Reading this Althouse thread about friendship, I was struck by a few things, particularly in the comments.
There seem to be some rather sharp divides between groups of people on the nature and value of friendship. There are the loners, some of whom seem proud that they don’t want or need friends (they’re not “people who need people), versus those who freely admit to relying on and valuing friends and being sad when they don’t have enough of them.
I’m one of the latter group; friendship is very important to me.
Another divide is between those who prefer light friendships based on fun and activities, and those who need to be able to confide in their friends about the deeper things in life and are eager to give emotional support and get it.
I value and feel the need for both kinds of friends, and the best friends of all are those rarer ones who combine the two functions.
Does this reflect—at least somewhat—a natural man/woman divide? Perhaps. It’s not a strict divide, to be sure, but I think a sexual differentiation is probably at least a tendency.
There’s also the issue of how to end a friendship when it’s played out, and how to decide when that’s happened. I tend to hang on, for several reasons. The first is that I think friends can be important even if there are many flaws in the relationship, especially if the friend is one I’ve had for a long time. There’s something to be said for a shared and lengthy history—people who knew me when, who knew my parents and my old boyfriends, and who can understand my references to all those things. I don’t require some sort of perfection in friendships, or anything close to it.
That may be in part because I’ve lost some good, true friends because they died. That’s extraordinary painful for me, and I don’t have all that many friends to spare any more. What do they say about old age—there are no enemies, only survivors?
Some people see getting older as a chance to pare down, not just possessions but friendships as well, and to keep only the essential. That’s not my philosophy on people, although I’m trying to do it with the possessions. Of course I haven’t stayed in touch with every friend I’ve ever had; there’s a kind of natural attrition that does occur, and not just from death. But I don’t drop friends for capricious or trivial reasons,and certainly not previously good friends.
And if I ever were to drop a really good friend, I don’t think I’d do it by ghosting—that is, not calling or writing, and if the person tries to get in touch, not returning calls or responding to emails. I think that’s a cowardly way to do it, although it happens that way more and more these days. If the friendship ever meant anything, if you respect the past friendship, I think you owe it to that person to explain, even if the explanation is just something like “sorry, but I think we’ve grown apart and even though we were good friends in the past it just doesn’t seem to be that way anymore.” Acknowledge what’s happening, so they’re not left to wonder and to feel completely abandoned. And don’t tell yourself that the feeling of wanting to end the friendship is actually mutual, just in order to save yourself the trouble of making the break explicit.
My template for friendship seems to be my parents, who had a ton of friends. I couldn’t even begin to count how many, but probably a hundred good friends and hundreds more who were casual friends. They kept in touch, too—but it was easier because my parents and most of their friends had been born in the same community and lived there for virtually all their lives. They were a crowd of friends, and they had a lot of fun, too. They liked to get together in groups, to dance, play cards, and talk, talk, talk.
I suppose that sort of thing still exists in some places, but I’ve never been part of a community like that, and I think it’s far more rare now in general than it used to be.