Hey crybaby,
I hope you’ve had a great week so far! And if you haven’t, it’s probably because you didn’t listen to Monday’s episode, all about The Ins and Outs of Adult Friendship.
In this episode, Nthabiseng and I talk about the cheat codes for maintaining friendships as you age, how we’re deeping the intimacy in our friendships, friendship red flags and what to do when a friend disappoints you.
As always, happy listening!🎧
Also: to celebrate the podcast surpassing 600 downloads🎉, we’re bringing you 4 new episodes this month instead of our usual 2. If you ever have an idea for a topic you want us to touch on, email us at heycryaboutit@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail.
On friendship as work
I think most people would like to think of themselves as a “good” friend.
Surely, we’ve all celebrated a friend during a big moment, or lent an encouraging word when a friend is going through a tough time.
But what happens when being a “good” friend isn’t enough to maintain a friendship?
It’s a question I was mulling at the start of last year after I felt let down by some of my closest friends, who I’ve known for years. So, naturally, I brought the question to my therapist, who I’ll call Patty.
I won’t go into specifics here like I did with Patty, but the crux of the scenario was: “I know these friends love me, but this *thing* they did disappointed me. Am I wrong for feeling upset by the actions of my long-time friends?”
I’m sure you can probably guess that my therapist told me of course I’m not wrong for feeling upset. Nobody is ever wrong for feeling. But underneath that feeling was a deeper tension: how do I need my friends to show up for me now that we’re older?
It can be easy to think that the relationships we have with friends, especially close friends, will always stay the same. After all, no matter what happens in our lives, we’re still the same people, aren’t we? While we might be the same people, as we age, we gain experiences that require us to mature and evolve, or risk being left behind. Our relationships with one another are also under the same pressures.
The hurt I was feeling after my friends disappointed me was born from that same pressure. I wanted our relationship to feel as close as I knew it was, but getting there would require a more mature way of relating to one another, characterized by transparent communication, clearly defined expectations and an understanding that our lives are much different now than in the earliest years of our friendship.
When we fail to evolve in our relationships, they’ll deteriorate. Similarly, when a building’s repairs go unaddressed for too long, the facade will eventually crumble.
If we respect and care for one another as friends, and if we’re truly committed to maintaining friendships over the course of a lifetime, we have to do the work of evolution. It’s our responsibility - to ourselves and our friends - to reject the idea that friendship is effortless and requires little-to-no maintenance to thrive.
Like any loving relationship, friendship is work. As Maria Popova writes in “The Light Between Us” for The Marginalian:
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
The work of friendship is, by its very nature, rewarding and redeeming. We should be leaning into it, not shying away from it.