotional scars are deep and long-lasting, as described to me by a woman named Rachel. Living in the same freshman dorm and taking several classes together, Rachel and Julie became fast friends—and before long, best friends. In the middle of their sophomore year, Julie started dating Rob, a good-looking guy who lived in a frat house not far from the school. Rachel could tell her friend was smitten, although Julie didn’t admit it to anyone, not even to Rachel. Julie and Rob dated other people, but Rachel sensed it wasn’t by choice as far as Julie was concerned. Sadly, Julie was much more into Rob than Rob was into Julie.
As if her friend needed one more reason to pursue this elusive and hard-to-pin-down guy, Julie’s mom always had strong opinions about her daughter’s boyfriends and this time was no different. She kept pushing Julie into this relationship because Rob was pre-med, on his way to becoming a doctor. Rachel never thought much of Rob because he was so awkward