| ashu |
Posted
on 27-Apr-01 07:12 AM
Dedicated to a number of friends
and a few enemies.
Enjoy!
oohi
ashu
*********************************
Till the end
Friends can dump you, just like a lover. And what's
left is the vague fart waft of failure.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Carina Chocano
April 27, 2001 | Sayings about friendship fall into
one of two categories. Either they are perfect for
embroidering on cushions or they are poison-tipped
arrows slung in the general direction of the couch.
Lately, I've been identifying with the archers.
"Friends may come and go," wrote Thomas Jones, "but
enemies accumulate." Of course they do. They are
usually made up of former friends -- the only people,
aside from former lovers, who know and care enough
about you to truly hate you.
Falling out of love is generally considered as natural
and mysterious as falling in it. Getting dumped by a
lover will win you bales of sympathy as well as
several houseplants. But when a friendship ends --
especially when it ends formally and ceremoniously --
it's harder to emerge from the experience with your
sympathetic mien intact. You will, for a while, seem
vaguely suspicious. You will exude the vague fart waft
of failure.
This is true not only in school, where the term
"popularity" is used to define a state of social grace
and general impunity to which everyone aspires, but
later in life, when having the right friends can mean
the difference between obtaining a Cabinet position
and installing cabinets for a living. Dale Carnegie's
opus, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," is
not, after all, a book about friendship, it's a book
about success. And at least in Carnegie's book,
friends are gained on a steady diet of flattery,
obsequiousness and manipulation.
Ironically, Carnegie's manual of manipulation is
remarkably similar to popular notions -- far more
romantic than any of our notions about love -- of what
a friendship should be. In romantic comedies and
popular novels alike, lovers are free to come, go and
come back.
Friends are expected to remain steadily on the
sidelines, cheering as protocol demands. "Friendship
is more tragic than love," Oscar Wilde wrote. "It
lasts longer." Yet, friendships, when challenged, are
more brittle, less elastic, than love. They have a
tendency to shatter when they fall into the chasm
between ideals and the daily business of being
somebody's friend. And though we prepare for losses in
love, the end of a friendship always takes us by
surprise.
"There are no social norms we can rely on," says
Lillian Rubin, a social scientist, psychotherapist and
author whose 1985 book, "Just Friends: The Role of
Friendship in Our Lives," explores the valued but
fragile bond of friendship through hundreds of
interviews.
"Often people just drift apart, but if there's a
serious conflict, people take a more active role in
ending it. Friendships wax and wane. Sometimes you
feel close, other times less close. But there's no
social framework to sustain a friendship that gets
into trouble. People start to build a case against the
friendship. Nothing forces you to try to keep it
together. In fact, nothing holds relationships
together but two people's goodwill, and that is often
not enough."
"True friendship is never serene," Madame de Sevigne
wrote in 1671, and it still rings true.
In the first grade, my best friend was a cranky
redhead who lived next door and once refused to walk
to school with me after learning that I had vomited --
in the privacy of my own bathroom -- the night before.
The following year, my best friend (also my next-door
neighbor but in another town several states over) and
I resolved disputes by hurling rocks at each other
from either side of the fence. By the third grade (new
country, new continent, growing sense of futility) my
concept of friendship had been indelibly marked by
notions of geography and terror. Best friends A) live
adjacent and B) can turn on you any minute.
In fourth grade, I acquired a new best friend at a
slumber party, where for reasons I can't remember we
got to know each other by kicking and punching each
other through our sleeping bags. Afterward, we were
inseparable, until she moved away to London at the end
of the year. I lost my fifth-grade best friend to
Arizona. Sixth grade brought two best friends. We
ranked each other by degree both of friendship and of
popularity.
In our demimonde of Army brats, diplomatic offspring
and corporate kids, this seemed perfectly natural.
When, in seventh grade, a new girl with all the
prerequisites made up her mind to become our friend
(cool "Charlie's Angels" name, gymnast,
self-proclaimed "flirt"), she shrewdly arrived at
assembly bearing four T-shirts, each printed with one
of our names. Things progressed from there until there
arose a dispute over an eighth-grade boy from Texas
("Dallas" was popular), at which point she was ejected
from the group.
Soon afterward, she attempted to saw off her wrists at
a middle-school dance with the underside of the
cafeteria bathroom sink. After she was pried away from
the plumbing, she flung herself on the road and at the
mercy of oncoming traffic. Vehicles were spaced, on
average, 30 minutes apart. She was, we knew,
ridiculous. But she got the point across.
Rubin explains that in a family relationship, or even
in a marriage, negative feelings are moderated by a
sense that you can't leave the relationship. Friends,
on the other hand, are not united by this feeling.
