Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [2]
As I’ve accreted more friends over the years, I have learned that even best friendships are fleeting. And whenever you lose a friend, whether the choice is yours, hers, or mutual, it is painful. You mull over the reasons and try to take stock of what happened: Did I do something wrong? Should I have stuck it out? Should we have talked it through? Why aren’t I more resilient? Should I have done more to keep the connection? Why can’t I just move on and forget?
Even today, the message consistently reinforced by parents, teachers, friends, and popular media is clear: female friendships are supposed to last forever. For that reason, many of us cling to them long after they are worth keeping, and feel unnecessarily guilty when they end. A friendship lost is viewed as a personal failure, a source of embarrassment to both parties. As such, the social and emotional costs of lost friendships run high. As we morph from girls into women, we are judged by our ability to make and maintain friends.
No one has much sympathy for women who have difficulty finding their friendship niche, even if they are independent, creative, and have a strong sense of self. I remember my first summer job during high school, when I worked as a receptionist at a large marketing firm in Manhattan. Even with my abundant appetite, I would rather starve to death than be caught eating alone in a coffee shop. I assumed that anyone spotted at a table for one would be regarded as a friendless loser! Society looks even more unkindly on women who fail to sustain friendships, labeling their disagreements as “catfights” and friends who drift away as “disloyal.”
As strong as the cultural taboos are against ending friendships or having no close friends to begin with, the pain is multiplied exponentially when the decision to end a friendship is one-sided. No one ever likes to feel dumped. We can’t help but ask ourselves the same breakup questions we would when dismissed without recourse by a love interest: Wasn’t I good enough for her? How could she do that? Who does she think she is? Does she ever think about me? Is there something I could have done to prevent this?
In the case of being dumped, there are strong parallels between a friendship and a romantic relationship. Being tossed aside by a best friend is just as painful as being jilted by a boyfriend, husband, or lover. The ambiguity of not knowing why adds to the sense of abandonment and betrayal. Making matters worse, there are few supports to draw upon when you lose a close friend. If you split up with a romantic partner, divorce your husband, or lose your spouse, a circle of caring people embraces you. Losing a female friend, on the other hand, provides the bricks and mortar for a wall of silence. After all, how do you explain to another female friend that you have parted ways with someone you thought of as your best friend? Won’t she think of you as a loser, or a fickle friend? Or will she be jealous that this other friendship was so important to you?
As a result, women are reluctant to speak openly or acknowledge these painful endings, despite the fact that each of us has at least one breakup (and more likely, many of them) in our history. So great is the shame that only a handful of those I interviewed for this book were willing to use their real names or provide those of their friends. When women have conversations about fractured friendships, they are held behind closed doors with therapists or confided to close friends, generally prefaced with the phrase, “Please don’t tell anyone . . .” Whether consciously or unconsciously, each of us carries skeletons in our closets—secrets about the friendships we lost, the friendships we killed, and the ones that simply disappeared. If only we were able to share our stories!
As we experience various