A couple of summers ago, my best friend, let's call her Q (because no one ever uses Q for this kind of variable), stopped speaking to me. It was horrible. I cried. A lot. So much, in fact, that I finally told myself, "You're going to make yourself sick. You have to stop this," and I started doing yoga or swimming instead of crying. Eventually, she told me that the longer it went, the harder it was to start an email back, and then that she wasn't in a place for that kind of friendship. We'd been friends for six years.
In the middle or at the end of this, I read an article about recent books about women's friendships. One of the books in the article was Liz Pryor's What Did I Do Wrong? When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship Is Over. I added it to my Amazon wish list. Recently, I've been requesting things from my wish list through interlibrary loan, so I requested this one too.
The book is strongest when Pryor is telling stories about women's friendships and what she calls "unendings." If you're a woman, you're probably familiar with such unendings: your friend simply stops talking to you, or you decide you don't want to be friends anymore and simply stop talking to your friend. Pryor's argument is that what's so devastating about unendings is not the endings of the friendship but the uncertainty around them. We need closure: "And I wanted to know what would happen in the end. When I asked her, she said, 'What is the end? What defines it exactly?' That question is precisely what makes the whole experience so difficult. It's usually not clear to the one who has been dumped."
The book is most useful when she talks about how to stop being friends with someone. One solution is to write a letter, and she includes lots of examples of letters that worked and letters that went wrong. She also makes the point that sometimes what you might want is to end this phase of the friendship and continue the friendship in a different way; ending the friendship doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
She has some suggestions about what to do if you're the one being dumped - letter writing is also an option, and one woman "had decided just a few days before I called to let go of the idea of a friendship with Sophia, in order to move on from the rejection and uncertainty she felt. She told me she actually had to pick the day, write it down, and feel it all day. She used it to mark the closure she'd never had, and it worked for her. She was free from the turmoil she'd felt surrounding the entire experience, because she made the choice within herself."
The book starts with Pryor's experience of a friend initiating an unending with her and her realization that there aren't rituals for ending friendships. She attended a baby shower, "And then, out of nowhere, I heard myself addressing the entire room with the question, 'Why do you think that when a friendship ends between two women, it gets no acknowledgement?'" One of the women says, "Sometimes I think I was more devastated when my best friend and I broke up than I was by my divorce. I woke up one day and the reality hit me: we were no longer friends. This horrible space, confused, angry and hurt, became the place I went when I thought of her. Not only did I feel a lack of empathy from the other people in my life, there was almost an entire lack of acknowledgement." This experience leads her to talk to other women about their stories: "They were dying to purge, to tell, to claim, to deal with the emotions."
Part of Pryor's premise is that women don't talk about the endings of their friendships. This is the other reason I told you about Q at the beginning of this entry: I feel so lucky. When Q stopped talking to me, I had other friends I could talk to about it. One friend, who I worked with at the time, said, "That's like a breakup," and let me come into her office and say, "I'm sad." Another friend told her family about it and told me that they were all outraged on my behalf. Other friends let me talk about it and offered hugs.
The biggest problem with the book is that Pryor never fesses up to being the initiator of an unending; her personal stories are all about being dumped. So as not to make the same mistake, here are two of mine:
Y (another underused variable for people's names) and I were friends for a very long time. We were two of the original members of a group of friends that lasted from elementary school all the way into our college years. There were times when she was my best friend. And yet, I always felt second best; there was always someone she loved more than she loved me. There were times when we didn't get along, sometimes violently so. Other times, we were much closer. We started to drift when I went away to college, but we'd still see each other with our group of friends at breaks. I remember the exact moment I decided to stop being friends with her. I still saw her sometimes (at that point, she was living with another friend's parents), but we weren't friends anymore. I never told her I didn't want to be friends anymore. Mutual friend Z told me a couple of years ago that there were times when Y would say, "I should call Ruth," and Z would suggest that she not. Z had lunch with Y a couple of months ago, and Y is doing well. I'm glad. I'm also worried: what will it be like to see her at the reunion this summer? The anger I felt when I decided to stop being friends with her is gone, but so is the love I felt before that. I have a picture of her, laughing in a classroom with a sandwich in one hand and a pop bead crown and necklace, that I keep thinking would be perfect to send to PostSecret, but I don't know what I would write on it. "I don't love you anymore"? It seems mean, when what I really mean is that I've moved on, and I'm okay with it. Pryor says, "I think that like many women who initiate this experience, Terry has a feeling of entitlement that says we're allowed to choose our friends and end our friendships in whatever way we see fit. It is our own choice and it doesn't make us bad people. All of which is entirely true. We aren't bad people because we want to end a friendship, but the way in which we choose to end it can be more or less bad in the hurt that it causes." I feel that same kind of entitlement when I think back about Y. I made a choice, and it was the best choice for me. It's been so long that I can't even dredge up any guilt or regret over doing it badly.
V and I had one of those friendships that's intense right from the beginning. She had an amazing power to get me talking about all kinds of things and not regret or resent telling her so much about myself. Then life circumstances changed, and I didn't see her as much. I invited her to my birthday party, and she wrote back and said she already had plans. I let the email sit in my inbox for so long that I thought, "It's too late now." And then I thought, "I'm not sure I really want to be friends with her. I'm always going to have to do all the work." I sent her an e-card for her birthday (two months after mine), but never got a "V has picked up the card" notification from Amazon. Either she didn't click the link, or it got trapped in a spam blocker. I never told her I didn't want to be friends anymore, and I do feel guilty about this one. But let's be clear: I don't feel guilty about not being friends with her anymore, only about not telling her about it.
