I Used to Think the Best Friendships Lasted Forever

Friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for life. This is a quote that I have heard often and always took it to mean that the better friend is a friend for life. Friends for a reason were those people who you had in your life and they dropped off because once the connection that brought you together was gone, both friends would drift apart. Now lifetime friends, these were the rare ones, these were the people you could count on—forever. The forever friends were my mental construct of what the best friendships looked like. Friends for a season were the flighty ones, and friends for a reason felt transactional.

I have come to understand the nuances of friendship in a different way. There are so many ways that people come in and out of my life and I value them all in different ways.

There is my childhood friend Jane, an adventurous and completely unique human. We lived attached to each other for most of high school. We would run together after school, then run home to check in with our parents, and then often call each other thirty minutes later.

When she moved to the Yukon and I moved to Victoria, we hardly talked. She was in a tiny village north of Dawson Creek and we could only speak on radio phone. Those infrequent and expensive conversations were treasured minutes to connect and share important pieces of our lives. She was tracking to make the Olympic Nordic Team, and I was rowing at UVIC and loving it.

Sometimes we don’t speak for years, but the love I have for her is always there. Geography and life choices have made our drift from one another significant, but the ocean between us hasn’t changed my love for her.

Speaking of love. There are people that I have only known for a few months, but our time together was seminal in my life in some ways.

I can say I truly loved my first real boyfriend. He was in architecture school when I was still in my late teens, and the culture and creative channels he introduced me to have influenced my creative trajectory. We went to the Rivoli for poetry readings, an old warehouse for a party with arty people, and spent hours listening to great music. With him, a bigger world opened up, and I will always love him for this, and treasure the time we had together.

As I began to compete internationally, my life moved in a different direction and we haven’t seen each other since. This seems like a natural event in dating, but in friendship these driftings I have too often interpreted as failures.

We have friendships we feel certain will last a lifetime. We found our tribe, these are our people, we have discovered our chosen family.

And yet.

Sometimes even these friendships can fall away.

A lot of stuff can happen. People move away, they get married and we don’t like their partner, they get divorced and we loved their partner. Jealousy can surface and a friendship can’t survive this toxic energy. One person is shifting their views on the world; they want a different kind of conversation. Someone has done a lot of inner work, and her friends haven’t. Over time it feels like they are now speaking a different language.

There are times I have misjudged a friend’s willingness to go deep, and when they are never able to get vulnerable or have insight, the friendship can’t deepen. As Brené Brown has said, the quality of our relationships is directly connected to our willingness to be vulnerable with each other.

When these friendships end, it doesn’t mean failure.

Two people in the world can travel a distance together, and that time together can be deeply rewarding and then it’s not.

For me, a great indication that I am spending my time in a friendship that no longer fits is that I feel drained after I spend time with that person. That drop of energy is a sign for me that the friendship is no longer feeding my spirit, expanding my thinking, or deepening my heart.

It’s ok to say goodbye.

Friends have left me and broken my heart.

Three years ago a lifelong friend told me she couldn’t be who she wanted to be with me as her close friend. There was something in me that triggered her own insecurities and allowed her to play small when she wanted to play big.

She spoke to me and tried to explain. My pain was so deep that I could hardly hear her speaking. Coming home to an empty house that afternoon, I held my daughter’s dog Luna and sobbed like someone I loved had died.

As I grappled with the confusion of how this could be, I started to come up with reasons I had failed her, why I was not a good friend, the aspects of who I was that were unbecoming or wrong. As I began down this spiral, another good friend reminded me that sometimes friendship just ends. I didn’t have to beat myself up or find reasons that I wasn’t enough.

Telling the story of this ending still hurts my heart. The pain is still there.

And also, the joy.

We became adults while in each other’s orbit.

We shared years of our lives, watched each other change, loved each other through so much. The fact that the friendship ended doesn’t erase any of that.

Maybe this is what I misunderstood about friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for life. I thought the length of the friendship told me something about its value. I thought the friendships that lasted were somehow more successful than the ones that ended.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Some people walk beside us for decades. Some for a few years. Some enter our lives for such a short time and still open up a bigger world.

I can miss someone and still be grateful they were in my life. I can grieve the ending of a friendship without deciding that one of us failed. I can love what we had without needing it to still be what it was.

Maybe the gift is not always in holding on.

Maybe sometimes the gift is simply that, for a time, we got to walk beside each other.