Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [20]
Other endings are mutual, with the friendship falling apart because of a misunderstanding, betrayal, or blowup. When this occurs, both women can generally pinpoint the time or event that transformed the friendship. The large majority of friendships have ambiguous endings, with two women drifting apart and never really able to understand what happened or to determine precisely what led to the demise of a once-close friendship. Just as no two friendships begin the same way, the factors leading to their demise are never the same, although patterns begin to emerge.
DISAPPOINTMENTS
There is an implicit contract between friends: they will be there for each other. Thus, minor disappointments can assume gargantuan proportions between close friends because of the intensity of the feelings between them. There are a range of ways two women can disappoint each other, but some common disappointments are associated with important milestones in a woman’s life—childbirth, deaths, birthdays, and weddings. These are times when women tend to be emotionally vulnerable, when small infractions or insults become magnified or exaggerated. That’s what happened to Karen.
NOT BEING THERE
Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success in life is just showing up.” When it comes to friendships, not being there can also make an important statement. Karen and Megan had been best friends since college. They saw the world the same way and even shared an offbeat sense of humor that was often elusive to other friends. They were both vegans and political liberals on a largely conservative college campus. After graduation, although they saw less of each other, they still got together for girls’ nights out and considered each other best friends.
When they were 24 years old, Megan’s father died. Karen had no car and lived more than four hours away from where the funeral was being held. Clearly, there was no easy way for her to get to the funeral. She reconciled herself to the idea of not attending the service by planning to spend “alone time” with Megan afterwards, which she thought would be even more meaningful. She reasoned, or perhaps rationalized, that mutual friends would surround Megan in the days immediately after the death and she would be there with her when things settled down.
Karen was stunned when Megan refused to see her after the funeral and then never spoke to her again. “Having never lost a parent of my own, I didn’t realize how great her need would be to have me beside her,” says Karen, who is now in her late forties. “If I’d known how devastated she would be, I would have done whatever it took to get there,” she says.
Worse than the loss of that one special friendship, it turned out that none of their mutual friends spoke to Karen again, either. They had been a close-knit group who had been together from the first weeks of college through graduation and beyond. For Karen, this sudden severance was an extraordinarily painful time in her life, which she still remembers more than twenty years later. She knows that she screwed up and regrets it, and has never made that same mistake again.
As far as Megan was concerned, Karen “blew it” (the relationship) by not showing up at the funeral. There is no way she could forgive Karen, even though she came to realize that the hurt was-n’t intentional. From Karen’s perspective, she thought the relationship was strong and forgiving enough to make allowances. But there are certain life situations—most frequently, the milestones listed earlier—where all bets are off, and where sometimes the close emotional allegiances and history we bank on to get us through are unable to prevent feelings from being hurt. When anyone’s feelings are wounded, emotions can trump rational thinking. Perhaps if Karen had discussed her decision with Megan, she would have realized the importance of showing up that day, and could