Ditching a friend, untying a bond

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By Mary McCarty, Staff Writer 1:41 PM Saturday, February 11, 2012

As a reporter, I have to guard myself against interviewing people when I’m off duty, especially on the first meeting.

Yet I recently met someone who was so engaging, so easy to talk to, that I started asking the kind of intimate questions usually reserved for close friendships.

“Did you ever have to let go of a friendship that became too destructive?” I asked, when the conversation had somehow veered in that direction.

He blanched; I had clearly struck a nerve. I laughed, embarrassed, and apologized, suddenly realizing this was hardly cocktail-party conversation. Few things in life are more painful than ending relationships, romantic or otherwise.

Indeed, a recent New York Times article was headlined, “Dropping a friend can be like a divorce.” New Yorkers shared their stories and their strategies for letting go of friendships. Writer Jeryl Brunner, 46, talked about a friend from her nightclubbing 20s. “It’s almost like we were in different movies,” she said. “We didn’t connect on this fundamental view of what was important. I don’t obsess about material things. I’m the kind of person, if I had $100, I’d see a play; I’d have an experience. Her sense of joy came from owning a Gucci bag.”

It’s the kind of disconnect that normally might result in a natural drifting apart as people marry and raise children, or become engrossed in their careers, with little room for profound friendships, let alone peripheral ones.

Brunner said she took the “bad-boyfriend approach” and just stopped calling — a decision she regrets to this day. She thinks she owed her friend an explanation for ditching her.

But what would she have said? “You’re too shallow, so I don’t want to be your friend anymore” probably wouldn’t work very well. Is there not a gentle drifting apart that’s more possible in friendship than in a romantic relationship?

Social media consultant Jeff Newelt told The Times that he simply told a group of former coworkers he had other plans when they asked him to go out, until they took the hint.

“Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage, a point where people achieve enough maturity and self-awareness to know who they are and what they want out of their remaining years, and have a degree of clarity about which friends deserve full attention and which are a drain,” wrote Alex Williams for The Times. “It is time, in other words, to shed people they collected in their youth, when they were still trying on friends for size.”

Well, it all sounds so darn healthy, but I must admit that the whole concept makes me uncomfortable. Are friends to be outgrown like a ratty pair of jeans, or weeded out like an unruly garden patch? What about loyalty? What about embracing our friends not only in spite of their differences but also because of them?

What feels like “self-awareness” to one friend can feel like betrayal to another. What feels like a superfluous friendship to one person is another’s treasured bond.

What feels like clarity to one person can feel like rejection to another.

And when, exactly, does a friendship become a drain? When someone is sick, or lonely, or suffering from emotional illness?

As a nerdy, bookish kid, I experienced my fair share of rejection and my share of loneliness. A friend was the rarest and most precious of things, to be guarded and protected like a Faberge egg.

I still feel that way, honestly, although I have the opposite problem now than in my childhood: too little time to spend with my cherished friends. I count on their understanding that the bond remains strong, even when we can’t spend much time together.

But there are times when people drift away, for different reasons — time and distance, or because someone becomes very different from the person I first befriended. Or, in very rare cases, they turn out to be very different from the person I believed them to be.

Leaving them might be the right thing to do, but it still hurts.

As Holden Caulfield famously observed in the closing words of “Catcher in the Rye”: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Letting go of friendships might be what psychologists call “an inevitable life stage.”

To me, it feels more like loss.

What do you think? Did you ever have to let go of a friendship, and why? When is it appropriate to let go of a friend? Write your response to mmccarty@coxohio.com.

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