Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [58]
Unless a relationship is toxic, it’s prudent to maintain occasional or limited contact (e.g., infrequent phone calls or e-mails) rather than to cut yourself off completely. You never know when you might be in the same universe again. This is especially true for your friends from high school and college.
College Friendships
A study published in the journal Personal Relationships suggests that without an active effort to nurture them, college relationships are at high risk of falling apart. Professor Glenn Sparks, Ph.D., and his research team at Purdue University studied the friendships patterns of best friends who graduated during a nineteen-year period from 1983 to 2002.
On average, the graduates moved six times after college and the typical distance between friends was 895 miles. In addition to the geographic challenges, friendships were affected by blossoming romantic relationships, growing families, and increasing career demands.
Sparks offers a cautionary note based on his study: “Even if you have not spoken to a friend for three years, get back in touch,” he says. “You may find a friendship that will last your whole life, and that is a great thing. Making friends is like managing a bank account. You must make investments, and it is never too early to start.”
While even very close and long-lasting friendships can unravel over time, the odds of a friendship fracturing are significantly higher when two friends don’t know each other as well. One reason why is that early on in a relationship, friends are reluctant to reveal their true selves to one another with complete candor. When some secret or previously unseen character flaw seeps out, it may compromise their trust in one another.
One woman, Emma, 44, described such a breakup to me. Emma’s close friend Carrie stopped calling or taking her calls. “I am comfortable that I didn’t do anything to offend her. I truly didn’t. But she let it slip in conversation once that her boyfriend of many years had asked her why she was never able to keep her female friends,” Emma recalls. She eventually learned that Carrie had a troubled childhood from which she never totally recovered. “Although she was trying really hard to have healthy relationships, she just wasn’t capable of keeping a friend,” she says. As soon as she came close, Carrie withdrew without an explanation. Emma better understands Carrie’s friendship difficulties by gaining insight into the past.
When women describe the reasons why their friendships fall apart, the losses are generally due to myriad reasons, including personal as well as situational or contextual factors. It’s impossible to tease out precisely what went wrong, although women often mention how a life event or transition often gives one woman the “out” she is seeking, and that drifting apart ultimately brings one or both friends a sense of relief.
COUPLING
Marriage is another milestone that signals the strengthening of some friendships and the weakening of others.While the health and social benefits of friendship are great at every phase of life, most women find that it is harder to maintain one or more best friends when they are married, mothering, working, or caregiving due to competing demands on their time.
Some female friendships take an unexpected turn for the worse because boyfriends or husbands get in the way. When friends love spending time together, it’s natural to want to extend the relationship to their significant others, but this doesn’t always work out as hoped for. You may think: wouldn’t it be nice if the guys hit it off? We could go out to dinner together at that new Asian fusion restaurant. Or we could plan a vacation with both our families over the spring vacation.
Just because there is chemistry between you