Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [55]
As two friends grow and change, so does their friendship. If their paths converge, it can strengthen the relationship, but if one individual changes significantly and the other doesn’t—or if two people’s lives diverge completely—it can signal doom. For example, if the basis of a friendship revolves around looking for men, it may change when one friend becomes engaged or married. If two friends graduate from college and one begins working for a small non-profit and the other joins an investment banking firm with a high salary, their preferred social circles and financial circumstances may change. One may want to take a ski trip to St. Moritz while the other is wondering how she will pay next month’s rent.
There are many other reasons why two women who were once close might now feel like they live in different worlds. Sometimes fundamental differences between them have foreshadowed the end of the friendship. When a friendship is on the cusp of change, it often becomes eerily quiescent. The phone calls between you are more infrequent. You don’t see each other for weeks or months at a time. You forget her e-mail address (which you once used constantly) or her cell phone number (which once was on your speed-dial), and you think she probably has forgotten both of yours.
She’s no longer your go-to person when you need advice. You seem to have less in common and less reason to connect. There are other people to whom you pour out your heart. Even if there aren’t, you can’t imagine sharing the same intimacies you once did with her. If you needed to ask her for a big favor, you might summon up your courage to call her and ask—but it would take some mental gymnastics beforehand.
You wonder what went wrong. Then you push the thoughts out of your mind until some trigger reminds you of her again. When communication between two friends ceases, the status of the relationship is fuzzy. It’s almost a “friendship coma,” a relationship that is neither dead nor alive.
The longer the lapse in time, the more difficult it becomes for the former friends to reconnect. It’s hard to be the one to call and try to explain the hiatus. When friendships reach this state, they usually wither away and die, sometimes beneath the radar of conscious awareness. One woman referred to the women in such relationships as “semi-friends,” explaining that the bond was never actually broken. When this happens to you, you’ll need to decide whether to let go, hang on, or do something about it.
The friendship of Chelsea and Erica fell into this category: their lives drifted apart as they followed two different trajectories. Erica, who is now 34, met Chelsea in grade school. Except when they had “serious boyfriends” during high school, they talked to each other constantly. Each woman knew she had a shoulder to cry on whenever a relationship with a guy ended.
Chelsea went off to college, but the two women kept in touch. By the time summers came around, they always picked up right where they left off again. They were maids of honor at each other’s weddings. When Erica moved to another city after her marriage, they saw each other less, but they still felt close whenever she came back home to visit her folks. Whether or not her husband accompanied her on these trips, Erica always made time to reconnect with Chelsea.
“Then I began hearing from her less and less often,” says Erica. “I got pregnant and found out about her pregnancies from other people, not her,” she says. The last time Erica came to see her parents, she visited Chelsea and had the chance to meet her children. This time, she felt a distance that never existed before.
“I didn’t have that feeling of connection