At almost 50 I have a pretty sizeable number of friends. I read an article once that had an illustration that showed a representation of personal relationships as concentric circles, ranging from the small circle closest to the center to depict those closest to you, to the large outer perimeter -- those who know you because your paths cross regularly enough, but don't actually know you. I've felt lucky in friendship. Almost each new life experience I've had -- a horrible work environment, a local chapter of a writer's club, taking sunrise photos on the shore of a nearby lake -- has resulted in finding at least one friend.
I believe friendship requires mutual respect, a feeling that each person values each other, consideration, and empathy -- the same things needed for love and affection. I haven't had an issue finding this with my closest female friends. Can you guess where I'm going with this? My friendships with men, if you can even call them friendships, have been complicated and problematic.
I went to a college that I believed would provide more insight on men. I don't have brothers and often felt uncomfortable around boys. Going to a service academy that was about 90% men didn't do much to reassure me. There were guys that were nice to me, but I felt distrustful. Do they want to know me or was it like that fortune cookie joke, did they want to know me in bed. My senior year of high school, my own newly widowed mother provided this advice, stated smugly: "Men only want one thing." You don't have to be a master of riddles to figure out what she meant.
It's a pretty dismal thing to believe your value to men might very well amount to how soon and how well you'll put out. I want to believe that isn't true. I don't think I'll give my daughter's the blunt advice my mother gave me, but I'm not going to lie, either. If I only use my life experience as evidence, it may be dismal for them, too.
When I separated from my ex-husband, I had hoped we could maintain a friendship. I never should have burdened myself like that. Like many men, he took friendship to mean I would be available for phone calls or texts at his whim. One Saturday morning he stopped by with my youngest kid and his dog in tow, and let himself into my house because he wanted to talk. It didn't matter that it was 8 a.m. and I was in bed enjoying a slow and quiet morning, and that *I* didn't want to talk. He wanted to talk and therefore, in his mind, I should entertain it. There was no phone call, no warning text. It didn't end well for him. I took that incident and recalibrated my expectations.
He'll ask if I talk to any of my other friends the way I talk to him, and I counter with, "my friends don't treat me the way you do." Isn't that at the core of it -- friendship means each side is holding up their end of the rope. It means you meet in the middle of the bridge, not that one person is perpetually crossing the entire bridge to meet the other. It causes me to question the ideas men have about friendship and causes me to suspect many of us are operating from vastly different definitions.
I remember whenever anyone who fell into the category of former-fling-but-not-ex-girlfriend-who-still-held-a-torch reached out, my ex would reassure me that this person was a "friend." This all inclusive bucket category confused me. Why do men get angry when they are "friend-zoned" when many of them refer to former people they fucked as "friends?" Do men see friendship with women as the catchall for before and after sexy times? In these cases, friendship seems to be a waypoint in the course of pursuit and inevitable retreat phases but not a valuable destination in its own right.
I've had other men befriend me, but they only like the agreeable, fawning version of me. The moment I raise an issue or want to take the focus off of their interests, or, gasp, criticize them because I don't like how they treat me, it's a problem. They seem to want to call the terms of the relationship, as if I don't get an equal say. My ex is hurt that I don't consider him a friend. The solution to that is simple -- act like a friend! His hurt feelings aren't going to bully me into a change of heart, not anymore. This post is not intended as a slam on him; he's not the only man in my life who unilaterally seemed to think he could declare the status of the relationship.
I have a long running joke with three of my friends on our ongoing group chat. They're all college classmates of mine, and the joke is about the previous class president, who was also a friend of mine. As cadets in our senior year, we had taken a trip to the mall with the goal of buying his fiancee a few gifts. At one point during this excursion, he said "It could have been you, you know." That's it, that's the joke. Anytime he did or said anything on social media, the joke would re-emerge in our group chat. In life's typical you can't make this shit up fashion, at our twenty year reunion, his wife wasn't there, and I, who was in my hotel room because I had not forked over the money to pay for the dinner event, was summoned to the hotel ball room to star in the role of plus one. This was comedy gold for my friends, who were all in attendance. As I've matured, I see how little this "friend" actually cares about me. I looked good in person and on paper, and therefore was deemed worthy enough to consider a "could have been." But does he know me? Did he consider that I had a choice in that declaration or was I supposed to melt and feel flattered that I had been chosen?
It's the same way with friendship. Friendship doesn't happen because one declares it. Friendship requires practice, and, hard to believe, friend behavior. I suspect the entitlement my friend the class president felt is a widespread phenomenon that expands into all of those concentric circles of friendship. Paired with that entitlement is a warped perception of love. There are people who think love means you can treat the other person like shit, and if they put up with it, they're a keeper. Notice how the decision making is one-sided. I imagine this entitlement is why my couples therapist had to emphasize to my ex that only one person has to want to leave to initiate a divorce. When you think everyone is living in your world, you may start to believe that your way of seeing things, including the labels you place on your relationships, is all that's required for validity.
This is a societal problem, and I have not quite worked out the dissertation to explain all of it. When someone is raised to see the opposite sex as inferior in every way, how, as an adult, can this person be a true friend to anyone of the opposite sex? When someone is raised to believe they will be the head of the household someday, and everyone in that household "under" them will adopt their last name, simply because they were born with the chromosome combination that indicates it's their birthright, a friendship enacted as a valuable connection between equals appears to be a contradiction.
I don't think any of that is difficult to understand. The women in my life seem to get it; the verdict is out on the men.
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