Friends Can Break Your Heart

Red Canna (1923) by Georgia O’Keeffe

I’m thinking about friendship this morning thanks to Jennifer Senior’s provocative piece in The Atlantic, “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.”

As someone who’s been more than a little obsessed with friendship for years now, I have so many thoughts, but my favorite part of the piece is the exploration of the friendship between the writers Elisa Albert and Rebecca Wolf. They saved their correspondence in a manuscript called The Wellness Letters, a document that offers up a familiar trajectory of exuberance and intimacy followed by disillusionment and conflict. In spite of having fallen madly in love (the friendship version) and deciding to create a collaborative work in honor of their friendship (!!!), their words became increasingly dismissive. Senior writes:

“Deep fissures in their belief systems begin to show. They start writing past each other, not hearing each other at all. By the end, the two women have taken every difficult truth they’ve ever learned about the other and fashioned it into a club.”

More specifically, Rebecca says she’s depressed and Elisa tells her TO CHILL in all caps. But Elisa also points out that intellectualizing your feelings only encourages you to circle the same self-defeating race track over and over. Meanwhile, Rebecca hints that putting friends on a pedestal and then knocking them off is a pattern with Elisa, one that hints at Elisa’s deeper problems with intimacy:

Ouch ouch ouch!

Even though both women obviously have their flaws (see also: they are human beings!), I found myself empathizing with both of them. Rebecca sounded depressed and stuck and probably needed some space to talk through how hard that was. Elisa was denying Rebecca that space but only because she felt strongly that the help she could offer needed to take a different shape.

Here was a moment that could’ve been a breakthrough! If they’d picked up the phone and talked, they each might’ve remembered the generous, well-intentioned woman hiding behind those strings of accusatory words. But as long as their relationship was reduced to arguments on the page, they were taking something alive and joyful and shoving it into into a dark box. Their experiment in WELLNESS made them both feel SICK!

***

By the end of Senior’s piece, I was sorting through my own broken friendships, thinking about how often they fell apart over a badly chosen string of words, when the friendship itself was so much bigger and livelier than that.

One of the perils of being a writer is that you sometimes boil down colorful challenges of connection and passion into reductive debates about who’s right and wrong. A persuasive writer can persuade herself of a lot of things. But carefully formed narratives about a friend’s shortcomings aren’t going to help you rediscover the spark of connection between you — or, more importantly, help you examine your fear of intimacy, your inability to trust, or your shame around being seen clearly, defects and all. Writers are also more prone to treating one small turn of phrase or perceived slight into the straw that broke the camel’s back.

But forget writers! We’re all prone to becoming confused by words these days – careless texts, dashed off emails, unreturned or displaced replies. We can reach each other around the clock, but the freedom and connection our technologies bring us can turn our friendships into something that feels callous or half-assed. “I love your mind!” becomes “Are you really hearing me? Are you denying how hard this is? Are you slipping away?”

***

One of my favorite lifelong friendships almost died this way. We met when we were very young, intense, and sensitive. Our backgrounds were very different but our families of origin were similarly disordered. Our young friendship was a lot like falling in love – we made each other laugh and spent all of our time together. Over decades of friendship, we reminded each other to be bigger, to take up more space, to believe that we had something unique to offer the world. But when conflicts arose or small slights caused a big reaction — or when the chaotic circumstances of twenty-something or thirty-something life created misunderstandings or differences of opinion — we became our worst selves. We felt ashamed, attacked, and confused about how to proceed.

Our fights weren’t that different than some of the breakthrough moments I write about in my marriage memoir Foreverland. The difference was that I wasn’t fully committed to this friend. When things got hard, I retreated. When our friendship was under stress, my primary goal wasn’t to save the friendship. My goal was to prove to myself that my friend was too difficult to love.

I’m not saying she wasn’t a giant pain in the ass! Oh yes, she was! And she disappeared, too. She was hard to lean on. Like Elisa, she wanted me to cheer up and chill out. But I had an essential misunderstanding of her. I saw her as an unhappy person, but it wasn’t true. She was a joyful person who didn’t happen to commune or connect in the ways I wanted her to.

