learn how to maintain and strengthen my existing friendships

People leave, and I’m never really quite ready for it to happen when it does, even when it’s expected and I’m supposed to be happy for the other person that they’re moving on to something better. I have a friend with whom I worked closely for a little more than a couple of years and with whom I regularly continued going out to lunch for a couple of years after that till now because though we didn’t work together we still worked at the same place. That situation will change as this person will soon be leaving the company to explore other opportunities. I described this relationship in a prior entry, and Todd said it was like this: “Your lunch buddy would also be a friend by my definition, though it’s more of a situational friendship than again there being a strong emotional connection. It’s like men in prison who make do with what’s available to them, but once they are free they revert to their old ways.”

Well, the thing is that I do feel a strong emotional connection. Whether or not that’s appropriate, I don’t know. I can honestly say that knowing this person has changed my life because I have been exposed to new things and new ways of thinking, and I was inspired to do things I otherwise would not have done. My life would be very different. Yet, our relationship doesn’t really exist in any other context than work. Although we have seen each other outside of work a few times, I know it’s not realistic to believe that the relationship will suddenly start existing in some other context. I don’t have a family, but this friend does which seems to complicate things in terms of keeping the friendship going on a deeper level. Omar, who used to be active on 43Things, told me this: “When I got married, I lost a lot of single friends, and gained some married friends. When I had children, I lost married friends and gained married with children friends.” It seems like people with families don’t have so many friends, at least not very close ones, that don’t also have families.

When they leave, people often promise to keep in touch because it sounds like the thing they’re supposed to say even if they don’t really intend to. Sometimes people really do mean it and they have the best of intentions, but gradually they move on and there’s no room for you in their lives anymore. Along these lines, Margaret told me: “People have a weak sense of “person permanence” in that we are a very “out of sight, out of mind” kind of creatures.”

I don’t trust the strength of the connections that I have. I don’t know, I like to have people in my life that I like on a consistent basis, but it doesn’t work out that way. The people keep going and then there’s always different ones after that, and it’s hard to get connected or stay connected and I’m more reluctant to want to try or to feel anything other than indifference. I’m really happy at the moment (maybe I’ll feel differently later) that most of the people I know, I know only superficially so that I don’t have to care so much when they leave…

This was a comment I had made last summer under an entry written by the user “fateaccompli”, who recently deleted her account. Her original entry is unfortunately lost now, but this was an important discussion that helped me a lot. I am reposting what I wrote here and what she replied to me as a comment because I just didn’t want this to be gone or forgotten… I’ve been reposting all these things that aren’t interesting or relevant to anyone else but me because I’d like to have discussions on similar lines of thought archived together in a convenient place, at least during whatever time I decide it’s still useful to use 43Things…

Needing others to be yourself…

I kind of get what you mean about being connected to the world through other people, although I don’t feel at all that I live vicariously through them like you once told me that you do. It’s more like I want to live and do things so that I can get approval.

I want to learn Chinese because I think my Chinese friend will like me more if I make an effort to understand his language and culture. I want to learn to swim because I want to have something more in common with my friend who encouraged me to do it and maybe have something extra we can talk about or do together. I read things people recommend to me because I want to show I appreciate their opinion and want to understad what’s important to them; maybe they might take the same interest in me.

These things feel intimate to me; whether or not they actually are, I don’t know. That’s not to say that I don’t do these things out of my own interest and for my own satisfaction because I do, but I would be lying if I said that personal enrichment were my primary motivation, at least initially, for doing those things. I do these things because I want to connect and to be liked back. Maybe this is part of needing others to be yourself…

This was a comment I had made last summer under an entry written by the user “fateaccompli”, who recently deleted her account. Her original entry is unfortunately lost now, but this was an important discussion that helped me a lot. I am reposting what I wrote here and what she replied to me as a comment because I just didn’t want this to be gone or forgotten… Additional comments are always welcome…

Attachment

I had lunch the other day with a friend and afterward we spent some time sitting in the car in the shade, and in a conversation I was trying to articulate some of my own problems that I have been experiencing regarding connectedness and attachment. What I struggle with in particular is the temporary nature of attachments.

I feel like I don’t have enough “constants” (you get what I mean if you saw the last season of “Lost”), or rather, anchors to keep me feeling secure. When I stop to think that everything is temporary I don’t know how to stay grounded. I feel less willing to make effort to form new connections with people because it seems pointless if it’s not going to last anyway. My friend asked me if I felt bad forever after my dog died and if I wished that I never had the happy experiences with him because they were only temporary. I said no, and he said that it’s the same with the people that come in and out of our lives; we can enjoy the relationships we have while they last but with the expectation that it’s natural that they will eventually end. I countered back emphatically that with my dog and with people who die it’s different because they don’t choose to go. He countered back that people leave but not by choice and that they don’t leave me specifically but they leave because of their own circumstances.

