They say breaking up is hard to do. I think for some, it’s rather easy. Think about the breaking up part. It doesn’t really take that long and it can be like a shot in the arm – it’s painful, it shoots through your blood and veins and may even leave swelling and bruises along with drawing some blood. It’s the recovery that’s really hard. But here’s the thing – when someone breaks up with you, at least you know they are breaking it off. It’s hard to see a romance end as well as the potential of lifetime love and partnership. However, if someone you considered to be your friend has ended your relationship and does not even tell you – well that is just cruel and unusual punishment.
When a friend cuts off communication with you, your head just doesn’t go directly to “they don’t want to be friends anymore”. At first, you worry. You fear your friend could be ill or perhaps lost someone close to him or her. You call, leave messages or email, because, up until then, you were always comfortable doing so. You never get the feeling that you could be bothering your friend or sounding pathetic or desperate – this person has always been your friend, your head just doesn’t go there. What comes next is keeping your ears open. Maybe you have friends in common, work together or run into each other in town. Maybe someone can tell you if something terrible happened to your friend. You are still worried; you think something must have happened because, otherwise, your friend would have called you, right? After a while, your head starts to go there. Did my friend break up with me?
Our friends are the family we choose. We want to be around them, to share our lives with them and watch their lives unfold. We support and encourage each other and help each other out as we navigate through life’s challenges. It’s so great to have someone to share your time with – especially as you start a family and your children become friends too. If you are really lucky, you have friends who are honest with you. They help you grow to become the people you are capable of becoming.
Have you ever been to a hair stylist and after they are finished, they give you a mirror so you can see the back of your head? It’s an interesting parallel to friends. It’s truly the one part of your body you cannot see without really looking at yourself in the mirror with another mirror in your hand. That’s what friends do for us, if they are good friends. They are the mirror we use to see the back of our heads. If a friend does not want to be friends with us anymore, why can’t they tell us why? We have invested our time into each other – be it coffee, dinner, play dates, shopping trips, what have you. If there were no warning signs, no arguments, nothing you maliciously did to your friend – why can’t they just say what changed? If a friend wants to break up with us, we can take it. It’s the cowardice in not saying anything and hiding behind unreturned messages that we cannot take. Not to mention, if your children and their children are friends, you are no longer hurting your ex-friend, but you are hurting your children’s friends as well.
Friendships change just as our lives change. Time gets in our way and we lose touch with people we used to have tons of time in which to give. As time slips by, we start to think an email just won’t cover our lapse. We believe that we need to make a phone call that gives us enough time to catch up – but our lives, our families, or our jobs get in the way. Before we know it, so much time has passed we fear our friend may feel hurt or angry and no longer wants to hear from us. Believe me; we do want to hear from friends we lost contact with. Why do you think Facebook – the pinnacle of friendship management – has been such a huge success?
In this modern age of thousands of ways to communicate and hundreds of technological devices in which to communicate, how can we ever justify leaving a friend in the mental limbo of wondering why you aren’t friends anymore? I challenge all of us to go through our contact lists and just drop a note, an email or a voicemail to reconnect with our wayward friends. If we know someone that we know calls us their friend, and we no longer want to call them our friend, then let’s be adults and just say so. It can be the best departing gift we can give to our ex-friend.
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