But look, even these intellectualized explanations don’t capture what was happening to us emotionally. In many of our worst moments, we were reenacting our relationships with our mothers. I would abandon the friendship when I felt abandoned. She would back away from the friendship when she felt unfairly judged. And what did that look like?

It looked like long silences, followed by long emails from each of us about what was messed up about the other one’s perspective. Every email amounted to: “I’m not the problem here. YOU’RE THE PROBLEM!” (Again: Exactly like a marriage between two people who have yet to accept that THEY’RE BOTH THE PROBLEM.)

These days, our friendship feels more like it did when we were younger: hilarious, fun, invigorating. We finally know how to ask for what we want and say no to things we don’t want. We know how to celebrate and respect each other. And we don’t write emails or text when a conflict comes up. We take a little space and give each other the benefit of the doubt until we can talk on the phone.

We’re committed to each other now, in other words. Instead of rolling our eyes at each other behind the scenes, we talk it out and sometimes have breakthroughs. And when we’re just pissed, we resist the urge to tell negative stories about what’s wrong with each other. (Okay, that’s what I do! My friend might be writing a whole book about what a deeply fucked lizard woman I am!) (It’s a testament to my deeply fucked lizard woman personality that I almost hope this is actually happening?)

As with me and my husband, we’re not perfect angels. We work hard to accept each other for who we are and to forgive each other when trouble comes up. WE ALSO FAIL TO DO THESE THINGS SOMETIMES.

***

So why do we tell stories about “good” marriages and friendships like they’re all about victoriously communing, free of conflict? The truth is that solid, lasting relationships often include talking about failure: I failed you, you failed me, we fail ourselves and each other.

Most of my difficult conversations with old friends and with my husband (and also with my mom!) start with the words:

I THINK I FUCKED UP AGAIN.

Or

YOU FUCKED UP BUT I FORGIVE YOU ALREADY.

Or

WE ARE ABOUT TO FUCK UP, PROBABLY. LET’S TRY TO ACCEPT THAT!

Or

UH OH, I CAN’T THINK STRAIGHT SUDDENLY. I MIGHT FUCK UP!

***

The private side of this is that when I shift into a chaotic, insecure state that’s an echo of my childhood, I try very hard to slow down and observe those old familiar anxious or avoidant sensations. I recognize each storm as its own phenomenon that exists outside of the friendship.

When we tell the story of a friendship, broken or thriving, that’s the piece that sometimes gets ignored: Two people who love each other like crazy can make a mess of things whenever they don’t feel free to ask for what they want or don’t recognize when their insecurities and fears are pushing them into an agitated state that isn’t the fault of the friendship itself. When you try to ‘fix’ a friendship via texts or emails, chances are good that you’ll turn a wild, passionate connection into a debate team exercise where no one wins.

Long-term relationships thrive when you can set aside your shame enough to take responsibility for the storm inside of you, and forgive the storms inside of the people you love the most. When two storms collide, it doesn’t have to be catastrophic. It can be miraculous and hopeful instead.

Because friendships, like marriages and family relationships, aren’t predetermined to succeed or fail based on some constellation of shared traits. Friendships are shared projects, built from mutual acceptance, and strengthened by the recognition that we’re all hapless, bumbling fools who mess up repeatedly without realizing it.

It’s easy to get fixated on those lost friendships that broke your heart. But viewing each “failed” friendship as a tangle of inadequacies and offenses keeps us trapped in the same rigid mindset that repeatedly privileges MAKING LOVE LAST FOREVER over the joys of making love fun and satisfying RIGHT NOW. We don’t benefit from this rigid determination to move triumphantly from bad friends to good friends, from mistakes and misunderstandings to some fantasy of an effortless BFF bachelorette party that never ends.

You can’t optimize your friendships. Sometimes you love people for mysterious reasons. Sometimes they piss you off for mysterious reasons, too. The answer isn’t more control and more fear, more careful screening and more running away at the first sign of trouble. Do you want to fall in love again, or don’t you?

If you do, then forgive yourself until you feel brave enough to say: I think I fucked up. I’ll fuck up again. So will you. I love you anyway.

Thanks for subscribing to Ask Polly! For more on the joys and challenges of a long, committed friendship, I recommend Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman. For more on the joys and challenges of a long, committed marriage, I recommend Foreverland by me. Send your advice letters to askpolly@protonmail.com.