Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [42]
While not having her in my life hurt my feelings and made me wonder what had gone wrong in our friendship, I am grateful to have my friend back now. In retrospect, I understand that our friendship wasn’t the problem, per se, because I realize the enormous stress my poor friend was under. Not only has my hurt and anger totally dissolved, but I wish that there was something I could have done at the time to let her know that I was there for her and to help her deal with her situation.
The stress and humiliation created by mental, emotional, or substance abuse problems of close relatives often take a silent toll on female friendships. Because of stigma and shame, it’s hard for someone to tell you her sister was arrested for drunk driving or her husband was hospitalized for bipolar disorder. At times like this, people often feel so alone that their world becomes very narrow and their friendships are put on hold as they deal with a crisis. Sometimes you just need to accept the distance a friend puts between you and her even if you don’t understand it.
When you can’t make total sense of a situation logically, one plausible explanation is that you are missing a key piece of information. It’s like being challenged to figure out a complex cross-word puzzle without knowing the theme that ties all the clues together. For example, if your friend suddenly seems irritable and guarded, consider that she may be having personal or family problems that she doesn’t feel comfortable talking about with you. Instead of sharing them, she maintains her privacy by cutting herself off from everyone. It isn’t always about you!
Being dumped hurts and the path to acceptance is difficult, but it is better to befriend and lose than never to befriend at all. The good news is that most women get over the loss, and survive and even thrive afterward. Every single day, wise, wonderful women, who previously enjoyed spending significant amounts of time together become estranged from each other and rebound to find new friends again. They learn and accept the important lesson that friendships, more often than not, are vulnerable to change as we move through different stages and circumstances in our lives.
STAGE 7 : RELIEF
It may seem paradoxical, but women say they experience a sense of relief after they have been dumped and have reached a state of acceptance. Very often, they look back and realize that the friendship wasn’t as reciprocal or perfect as it seemed. The person who was jilted may have been the one who was always initiating phone calls or who was always trying to arrange dates. No one is completely comfortable in sustaining a one-sided relationship over the long haul. Randi ultimately realized that she desperately wanted a close friendship that was more reciprocal than the one she had with Nicole. After she accepted the loss and was able to see the limitations of that relationship, she felt a sense of hopefulness. I suggested that she look for a replacement closer to home. She may have had more in common with someone in her neighborhood (perhaps a mother of one of her children’s friends) than she had with this expat. At different times in a woman’s life, it may be more or less difficult to make and maintain female friendships. But before long, Randi’s little ones will be older and she will have more time and options for female friendships than she does now. Since she currently has a very full plate, it might be worthwhile for her to reconnect by e-mail, at least on an interim basis, with some of her friends from back home.
As a friendship unravels, there may be great discomfort at first, but many women who had been reluctant to let go report a sense of closure by accepting the end of something they come to realize wasn’t mutually satisfying.
Friendship Recovery