Perhaps this is a good consequence of LJ/MySpace/Facebook. Yes, it can be painful to find yourself unceremoniously dumped off of someone's friends list, but at least you know they don't want to be friends with you anymore.
What are your stories of endings and unendings?
In the middle or at the end of this, I read an article about recent books about women's friendships. One of the books in the article was Liz Pryor's What Did I Do Wrong? When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship Is Over. I added it to my Amazon wish list. Recently, I've been requesting things from my wish list through interlibrary loan, so I requested this one too.
The book is strongest when Pryor is telling stories about women's friendships and what she calls "unendings." If you're a woman, you're probably familiar with such unendings: your friend simply stops talking to you, or you decide you don't want to be friends anymore and simply stop talking to your friend. Pryor's argument is that what's so devastating about unendings is not the endings of the friendship but the uncertainty around them. We need closure: "And I wanted to know what would happen in the end. When I asked her, she said, 'What is the end? What defines it exactly?' That question is precisely what makes the whole experience so difficult. It's usually not clear to the one who has been dumped."
The book is most useful when she talks about how to stop being friends with someone. One solution is to write a letter, and she includes lots of examples of letters that worked and letters that went wrong. She also makes the point that sometimes what you might want is to end this phase of the friendship and continue the friendship in a different way; ending the friendship doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
She has some suggestions about what to do if you're the one being dumped - letter writing is also an option, and one woman "had decided just a few days before I called to let go of the idea of a friendship with Sophia, in order to move on from the rejection and uncertainty she felt. She told me she actually had to pick the day, write it down, and feel it all day. She used it to mark the closure she'd never had, and it worked for her. She was free from the turmoil she'd felt surrounding the entire experience, because she made the choice within herself."
The book starts with Pryor's experience of a friend initiating an unending with her and her realization that there aren't rituals for ending friendships. She attended a baby shower, "And then, out of nowhere, I heard myself addressing the entire room with the question, 'Why do you think that when a friendship ends between two women, it gets no acknowledgement?'" One of the women says, "Sometimes I think I was more devastated when my best friend and I broke up than I was by my divorce. I woke up one day and the reality hit me: we were no longer friends. This horrible space, confused, angry and hurt, became the place I went when I thought of her. Not only did I feel a lack of empathy from the other people in my life, there was almost an entire lack of acknowledgement." This experience leads her to talk to other women about their stories: "They were dying to purge, to tell, to claim, to deal with the emotions."
Part of Pryor's premise is that women don't talk about the endings of their friendships. This is the other reason I told you about Q at the beginning of this entry: I feel so lucky. When Q stopped talking to me, I had other friends I could talk to about it. One friend, who I worked with at the time, said, "That's like a breakup," and let me come into her office and say, "I'm sad." Another friend told her family about it and told me that they were all outraged on my behalf. Other friends let me talk about it and offered hugs.
The biggest problem with the book is that Pryor never fesses up to being the initiator of an unending; her personal stories are all about being dumped. So as not to make the same mistake, here are two of mine:
Y (another underused variable for people's names) and I were friends for a very long time. We were two of the original members of a group of friends that lasted from elementary school all the way into our college years. There were times when she was my best friend. And yet, I always felt second best; there was always someone she loved more than she loved me. There were times when we didn't get along, sometimes violently so. Other times, we were much closer. We started to drift when I went away to college, but we'd still see each other with our group of friends at breaks. I remember the exact moment I decided to stop being friends with her. I still saw her sometimes (at that point, she was living with another friend's parents), but we weren't friends anymore. I never told her I didn't want to be friends anymore. Mutual friend Z told me a couple of years ago that there were times when Y would say, "I should call Ruth," and Z would suggest that she not. Z had lunch with Y a couple of months ago, and Y is doing well. I'm glad. I'm also worried: what will it be like to see her at the reunion this summer? The anger I felt when I decided to stop being friends with her is gone, but so is the love I felt before that. I have a picture of her, laughing in a classroom with a sandwich in one hand and a pop bead crown and necklace, that I keep thinking would be perfect to send to PostSecret, but I don't know what I would write on it. "I don't love you anymore"? It seems mean, when what I really mean is that I've moved on, and I'm okay with it. Pryor says, "I think that like many women who initiate this experience, Terry has a feeling of entitlement that says we're allowed to choose our friends and end our friendships in whatever way we see fit. It is our own choice and it doesn't make us bad people. All of which is entirely true. We aren't bad people because we want to end a friendship, but the way in which we choose to end it can be more or less bad in the hurt that it causes." I feel that same kind of entitlement when I think back about Y. I made a choice, and it was the best choice for me. It's been so long that I can't even dredge up any guilt or regret over doing it badly.
V and I had one of those friendships that's intense right from the beginning. She had an amazing power to get me talking about all kinds of things and not regret or resent telling her so much about myself. Then life circumstances changed, and I didn't see her as much. I invited her to my birthday party, and she wrote back and said she already had plans. I let the email sit in my inbox for so long that I thought, "It's too late now." And then I thought, "I'm not sure I really want to be friends with her. I'm always going to have to do all the work." I sent her an e-card for her birthday (two months after mine), but never got a "V has picked up the card" notification from Amazon. Either she didn't click the link, or it got trapped in a spam blocker. I never told her I didn't want to be friends anymore, and I do feel guilty about this one. But let's be clear: I don't feel guilty about not being friends with her anymore, only about not telling her about it.
Perhaps this is a good consequence of LJ/MySpace/Facebook. Yes, it can be painful to find yourself unceremoniously dumped off of someone's friends list, but at least you know they don't want to be friends with you anymore.
What are your stories of endings and unendings?