I'm not sure what the definition of friendship should be in this era of constant change and confusion. There seems to be a certain churn of people in our lives; they come and go, people break up and move away, change jobs, disappear, stop calling. Companies fail. The relentless economic pressures most people face keep us feeling like we are running on a treadmill, from which there may be no escape. The faster we run, we see that we are only further behind where we think we need to be.
Loneliness and alienation are the common disease of modern urban American life. Most of us have enough resources to stay within the walls of our private spaces, listen to our own music, imbibe our chosen poisons, and isolate from our neighbors and the many strangers living nearby. Our families are often widely dispersed, barely available to us most of the time.
Into this odd lifestyle, and it is odd, given human history, comes the modern concept of friendship. I want to talk about only one flavor of friendship here -- the male-female variety.
I know many people who do not believe men and women can be friends. They think they can only be lovers or have no real relationship at all. I realize that for decades I have fought against this restriction, trying to create friendships with many women, and many of these relationships remain, despite all of the entropy referenced above.
Yet, it's also true that sexual tension has undermined some of these friendships. Sometimes we confronted the line and pulled back; sometimes we crossed it, and fell apart. There appears to be no difference now in who has remained a friend and who has disappeared from me, however.
If friendship means anything at all, it has to be based on trust. That probably has always been true, reaching way back to our origins. You have to feel safe to be friends. Most of us work hard to earn the trust of those we want to be friends with. We try not to hurt them or do anything to betray their trust. When we make mistakes, we try to repair the damage.
At your very lowest moments in this life, when you really need someone to turn to, whom do you call? Maybe that is the truest test of who your friends are. If they are of the opposite sex, given all the cultural baggage (and likely biological baggage as well), you may well have an exceptionally special friend, right?
Or maybe you have a potential lover or a love lost, where somehow you've both accepted that the time was not right, is not right, or may never be right.
The saddest aspect of all of this, in my view, is when the "perfect storm" of friendship and love engulf two people (and here, same-sex couples are as vulnerable as heterosexuals), yet for reasons of timing and where they are in life they have to separate and try to "move on."
Moving on. I don't know it is possible, really. Everybody says time helps. I doubt that. Time may mask the pain, change the circumstances, introduce new factors into the equation. Often as not, new people arrive, which may be nice all the way around, if you are of the opinion that all change is good.
But to deny that something uniquely special has been lost in the process is to ignore that every relationship is uniquely special. Couples confide their true histories to each other and in this way they become custodians of each other's story. Somehow we have to learn to grieve when a couple goes down, partly because two more stories may well end up lost to our common history. Yes, there may be a new day, at least for the more resilent one in that couple, but this is also a time of certain death for what they had collectively. There also is the possibility that one or both of them will not recover. I don't think when a death of this type occurs any celebration is in order -- in this way I object to the modern notion of a funeral or any other kind of ceremony faking happiness when none in fact is to be found.
When my relationships die I always cry. Always alone.
Today I sat alone in my car and cried.
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