Most people believe friendships should last a lifetime. They think that ending a friendship is always a bad thing. Best Friends Forever or BFF is an overused acronym they love to tout on chatrooms and other platforms.
Take it from me, a seasoned collector of friends. “Friendship is forever” is not necessarily true. Over the years, I have found myself drifting away from friends, some of whom were once my close pals. And vice versa. In life, there are friendships that naturally end as our values, interests, and perspectives shift.
Has a friend drifted away and you feel like you must have done something to offend him? Don’t feel guilty too fast. Truth is, there are friends we need to cut off from our lives. Not every person is meant to stay in our lives forever.
There are friendships that we outgrow. The connection is often based on the past, and the past is sometimes best left alone. Friendships can end because we’ve evolved and don’t connect over the same thing.
I have a former friend, a former friend who acts as if he hasn’t met me when we find ourselves invited by a mutual acquaintance to a party. He avoids bumping into me, so I avoid getting near him, as if we’re in a kind of silent “iwas-iwas” rigodon dance. Is it because he’s now upwardly mobile, and socially well established after marrying into a wealthy family? Is he avoiding me because he doesn’t want his current friends to know his financially destitute past? Does he want to delete the fact that we both once used to frequent cheap beer garden joints after office hours?
I also have cut off ties with a friend who now has political leanings that are abhorrent to me. I could have agreed to disagree or to refrain from talking about politics when we’re together, but I just can’t stand his values and his beliefs. Not to mention his air of arrogance. I guess being associated with the politically powerful has rubbed off on him.
I also remember sitting with another friend I knew since college. From our conversation, he was still keen about fast cars and other luxurious obsessions. He even brought me to the parking lot to show off his latest love, his hybrid car. I had to pretend to be impressed throughout. He never got to ask me about my present life and my family.
It can be a painful experience to try to keep maintaining a friendship when you feel drained, exhausted, or like you’re the one putting in all of the effort.
I no longer feel guilty about deliberately losing friends. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do to yourself is to cut the cord and release that friend, especially people who didn’t show up in your times of trouble.
Consider it as a positive sign that our attitude towards some friends is changing because that means we too have changed. We’re becoming more clear and selective on the kind of friends we want to spend our precious time with. Let’s face it. At 60 or 70, our time is limited.
As we release “friends” from our lives, and find ourselves released from their lives, we create space; space where more aligned people can enter our lives. Just like an overgrown tree, we need to cut off dead or unproductive branches to make room for new growths. This is a good time for us to review who are our true friends. Some friendships have stood the test of time and can still be considered sources of mutual enjoyment and growth.
But it can be hard to determine whether or not a friend is “toxic” especially when you know people are rarely entirely bad; most have positive sides as well. So, how do we decide if a friend is actually an enemy in disguise? What are the signs of a “toxic” friend?
The first characteristic is he/she is a taker. A good friendship, like a good marriage, must be a give-and-take relationship. But if he is continuously looking for something to get and uses friends as a means for that, then he is definitely a taker.
I have a friend who calls me from time to time to get me involved in some of the projects he is pursuing. But my wife viscerally hates him. When he calls me at home and my wife answers the phone, I will never get the end of it later. I try to mention the good opportunities he brings, but she doesn’t buy it. She says, “He is only interested in you, not me, not us. He’s friendly with you because, your skill is valuable to him. You’re not demanding when it comes to payment. He is just exploiting you.” Now I realize she was right all this time.
The taker, as a friend, isn’t much interested in the friendship itself but in what he can get out of it. As he is only out to receive, he rarely thinks about giving, so this is not a give and take friendship but consists of a parasite and a host, the former sucking the latter dry.
A variation of the taker is the “emotional drainer.” After talking to him, it feels like the air has been sucked out of the room. One friend who is a likely candidate to be cut off by me calls me from time to time only to pour out his feelings about the dismal state of his business, always saying he wants to give up because things aren’t going his way, in a tone of doom that makes me recall a line from a Beatle song: “He’s so heavy.” Essentially he’s driven by wanting and grasping for comforting words, cheer-up words he expects to hear: go on and persevere and never lose hope, and so on.
Most of all, a red flag is a friend who has a “silver tongue.” He uses words as a tool to manipulate and get his way. If your friend has a mouthful of promises and excuses but shows very little action, this individual is ripe for pruning. When you call him for a little financial help, he would mouth empty words of kind concern, and then veer towards talking about his personal misfortune at the moment.
Glib and charming “friends” who offer us little more can be fun at times, but we shouldn’t consider them as friends of true value. Someone who always praises is simply feeding into your vanity, knowing that you’ll keep him around and trust him, as long as he tells you what you want to hear.
Who are the friends we should keep and new friends to cultivate? The helper, the friend who stays true in good and bad times, the mentor, and the compassionate friend. These people are more likely to be calm, happy, helpful and wholesome individuals themselves. They help enrich our lives in many little ways and add something to the conversation, so to speak.
These are the kind of friendships that are for keeps. Forever, like a diamond.