Someone else's slippers

Adventure Girl learns a lesson in friendship

‘Does this mean I’m dumped?’

In relationships, there are commonly accepted ‘rules’. There are statuses like ‘single’, ‘in a relationship’ or ‘f-buddies’. You form a ‘relationship’, you break up, and sometimes you make up. You have ‘the talk’, assign the appropriate label from the drop-down menu, and alert the rest of your social network via Facebook. All of this is clearly defined. We even have laws and ceremonies dedicated to officially sealing two people together.

Friendships aren’t so clear cut. The boundaries from ‘acquaintance’ to ‘colleague’ to ‘friend’ to ‘BFF’ are more subtle. They are also more fluid.

Friends can step into your life suddenly and intensely, or they can shift gradually into focus and back out again. A friendship can become strained, or a shared experience lost, causing distance to stretch between you.

Where a friendship does come apart, there is rarely a single event you can point to as the end. You don’t ‘break up’ with a friend; you just stop calling, but this can mean you both drift away, assuming a slight on the part of the other, when they are thinking the same as you. Leave it too long and the silence stretches into awkwardness and you may never know if they felt wronged or just got busy.

And if your friends are friends with each other (you may recall my post on mixing friends from a few months ago), there’s a whole extra layer of grey to worry about. There are issues of confidences, sensitivities when discussing one friend with another, entire areas of taboo which can place a strain on that friendship, too.

Post-rift, it gets more complicated. Social gatherings can become awkward when there is an issue left unresolved, especially when there is no rigid boundary or expectation that you will take sides, as you sometimes divvy up friends when a relationship dies.

With so much murkiness, it can be difficult to know what is reasonable to expect from the other person, and what they can reasonably expect from you.

There are rules, but we don’t speak of them. There are expectations, but we don’t acknowledge them, except as we navigate their fragile borders… oops, she got pissed off, I won’t do that again. And sometimes by then it's already too late.

Forgiveness is important, but for me it’s one of those paradoxes. The more you care, the more you are prepared to let things slide, but something can hurt more because you care so much. And then you get the flip side, where you let things go because you don’t care enough, or you forgive less because it's not worth the effort when you can simply walk away.

In the absence of defined rules, it can be more difficult to acknowledge jealousies and rivalries, slights and injuries. You suck it up and you move on, together or apart. You withdraw, or you extend, but it is all unspoken, at least between the two of you.

Most of the time when a friendship does end, it’s like an old jumper pulled out of shape, or worse, a borrowed jumper, stretched until it fits neither of you. You accept your time has come and gone, the season has past, you slip it into an unused drawer.

And when that happens I mourn its loss. Others come along and fill their place, but it’s never quite the same shape, like wearing someone else’s slippers. A lesson learned too late, or sometimes not learned at all.

-AG

Bearded weirdness or 'Playing Paddocks'

A lesson in mixing friends with Adventure Girl

Remember that game you used to play as a kid, where you drew up a grid of dots, as big as you could make it, then took turns to connect them with dashes? The object was to make as many closed-in squares as possible: paddocks. Then you would initial them, territory marked, borders closed.

I was never very good at it.

I'm not sure if the two are related, but I've never considered myself particularly territorial. Not over friends or family, or friends of friends. In fact, if I could put the acquaintances from one side my life's paddock in a room with a bunch from the other side, and they hit it off, that was all for the better. As superficial as it sounds, it made my life easier, because it meant I could catch up with more of my friends at once. It was like I'd managed to join lots of dots across the page in a kind of uber-paddock of friend efficiency.

As I get older, the dots of my life seem to join up more and more. My life is covered in interconnecting dashes. This should feel great. More of my friends are becoming friends, and I'm becoming friends with their friends.

But on a couple of occasions now, this has bothered me. I've noticed my friends interacting independently of me. Not just independently as 'friends', but forming connections that extend beyond being the 'friend of a friend'.

Suddenly I feel as though my border hasn't extended into an open-armed love-in, but has been crossed.

I've laid out a whole bunch of dashes without closing the gates. The paddocks don't contain my initials, but somebody else's. All that ground work, only to miss out on the paddocks! Worse, I'm standing outside the paddocks: borders closed.

I know this is a childish response. I shouldn't feel territorial at all. I should be happy that my friends are getting along so well. It's not as though I'm worried about what they will say about me to each other. They tend to say all that stuff to my face - that's why we're friends. And it's not like I'm worried about losing a part of their friendship when they offer that piece to someone else. There's always more to go around.

But it must come from somewhere, this feeling of bearded weirdness. If only I could pinpoint the cause, I could shake the whole thing off. And I know it will pass. I just have to get used to it.

Maybe I should start a new sheet, a new game. One where everybody works collaboratively. No initials and no borders.

Or maybe I should stick to Chinese Checkers.

-AG