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Show Notes
When friendships naturally drift
Not every friendship is meant to remain exactly as it began.
Sometimes people who were enormously important during one season of our lives gradually become more distant. That doesn’t necessarily mean the friendship failed.
Perhaps one of the more gracious things we can learn is to appreciate a friendship for what it was without demanding that it remain unchanged forever.
Who should make the effort?
Friendship doesn’t have to operate on a perfect 50/50 basis.
One friend may organise the lunches and make the telephone calls. Another remembers birthdays. Another is the person who quietly arrives when life goes terribly wrong.
Reciprocity isn’t about keeping score.
But there should be a sense that both people value the relationship.
The friend who constantly cancels
Life happens, and good friends understand that.
But there is a difference between occasionally cancelling because circumstances intervene and repeatedly treating another person’s time as optional.
If you need to cancel, particularly at short notice, take responsibility for suggesting another date.
Respecting someone’s time is part of respecting them.
Emotional reciprocity
Most of us have encountered the friendship in which every telephone call becomes a debriefing session for one person.
Good friendship isn’t transactional, and there will inevitably be periods when one friend needs far more support than the other.
Over a lifetime, however, healthy friendship tends to have an ebb and flow.
Sometimes I carry you. Sometimes you carry me. And sometimes neither of us needs carrying and we simply enjoy being together.
When circumstances change
Divorce can be an extraordinary test of friendship. So can career success, redundancy, retirement, financial changes, caring responsibilities or moving away.
Friendship asks us to see the person rather than simply their circumstances.
It also asks a difficult question: can we genuinely celebrate another person’s happiness or success when it highlights something we feel may be missing from our own lives?
Comparison and jealousy
Social media has made comparison particularly easy.
But friendship isn’t about the handbag someone carries, the car they drive, the house they live in or what they have achieved.
It is about something much deeper: trust, history, affection and the intrinsic value of knowing another person and allowing them to know us.
Maintaining long friendships
Long friendships require some maintenance.
Make the telephone call.
Remember important moments.
Continue supporting a friend long after everyone else has stopped asking how they are.
And remain interested in the person your friend is becoming rather than expecting them always to remain the person you first met.
When a friendship has run its course
Sometimes friendships do end.
Boundaries and kindness can coexist.
Having boundaries doesn’t require cruelty, drama or ghosting. Equally, kindness doesn’t require giving someone unlimited access to our lives.
Sometimes the most gracious response is simply to loosen our hold and allow a friendship to become something different.
A gentle friendship audit
Rather than auditing our friends, perhaps we should occasionally audit ourselves.
Ask yourself:
Do I initiate contact, or always wait for someone else?
Do I really listen?
Do I remember what is happening in my friends’ lives?
Can I celebrate their successes without comparison?
Do I respect their time?
Can they trust me with private information?
Can I allow a friendship to change without immediately interpreting that change as rejection?
And perhaps most importantly:
Do the people I care about actually know that I care about them?
Adult life is complicated, and therefore adult friendship will sometimes be complicated too.
But its foundations remain remarkably simple: interest, trust, generosity, kindness, respect and grace.
Perhaps the most elegant friendships aren’t those in which nothing ever changes. They are the ones that give each person enough room to change and still, somehow, find their way back to each other.
In memory of my beautiful friend, Louise, and 30 years of friendship.
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