You expect someone to break your heart. It’s understood that the
person you love might one day wake up and decide they don’t love you
anymore. It’s painful, yes, and you will feel like dying and you will
feel like crying all of the tears but it’s a fact of life. It’s almost
necessary. If you haven’t had your heart broken yet, it’s like you don’t
know all there is to know yet. BRING ON THE HEARTBREAK, BABY. I want to
understand.
Something you don’t expect, though, is a very important and valuable
friendship coming to an end. I mean, on a basic level, you get that
friendships fade and people outgrow each other but it’s sort of like
getting in a drunk driving accident or having someone close to you die:
it’s something you hear about all the time but you never expect it to
happen to you.
This is the reason why the dissolution of a friendship can often be
harder than the dissolution of a romantic relationship. In a way, it
just feels more personal. Like a betrayal. People fall out of love with
each other for a variety of reasons, many of which often have nothing to
do with you. We know our hearts are fickle. We know that what we want
today may be different than from what we want tomorrow. Best friends,
however, are supposed to be the loophole. Jobs, boyfriends: those can be
temporary, but best friendships are expected to transcend all of that.
In a time of constant change, they’re there to remind you of the
familiar.
I’ve gone through a breakup where I lost my fucking mind and did all
of the crazy things you’re not supposed to do but can’t control anyway.
It was awful and I thought I would never feel normal again, even though
people said I would, and they eventually were right. I did feel normal
again and now I can’t even access a sliver of the pain I once felt, even
if I try real hard.
But a few years ago, I had a falling out with my very best friend, my
number one, my life partner, and that’s pain that I can still readily
access. That’s pain that never went completely away. Because I still
think sometimes, “You should be here with me. I should be able to call
you with this news or send you this funny YouTube video. You weren’t
supposed to go away. You were supposed to survive it all.”
I don’t know, I just never felt that way about an ex. I kind of
always understood the risk involved with giving someone your heart. So,
although devastating, I wasn’t exactly shocked to the core when things
ended.
With the loss of best friends, part of me still feels shocked because
it seems like such an attack on who I am. The idea that someone could
no longer want to be in my life, even though we’ve never loved each
other in a romantic way, hurts. Isn’t sex the reason why things become
alive and then sometimes die? I thought platonic friendships were
somehow immune to strife. This was stupid wishful thinking, on my part,
and now I know that it is distinctly possible for someone to no longer
like who you are as a person. They don’t care about what you look like
naked or if you have a wandering eye or if you can bring them breakfast
in bed. They just care about your brain and whether or not awesome
things can come out of it. When the friendship is over, you get the
message: I DON’T LIKE WHO YOU ARE ANYMORE.
I understand that it’s more complicated than that. Like a
relationship, friendships end for myriad reasons. Still, I can’t help
but ignore the logic and feel the purest level of rejection.
