Alpha Framing: Friendship: When to Cut the Cord

Westend61

One of the eternal quests of adolescence is finding friends. It’s easy enough to make them when you’re little, because usually your standards are pretty low. “Oh, hey! You have Legos? I love Legos! Let’s be friends!” But once puberty hits (and more importantly, high school), things get more complicated. Your public image suddenly becomes immensely important to you, even if you don’t realize it, and you’re not so sure you want to be seen with Lego-Boy anymore.

It’s all too easy to start changing friends like fashion statements. You change your mind about something, and a friend disagrees, so you dump them to the curb and find someone else who agrees with you about the civil rights of badgers. Hey. It’s important, people. And maybe you start doing this so often that it stops mattering why. You get bored of somebody and stop talking to them.

It seems shallow, and it’s easy to paint someone like this as a villain. But…seriously. Real talk, or whatever the kids are saying now. It’s pretty easy to fall into that trap. You have one set of friends in elementary school; you get a new set of friends in middle school. Another in high school, yet another in college, and…wait for it…another one at work. It’s like friends are life’s merit badges or something. Whenever you make some fundamental change in your life, it comes with a whole new gaggle of people to re-forge your social life.

But let’s consider another scenario. What if there’s been one person, or maybe two people, or however many, who’ve always been there. They were there when you graduated elementary school; they were there when you graduated high school; they were there when you committed your first misdemeanor, when you stumbled your way into your first job, et cetera. You just know they’re going to be best man (maid of honor) at your wedding, ‘cuz they’re just…you know, awesome like that.

I’m talking about the Best Friend. Or, maybe not. Maybe I’m just talking about a Real Friend. One of those mythical creatures you always hear about, and you’re always on the lookout for one, but you never know when you’re going to meet one until two years into it.

You know when you’re in high school, and you’re so sure that you’re going to keep in touch after graduation? And then your parents tell you that that probably isn’t going to happen, that people change once they hit college, and you’re probably going to have to go through a seriously heavy transition period? And you think they’re just being bitter ‘cuz they’re old? You think, “Just because they didn’t have any friends after high school doesn’t mean I’ll end up like that. I’ve got real friends! They’ll stick with me! Yeah!”

I was like that. But you know the funny thing? I was right. I’ve had the same best friends since elementary school. I currently share an apartment with one of the kids I went to kindergarten with. I’m an introvert by nature, and I’m extremely picky when it comes to the people I allow into my life. Thanks to that, I managed to hit the jackpot in the “friend” department. But I know I’m rare.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve never faced the loss of a friend. I have people I used to talk to, used to stay the night with, used to play video games with, that I haven’t heard from in years. The closest thing I’ve had to a girlfriend in a number of years pretty much fell off the face of the earth, and I haven’t kept up with her for…well, a number of years.

And recently, one of my closest friends, someone I met in second grade…suffice it to say that we don’t talk much anymore. Weird schedules and a number of other factors have led to our not staying in touch very often. We’re still friends, and we still carry on the same sorts of conversations that we used to have; it’s just that they’ve become rare over the past couple of years.

Thank you, college.

Sometimes, it’s not just the acquaintances that we end up losing when we make a big change to our lives. Sometimes, we actually end up running into an impasse with a very close, very important friend. Maybe your political beliefs change, maybe your religious beliefs change, maybe you’re moving forward and they’re not, maybe they’re moving in a completely different direction than you are; whatever it is, some things just can’t be weathered.

But when we run into that situation, sometimes we just can’t do it. We can’t handle it. This isn’t just some random guy/girl we met in a bar or something. This person may as well be family. We can’t just…ditch them, right?

I’m generally of the opinion that you can’t. After all, relationships like this are rare, and usually momentous. They change our lives. I often feel that that means it doesn’t matter what happens, we don’t just abandon someone because of something inconvenient. But sometimes, it just happens. Sometimes there really is something insurmountable that stops the relationship from working, and it comes down to a choice: do we stick it out, potentially making ourselves miserable for years on end; or do we cut ties, make ourselves miserable for a little while, then move on into a healthier lifestyle.

What can someone do when they’re in a situation like that?

I only have one piece of actual advice for this, because honestly…this is too delicate to make blanket statements for. This is something I’ve heard before, and it comes into play here: what would you regret more? Sticking around with your friend only to realize nothing is changing and that nothing’s going to change? Or leaving them behind only to realize that things could have changed if only you’d stayed around?

That’s the question to ask: which would be worse? Because that’s the situation you want to avoid. Make your decision based on that, because it’s just too simple to say that you should break ties with someone because things got hard. It’s an easy answer. Oh, your relationship is making you feel bad? Jump ship! Sometimes it’s not that simple. Sometimes leaving makes things worse.

So if you find yourself having to make a gut-wrenching, life-changing decision, don’t just jump at the easy answer. Don’t just jump at the hard answer. Ask yourself which one you would regret more. Because no matter what happens in a situation like this, it’s probably going to hurt.

You owe it to yourself, and to everyone in your life, to take that extremely seriously.