The Difficulties of Friendship

I have never been a popular person in the terms of developing a coterie of friends, but in my childhood and again in my later teens I had a set of people I considered friends. That statement is qualified because it is difficult to really define what a friend is. Is it someone who shares the same interests? Is it someone who shares the same situation, such as school, college or work? Does that friendship move beyond these commonalities or does it stop when you change your interests or leave that shared situation? I feel that only if it meets that final criteria do you have a friendship. If the connection doesn’t survive changes in lifestyle or geography then it wasn’t a real friendship in the first place in my opinion. Now, that may be very harsh to some of you reading this, but it’s definitely been the conclusion I have drawn.

When Janet and I got married we had about 150 people at our wedding. These people included many who I regarded as friends at the time. In some cases the wedding was the last time I saw them. In others the friendship continued until the ties that connected us weakened too much to be sustainable. Now, a lot of that was down to us moving away from Kent where everyone else lived and then not having enough money for extras like trips down South more than occasionally. This continued for 5 years until I got a job in Japan. By the time I got back things had changed utterly.

During my time in Japan, the number of people who kept in contact reduced from 30 or 40 just after we left to a handful by the time we came back. My best friend was killed in a car crash six months after I left England and he was the glue that held our entire friendship group together. When he died so did almost all the connections between us. In those pre-Internet days, letters took ages to get from one country to another and sometimes the writer could phrase things in a  way that the reader completely misunderstood. That was the reason I lost two very important friendships over those years. If we had been face to face I feel sure that the misunderstanding would have been easily resolved by talking it through. With massively expensive phone calls between Japan and the UK that was out of the question, and we didn’t have the money or the inclination to visit the UK, so the misunderstandings remained and the friendships were lost.

After I came back I had reached the conclusion that friendships were situational and transactional. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy rekindling old connections through Facebook and Friends Reunited, but they were shallow and easily lost once more. I developed the idea, possibly through an attempt at self preservation, that connections between myself and others were enjoyable but that they would always be transient. My regrets about this were tempered by the fact that I had Janet and the children who were my whole world.

I remember meeting up with an old school friend after we returned to the UK the second time, after living in Hong Kong and Australia. We were catching up with each others lives and he was full of how amazing his career had been. I was genuinely pleased for him because I knew how focused he was and how much work he had put in. Then, after about an hour of talking about himself, he asked about my life. I started talking about Janet and he immediately cut across me and said he had no interest in hearing about the family. It was all I could do not to walk out at that point! When that meeting was over I decided never to see him again because his dismissal of my family annoyed me so much, but I kept him on Facebook for about a decade after that before his constant digs at my life and our shared history at school were finally pointed out by one of my children who wondered why we were still in touch!

I often joke that my 21st birthday took place in a large hall with 100 people and my 60th, if I had actually had a party, could have taken place in a phone box! With many people, perhaps most, the number of friends you have dwindles as you get older. I don’t think anyone from my earlier years now counts as a true friend because of the lack of contact. My longest standing connection is with the boy who helped me get used to St Andrew’s when I first arrived. 53 years later we still wish each other happy birthday but we haven’t seen each other or spoken to each other in over a decade. It would be difficult to characterise this connection as a friendship but perhaps when you get to my age it’s the best most people can hope for. I did miss him at the St Andrew’s 75th anniversary get together because I got there and realised that, because he was unwell and couldn’t get there, that I didn’t know a single person. My realisation that he was still significant in my life, at least in that very specific situation, surprised me.

We had drifted apart since the end of Secondary school with our jobs, earnings and lifestyles diverging to an almost comical extent. I was significantly poorer than he was and he seemed not to realise. Although he came to my wedding I missed his because I couldn’t afford to travel down let alone buy a wedding present. My Dad was fuming with me when I told him that and said I had let him down. I said I couldn’t afford it and my Dad said that if I had told him he would have given me the money, because you don’t miss your best friend’s wedding for any reason. He told me things would never be the same and he was right.

I do not miss having friends from my youth, partly because I see it as a natural process and partly because my family provides me with everything I need in terms of life. Also, a lot of those friends were not great fans of Janet because they thought she’d changed me so much. They were right but every change was for the better and if they couldn’t see that their friendship was of no value to me. However, when I reflect on those friends I once had and have lost for good I do occasionally become wistful as I realise how much they once meant to me.

I leave the final words to my Dad. He said, ‘You only get two or three true friends in your life if you are lucky and you need to keep hold of them’. He was right but his test of a true friend may have been part of the reason why I have discarded so many relationships with so little regret. A true friend was one whose doorstep you could turn up on at 2 in the morning and who would make up a bed for you without asking you why or how long you were going to stay. Does that kind of friend still exist these days?