How do you break up with a friend?

     I’ve had it done to me; I’ve done it to someone (poorly, I might add). I have relatives who have gone through it, and several friends. We’ve all probably gone through it from one side or the other, but nobody can tell you the best way to break up with a friend.
     You’ve grown apart, you are no longer gelling, or the relationship has gotten downright malignant, but only you seem to really know it. With romances, it can be hard to explain why a relationship needs to end, but with a friendship, it’s nearly impossible – there is no “goal” to a friendship, where if you feel the relationship will not achieve the goal, you’d better end it. Breaking it off then seems like a pure rejection of this person, as a person, whether that’s your experience of it or not. What’s the point, then, in ending a friendship?
     Friendships can cause you just as much pain as romantic relationships. It’s painful if you feel you are not really accepted for exactly who you are, and it’s painful if you feel like you are having trouble accepting your friend for exactly who they are. It’s painful if you feel you aren’t getting as much as you are giving in a friendship, and it is painful if you feel you are unable to give what your friend seems to need. And it’s horrible to feel that, whatever combination of these feelings you are having, your friend will not understand and will therefore be truly hurt by what you are about to do.
     Unfortunately, there is no good way to break up with a friend. The whole reason you have to do it is that he or she doesn’t understand the problem – otherwise the friendship would blow up, or simply melt away effortlessly, as they sometimes do. This makes a good conversation with an amicable conclusion almost impossible. Unfortunately, as with everything, you can be sensitive to your friend’s experience, but you cannot be responsible for your friend’s reaction. You can try to be both clear and kind, but you can’t control his or her interpretation.  So the focus has to be on you. What takes the best care of you? What form of communication will be the most productive? To what extent and in what form would I best be able to explain the problem? How can I do this in a way I won’t regret later? What needs to be said, and what is better left unsaid? What part of the problem can I own? Who do I want to be in this situation?
     It is possible that there is almost no way to end a friendship that won’t be accompanied by some form of regret. There will almost always be a sense that this friend deserved better, and there will always be pain over hurting their feelings. Or there may be a lingering question mark about whether the relationship could have been repaired. Maybe you will even feel hurt or unsatisfied with your friend’s response. In the end, all you can do is stand in your truth – you know when a relationship has become a negative force in your life, and it is your responsibility to yourself, AND to your friend, to choose to let that go.

The Personal in a Public Forum

     We are so spread out today. Friends and families who, back in “the day”, would have stayed within coffee distance now have to move where the work is. Even when we live within that distance, the increase in the hours that go into a normal work day make it difficult to make that coffee date a priority. So we are so grateful for the opportunities the internet provides to stay connected and share with everyone we’ve chosen to include in our communities. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter… we can better keep track of what’s going on in the lives of our “people”, and we can make sure no one is left in the dark about the basic goings-on in our own lives. It’s a wonderful and useful adaptation to changing circumstances.
     But there are aspects about this public sharing that are challenging to our personal relationships, and I’m afraid we may have to learn how to handle these challenges the hard way. This blog, for instance, whose purpose differs from these social-networking sites, has become a real challenge for me in this sense. Though not meant to be a forum for posting my personal news, in order for my writing to be meaningful it has to be in some part personal. But how do I address these personal issues without possibly offending friends and family for making these personal stories public? This has, in addition to the overwhelming amount of writing I have had to do for school, been a large factor in my not having written in a while. I am having trouble reconciling this issue for myself.
     Social-networking sites like Facebook leave us vulnerable to the same kind of offense. We may post something publically that some friends are really happy to have access to, but a specific person may wish we had not shared that way. And there are additional concerns. The “mass” quality of the choice to share information this way makes these communications less intimate, less special, and therefore can devalue the relationship. Friends may be grateful for the information, but unhappy that they had to find it out “that way”. It encourages a lazy, impersonal approach to our relationships, and gives us opportunities to cop out when facing personal discussions about difficult things. It can also seem to devalue the information itself – when we casually throw something on our Facebook wall, this brief and public communication can give the impression that we have a cavalier attitude towards our own news.
     These are all manageable issues, and I am in no way taking a stance against social-networking and blogs. The intention of these constructs is to allow us to stay connected and close. But if we can remember to value the relationship first, and use the social network to serve the relationship, hopefully we can avoid sacrificing relationships for the sake of the social network.