"It's a cycle that gets started and it's hard to stop,
unless people can talk about it. In a marriage,
someone would say, 'Look what's happening, we have to
talk.' But in a friendship, you feel you shouldn't
have to work things out. It's what makes friendships
so fragile."
They become fragile, it seems to me, as we get older
and start subjecting them to rigorous cost-benefit
analyses and performance evaluations. You're supposed
to consider yourself lucky if at the end of your life
you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand,
though, so far, I have lost at least as many. Some
have drifted away; others have been inexplicably
misplaced. Some have ended in shouting matches or
tragicomically civil letters.
A few are undead; we go through the motions for the
sake of no argument. One or two have ended in sex or
in not having sex. None of these choices seems quite
right in retrospect. This one was ruined through
honesty, that one through lack of it. But the feeling
of failure is constant in these situations no matter
what the variables or circumstances. The friend
doesn't so much disappear as enter a gray danger zone
of ambivalent feeling. Former friends occupy a bigger
psychic space than most acquaintances. They loom
larger and make the world a smaller, more
uncomfortable place.
I have lost friends even after vowing never again to
lose a friend. And I expect that by the time I'm
counting fingers on my deathbed, I'll have lost a few
more. Maybe I'll still be staging imaginary
reconciliations. Or maybe the sense of failure will
have grown into one of peaceful resignation, marred
only by the occasional heated argument rehashed in my
head.
I learned my lesson, I'll say. I guess I never really
learned my lesson.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Carina Chocano is a senior writer for Salon People.
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| namita kiran-thuene |
Posted
on 27-Apr-01 10:39 AM
I resumed my friendship just yesterday - after 7 months of cold war. Seven months ago I wrote her a letter saying, “you are nothing but a bitter woman, who wants wants wants wants but does not know how to give.” A week ago I wrote her a letter saying , Dear Fiona*, I don’t regret what I said because it was true at the time but, I miss you…
I have thought quite a bit about this thing called friendship. When I was writing that letter to her, suddenly I realized it could have been my lover with whom I am ending our relationship. A friendship is a relationship where everything goes without the sex. Well, I am speaking only for myself. You go out to eat, you cook together, you make a vacation plan, you just hang out, you introduce him/her to your other friends/families, and don’t forget – the talking part.. What I think is, we take our friendship as a given, it is taken for granted. The cold reality is one has to work on it ( as the writer has mentioned, I think) as you would in any kind of relationship. Whether it is with your dog, husband, daughter, son, brother, mother, sister. If you are unable to do it then the fall out is imminent. I won’t even touch the friendship made in a virtual (cyberspace)world.
*not a real name
by the way I really enjoyed the article You posted: Wislawa Szymborska on poetry and poets
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| namita Kiran-thuene |
Posted
on 28-Apr-01 02:17 PM
Hari,
First of all I am in a kinda mellow mood right now. (after that accident). I really don't want to start a fiery discussion about "friendship" made in the cyberspace. But still I am trying to concentrate on how to answer best your questions. I think there are few separate issues you have raised. First, the discussion with people here - would you have discussed as you do if you knew these people in the real world? (With friends or not friends).
I think I would have. I do. I always give emphasis on being civil while discussing. Whether in the real world or in the virtual world. Tell me why should it be different? An idea is an idea, no matter where it is being discussed. If you take somebody who thinks he/she can be mean, vulgar, or just plain rude because of the anonymity the cyber provides then the person has to examine herself first. We are exchanging ideas here: the point of coming here (at least for me and many people it seems) is to share ideas, thoughts, knowledge... Whether over a glass of wine or a cup tea or in front of the screen, it should not matter. But, apparently it makes a huge difference for some people. I see people who hide behind the cyberspace or just some creative "chaddma" names to dump garbage, people with half baked ideas, people who are unable to connect thoughts from one sentence to next sentence, people who can not read through from second to the third sentence, (you get the idea, right?)are the people who will not stand a chance if they were to discuss in the real, civilized world over a plate of dal bhat, over a cup of Darjeeling tea or over a glass of Bordeaux. But the one sided forum this medium provides, this is great for those kind of people.
You asked if one would have discussed just as vigorously or in the same manner if that person is a friend with the other party. Again, I am talking about my own experience here. Ashu [if you don't know who he is then my friend, you could be a friend of rip van winkle :) ] is a friend of mine, or at least he used to be before I left this country for a while, before a lot of things happened.. Anyway ... we disagree on many things and we express it here. Our friendship has not changed how and where we discuss.
I am kinda tired now so rest later...
tell me what you think.
Namita
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