Old friends

I’ve always had a bit of envy for those peo­ple who can main­tain life­time friend­ships. You know the ones. They’re well into adult­hood, but still BFF with their child­hood playmates/high school pals/college room­mates even through the years and the miles. I have a hard enough time mak­ing friends, but it seems I have an even harder time keep­ing them.

(One friend­ship from grad­u­ate school did endure for twenty-plus years. Though nei­ther Tanya nor I was good about keep­ing in fre­quent con­tact, we’d touch bases every year or two. It was quite a shock, then, to read about her death in the alumni newslet­ter two years ago.)

So many of my friend­ships of the past seemed based on being at the same place at the same time. There was one group, though, that I really thought would be my BFF — a group of fiber artists that met online in the early ‘90s, coa­lesced into a tight cir­cle of seven women over sev­eral years, gath­ered F2F when­ever we could man­age given that we lived all over the con­ti­nent (and in one case beyond). We cheered each other, sup­ported each other, pro­vided shoul­ders, ears, and the occa­sional kick in the butt for each other as we all worked our way through our respec­tive spouse prob­lems, employ­ment issues, child-rearing dilem­mas and the mud­dled messes of life. I would have had a much more dif­fi­cult time get­ting through my divorce, rebuild­ing my life, and bat­tling the major depres­sive episode of 2002–2003 with­out them. I’m not sure I could have done it.

I met DH in August 2003, and sud­denly had some­one else I could count on for sup­port. I didn’t have Rela­tion­ship Prob­lems any more; my kid was off at col­lege and not con­stantly in my hair; my depres­sion was under con­trol; the Weav­ing Muse had wan­dered off to parts unknown. When DH and I mar­ried in sum­mer 2004, most of the Group came to our wed­ding. But things felt strained — some of the cama­raderie was miss­ing. The con­stant stream of chatty emails was falling off, and finally came to a screech­ing halt the next late spring, at least in my inbox and one other.

Five of the Group are appar­ently still hang­ing out together — they all went to Con­ver­gence together this sum­mer. The other two of us still don’t know why we were dropped, and we both feel like we were, in fact, delib­er­ately dropped.? I don’t know if it was some­thing I did, if I changed too much with­out real­iz­ing it, or if it just happened.

In the end, it’s another friend­ship that I thought would last, gone. Poof.

What is it about friend­ship that, evi­dently, I don’t Get?