Easier said than done, but something to consider.

There’s a fine line between wanting to be right and wanting to be understood in any argument and they can often look like very much the same thing.  We push and push and push to get our point across, relentlessly pursuing a concession.  A concession, yes, but of what kind, exactly? 

 

I push because I assume you don’t understand my point.  After all, I think, if you truly understood, you couldn’t possibly still believe I was wrong and you were right.  But then what if you demonstrated you absolutely understood?  What if you took a moment to not only acknowledge what I was saying, but that you understood why I was saying it, why it made sense to me?  What if you did all that, and then told me why you STILL disagree?  I suppose I would have to listen to what you were saying, or at least stop pushing my point.

 

And who knows, maybe if I truly understood what you were saying, if I took the time to demonstrate I absolutely understood, maybe I wouldn’t still believe I was right.  Or maybe I just wouldn’t care so much about being right anymore.  Either way, it’s worth a try. 

Time heals…nothing. By itself.

     I am having occasion to check in (yet again) on a process of forgiveness that seems to be taking forever.  The hurt involves betrayal, manipulation, depletion and humiliation.  The forgiveness is two-fold, as it tends to be.  I have to forgive him, and I have to forgive me for allowing him.  And I am seeing that time alone heals nothing.  In time, the universe tends to give you opportunities to heal through experience, but if you are failing to see the opportunity, you may have to create one.   

      In the process of forgiving, I let time go by, waiting for myself to simply let it go.  I felt that if I were the kind of person I wanted to be, I would just let it go and move forward.  Then I woke up 3 years later and realized that I was, simply, NOT letting it go, despite my best intentions.  And worse, that I had come to define myself by the experience, so it was contaminating my new and potentially joyful experiences with distrust.  I needed an experience that would help me redefine myself.  So I invited the past back in, so that I could at least write a slightly different “last” chapter.  So I could finally take some action.  And there was definitely some healing.

     But now there is a new occasion to examine how far I have come regarding this long-ago hurt.  The past is making an appearance in the present.  And I see that it no longer has any power over my new experiences, that is, my experiences that have no ties to the old ones.  But having been given the possibility of experiences that bridge the two, I see that I still feel the sting of humiliation and anger.  And I see the opportunity the universe is giving me.  There is a reason the past is working it’s way into my present.  There is more to my process of forgiveness and letting go, and healing is to be found in the new choices I can make, in the person I can now choose to be.  I’m nervous about it, but ready to see how far forward I can move.

     It’s interesting, though – now that I have come to see this Personal Evolution aspect of the marriage relationship, I am seeing all of my relationships in this light. 

     Maybe it’s because I’ve never been good at casual friendships.  I’ve never been the popular type – capable of chatting without intruding on people’s personal experiences, joking casually and cleverly, good for a good time.  Not that I’m a total bore.  I’m very capable of laughing and having a good time, and I’m a terrific audience for the clever.  I like to play, do, and try.  But my sense of humor has always come out most strongly in the process of exploring the depths – I am very good at finding the funny in what is deeply personal and deeply TRUE.  So my friendships have always had an element of this kind of exploration, of grasping for understanding, of trying to learn from it all. 

     So that’s ok.  I struggled with that for a long time in junior high and high school when that was a source of some real self-esteem issues, but as an adult, I have learned to embrace it and focus on the richness those relationships provide me.  And as an adult I am seeing that if my friendships are going to be about this, then they can be about so much more than a friend who is loyal and understanding, and who seems to like me.  I can choose my friends for what they inspire me to reach for.  I can choose them for my own Personal Evolution.

