On Loving Women, Balls Out
I’m reading this book called The Friend Who Got Away, and it has had me reflecting on friendships, the lack thereof, and the ways in which women change each other as they age age.
I’ve had a lot of female friends in my nearly three decades of life, and yet I always tell people I’m one of those women who gets along better with men. In most ways, I do, it’s not a lie. Most of my friendships with women have dissolved, leaving me wondering what is wrong with me or them or the boy that got in the middle. One the most solid relationships in my life is with Robin, the boy who rescued my in highschool and remains one of my closest friends, 12 years later. Yet, even as I tell myself that men are easier to befriend because they don’t compare themselves to me and generally relate to me more honestly [ie without judgement on my every comment or opinion, especially about parenting], I long for that one female friend that I know will always be there for me. I meet women and immediately make a judgement as to whether or not they are the type of person I can see visiting me ten years down the road. It’s not because I want to judge them, it’s because I desperately want them to be likable and kind, and most of all, I want them to like me.
I think I have had bad luck, though. For all my faults, I have tried to love my friends the way they want me to love them. Things change, though, and it’s hard to relate to friends that are thousands of miles away, in a different stage of their lives, wondering what the heck happened to me. I moved around a lot in school, and regularly promised various girls that I’d always stay in touch and think of them often, all the while hoping I had the strength to keep from getting too attached. It was a defense mechanism I created for myself with men and women: at 14 I knew that it hurt too much to lose friends, so I hardened myself as much as a teenager can, and took friendship as lightly as possible.
It bit me in the ass, though, because I have this pesky habit of falling hard for friends and doing just about anything I can do to please them. I rolled on the floor with Jennifer and told her she was the sister I wish I had, I followed Jaime around and became a different person entirely for her affection, I tried to relate to Hannah’s upbringing and style even though I was light years away from what made her who she was, and I pretended to understand I.’s perspective and feelings in attempt to gain her coveted approval. I sunk myself into these women, more so than they probably realized, and idolized each of them with a certain distance that I imagined would keep me safe.
All of these friendships either ended badly, vanished, or became distant and difficult to understand. I spend my time thinking about them, fluctuating between guilt and resentment. Guilt because I know I held myself back from them while asking to be loved wholly, and resentment because the part of me that idolized them is devastated when the inevitable shift in the relationship occurs. Things can’t stay the same forever, and the worst realization of all is the one that taps you on the shoulder and says, “She never loved you the way you loved her.”
Lisa and I spent every morning together for six months, talking about our lives and our dreams as our boys played together in the grey light of fall in Boston. Before I moved, she stopped taking my phone calls, and we never said goodbye. She later emailed me to say she was “bad with goodbye”, and she hoped I understood. I didn’t. Sandy opened her home to me when I was [quite literally] homeless, and then dropped off the face of the Earth. T. wanted and needed my help, but had no idea how to receive it. She, above all others, suffered from the same friendship disease I’ve found parts of in myself: a complete refusal to trust a woman with her heart.
Distance, children and marriage are the top three reasons women fail in their friendships with each other. No one told me that, I just said it, and I’m pretty sure I’m right. What did I talk about before I had a child? Where did I go? What did I like to do? Who was I? What was it inside of me that so desperately wanted this thing called friendship that I tell myself now I have no time for? And when I say I have no time, I of course mean I’m Terrified and Scared and Absolutely Unsure of My Place with any One Given Friend Until We Are Put to the Test.
I don’t feel sorry for myself, though, I have a ton of women in my life that I care about deeply and love dearly. Many of the women I’ve already discussed are in that group. Many of them probably realize that if our friendship failed, it was because of me, either by growing up or failing them. In fact, it’s embarrassing to think of how many friendships in my younger years dissolved because of men. One friend once spoke to me on the subject, saying, “When I met you, you were a feminist and a protester, you knew better than to choose a man above your girlfriends, that is what is most disappointing.” I remember feeling defensive and outraged, but I also knew she was completely wrong: I never chose men over women, my behavior was indicative of my inability to, for the longest time, treat men as beings that deserved respect and nurture as much as women. It floored me that women would care who I talked to or made out with, and it always struck me as totally anti-feminist to refuse my body its desires with the opposite sex because it might hurt a friend. I could not comprehend how my friends could take relationships that seriously when I didn’t. Every relationship, be it with a man or a woman, was always at the mercy of the winds and the tides. That might seem terribly immature, but for me proved to be more true than not. Around 21, I decided that this philosophy was going nowhere fast, partly because of a boyfriend that became my first serious relationship, and partly because I got the opposite end of the stick.
A shift in ideals, a sudden seriousness about the self, an inability to see anyone’s child but your own, a miscarriage, a new boyfriend, a new apartment — all of these things can totally demolish a friendship at any time, quietly sneaking up on us and creating vipers. Photographs and memories take on new hues, darkening as we age and realize our mistakes and those we’ve suffered from. In the end, I hope that everything I’ve learned about women will help me, at 27, to land that friend that loves my flaws as much as my ability to devote myself to them. Perhaps I already have.
My closest freind is my partner Dave, my group of freinds, I think the women are outnumbered around 10 to one when it comes to actual freindship.
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