I was reading blogs earlier, and this entry really caught my eye. The subject, "girl-sting" vs. "boy-sting" (ie how you feel after a break-up with your girl friends vs. your boyfriends), really boils down, for me, to this: Friends vs. Lovers vs. Dates.
I do agree with the main thrust of the entry: break-up from friends can sometimes be WAY tougher than the break-up of a casual relationship, or even from a deep, heavy relationship. I think that there are a couple of reasons for that. I think that when you live with a lover, when the relationship begins failing, you have indications. And most likely, unless things are too far gone, you take steps to save the relationship (and it works) or you must learn to put down the relationship softly. Live-in relationships (unless some odd circumstance is working) lead to reasons why the friendship/love is dying.
But with friends, often there is no warning. Someone stops calling. Why? I also torment myself. I'm still hanging on to friendships from college, wondering why they don't call, and how can I want these people for friends still? But my relationship from college, that's dead. That's well, and truly, dead. It hurt like hell when it ended, but when the hurt subsided, it really subsided. And it hardly ever twinges. But I can honestly say that all the lapsed friendships in my life, they still rankle. Daily. Like Smitten, I think that sometimes it's easy to understand why a lover doesn't want you. But secretly, I think many of us want to see ourselves like Carrie, in Sex and the City. Not the glamor, or the life, but the friends. We want to be the center of the friendship. Carrie was best friends with all three girls, but you got the sense that they were only best friends with her, and not each other.
Secretly, I want to be like that, to draw friends to me with that strength. When a friend leaves me, I feel that I failed, ultimately, on the promise of our earlier relationship. *I* didn't keep up my end of the bargain, so I deserved what I got. When a *love* relationship fails, it feels different. I can't explain it, but the losses of friends that I've faced through the last 10 years, well, it hurts deeply. I find myself hanging onto a friendship now that I'm not sure is good for me; I have, in past years, loved this friend intensely and deeply, but we've both grown so differently that it seems silly. But the loss of another friend, right now, in what seems like a couple of years of intense loss, well, it seems unbearable. I still can't let go of another, different friendship that's been breathing its last breath for over a year.
Maybe I'm just bad at letting go, but maybe too we're not taught to get over these frienships the way we're expected to get over *love* relationships. What are the rules for ending a friendship? Is there any ever closure? I've never had any, though I think that there is often a never-ending quest for closure in *love* relationships. And really, in this country, at least, friendships are often the second-class relationships in your life, meant to take a back-seat to the ultimate "life-long" relationship that your life should revolve around. How can we build better friendships that are meant to last as long as our other relationships? I think this is an issue that is so HUGE for women, and I also think that we just don't talk about it. We don't, as women, sit down and try to understand our friendships. But aren't our friendships fraught anyway?
Tomorrow I'll talk about dynamics among women, and how I understand them; it's a troubling subject, and one that should be talked about more, I think. So check this out tomorrow afternoon or so, and I'll continue--women and friendships, part II.
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