      And then I can look at my other relationships – the one’s I haven’t chosen, the one’s I am stuck with - and I can see them the same way.  These relationships, too, provide me with opportunities to be better than I am currently being.  Every interaction is a scene in which I have a part to play, and I chose who I will be in it – will I be a good listener, will I be compassionate, will I be self-respecting, will I be honest, will I be curious… will I handle this the way I’d like to handle this?  And hopefully, in this way, I will become more and more joyful in my life, as the gap between who I am being and who I’d like to be closes, as I become my best version of myself. 

Why would anyone want to promise THAT?

     So then how does that apply in the case of a marriage, where walking away is not supposed to be an option?  That’s the whole point of my last entry, isn’t it, that it’s easier to love and respect yourself and your partner equally when walking away is a viable option.  You can negotiate towards your mutual happiness, or you can decide it’s not possible and let the relationship go.  Does that mean it is only possible to sustain this level of mutual love and respect outside of marriage?  Does it necessarily all fall apart once we say “I do”?

     This is the challenge that marriage presents us.  It is (or at least can be) a voluntary promise to consistently work towards yours and your spouse’s mutual happiness, NO MATTER WHAT, for walking away is no longer an option.  But why on earth would anyone want to promise THAT? 

    Personally, I saw it as a tremendous opportunity for Personal Evolution.  Marriage creates an imperative for stretching yourself as a person to include this other person you have chosen.  It requires you to strive to equally consider your own needs with the needs of another.  And, in theory, marriage provides you with a safe place to try, fail and grow, because your partner has made the same promise to you.  The reward, in addition to your personal and spiritual growth, is the benefit of everything this other person brings to the table.  A partner in this world.

     So for me, much of the question of my readiness for marriage was about two things. 

     First, how ready am I to equally consider my needs with the needs of another?  For a long time, I struggled to consider my own needs.  I had a tendency to give it away.  Some I know struggle more to consider the needs of another, they tend to hold it too tight.  The truth is that this is an erroneous dichotomy, it is not actually an either/or prospect.  So I needed to feel confident in my size as a human being, to understand my capacity for simultaneous and infinite generosity. 

     And second, have I met a man who will make this process a joyful one?  I needed to feel confident that I had found a partner with whom it might actually be POSSIBLE to always find the win/win in any given situation.  And I needed a man who deeply inspired me with everything he brought to the table; who therefore made the “work” of growing together a happy career. 

     I consider myself truly lucky that I was able to make this decision so consciously, and truly blessed with a marriage in which I never think of questioning why anyone would want to promise “THAT”.

Allow? What do you mean, “Allow”?

     I said something last time about no one being able to do anything to hurt me that I “simply did not allow”.  In retrospect, I am a bit uncomfortable with the word “allow”.  It’s a loaded word.  How is it possible, in a relationship between equals, for one to allow or not allow another to behave in any particular way?

     Relationships take work, we all know that.  You’re willingness to hang in there and negotiate through some difficult conflicts is a huge key to lasting and loving relationships, romantic or otherwise.  But what I didn’t really understand for a long time is that so much about a healthy dating relationship has to do with your willingness to walk away.  Your willingess to simply not accept less than what will make you happy.  And your willingness to lovingly and respectfully let someone else be who they are, choose their own path, even if that path takes them away from you. 

      I was not willing to walk away.  For some reason, walking away never felt like an option I could live with.  So then every negotiation was a fight, where I had to “stand up for myself”, and not “allow” them to hurt me.  I had to convince my partners to make me happy, because walking away was not seen as an alternative.  Sometimes the problem was that I should have walked away and didn’t.  But sometimes the relationship itself may have been more successful had I not actually walked away, but simply been willing to. 

     How would our relationship conflicts be handled differently if we were open to the possibility of letting the relationship go?   If we are able to recognize that if someone is, with full awareness, choosing not to make us happy, we should trust what they are telling us about themselves?  That we should respect, even if we can’t understand, their reasons behind their choices?  And that we could either negotiate towards mutual happiness, or accept that we can’t and move on?   How might my partners’ feelings towards me have been different without the relentless disrespect of my need to convince, to change their minds?  For in a relationship between EQUALS, there is no “allow”.