I didn’t articulate the words at the time but thinking about it over the past few days I think that as long as you live you always choose to stay connected or not. I don’t agree that leaving is not a choice because if something is important to you, you make the time for it and you don’t let it go and you find a way to make it work. Not even distance or circumstance is an excuse because we live in a technologically advanced age. How long does it take to send a text message or e-mail (or even to spend some time on webcam or telephone), like 5 minutes or something, and I don’t care what you do, there’s no one so busy who can’t find at least 5 minutes at least once a month. You stop making even this minimal effort because the relationship stops being important to you and you stop caring. That’s when you choose to leave; you let the connection go. It’s for sure a choice.

As he sat there talking to me telling me that even our friendship will end one day either because he moves back to China or my own life circumstances change or for whatever reason and that it’s not something to mourn or to detract from the present, all I could think in the background was, “I treasure what I have with you and I want to keep it, but I can’t. I don’t want to lose you, but I will. I don’t want to be okay with that, but there’s nothing I can do.” So, you bet I know of what you write when you say:

[attachment] is not the same as real love or compassion, and usually involves unrealistic thinking which ultimately leads to disappointment. it also does not involve a real appreciation for the other person.

No, it’s not compassion. I know that because I’m focused on something that I like and that I don’t want to lose. Does everything we do or think need to be compassionate? I don’t know. I understand even less than I did before we had this converstaion what it means to be connected. I feel like everything I want is invalid. I can’t even tell when someone genuinely wants to talk to me or spend time with me or if they are just trying to be nice and I’m just selfishly taking up their time and imposing myself on them.

I have been thinking again about why I never seem to get as much as I want out of relationships. Any given amount of time I spend with someone never feels like enough time, and I feel uneasy when I don’t know for sure when the next time I interact with them will be. People here today will leave tomorrow (physically, emotionally, whatever), and I will not have had the chance to experience everything I had wanted to with them or express everything I needed to (in other words satisfy all my selfish needs). The time I spend with someone never feels like enough time, and I feel like I need to experience and say everything all at once because I won’t have another chance… Every time feels like it might be the last time… People leave, but any one person is unique and fulfills a very specific need, and they can’t be exactly replaced so that when they’re gone it feels like part of you is also gone… I tell people how independent and individualistic I consider myself to be, but how can that be true when I say what I just wrote?

I’ve written about similar ideas before (even under this goal), yet after so much time still I haven’t been able to consistently change my way of thinking on this…

Say that someone offered to do something with me and it seemed like they really meant it but then for some reason they had to postpone and then they never mentioned it again and yet I’m still interested in what they offered; I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say anything, especially if some time has passed. If someone offers something they have the right to take it back and I think that’s fine, but if they do it indirectly by never mentioning it again or maybe by implying they have changed their mind in a passive way I didn’t totally pick up on, is it acceptable to bring it up or would that just be too pushy or selfish or seem like I just want to take advantage of them? I’ve been thinking about this.

Maybe in an instance like this what the person offered was something they didn’t view that significantly or seriously so they just forgot about it, and I took it more seriously than it was meant to be taken. I interact with few enough people that I remember the conversations and interactions I have with certain persons in explicit, photographic detail for long periods of time so that a year is like yesterday, and maybe most people aren’t like this and they don’t even remember the things that I can. Do people sometimes casually offer something because it sounds nice as a gesture but it’s an unspoken rule that you’re not really supposed to take them up on the offer?

I seem to have a pattern of thinking that I’m closer to people than I really am, and as I’ve been thinking about that fact recently, now I’m kind of scared to ask anybody anything for fear of invading their personal space, and I trust the way I generally interpret people less and less. I’m just totally confused…

I’m trying to remember why I thought this goal was such a good idea. In fact, it was primarily goals like this I had in mind when I first started my account last summer. I’ve gone my whole life so far without having long-term friendships of substantial depth, so obviously I don’t need to have them to survive. I can’t complain that I haven’t otherwise had a fairly decent life. So, why last year was it so important for me to make this a priority, and why have I spent most of my spare time the past several months thinking about this particular issue? I had let my guard down and let someone get closer to me than usual, and… it felt really good. I thought for once I could make a friendship work and stay close because I really wanted it to happen and I was conscious of it, but in the end I couldn’t figure it out… or at least not at this stage in my life I couldn’t.

I have this tendency to become intensely and singularly focused on certain topics (usually the wrong topics) for long stretches of time such that that the time I spend on them drowns out everything else. It’s time spent but not necessarily productive time spent. I keep dwelling on this idea of keeping my friendships close, the couple I had that were close, so much in recent months that it’s hindering me from making progress in other areas of my life because I can’t think about anything else. When someone asks me what I did over the weekend or what I plan to do when I go home in the evening, is it appropriate for me to admit that I’m not doing anything special because I spent or will spend all my time, literally hours and hours, thinking or writing (mostly to myself) about this topic and still making no progress whatsoever? It would be the truth, but I dare not say that when asked.

I’m too needy and my expectations are all wrong. If you are my friend, my close friend (this is an important distinction because there’s a different level of trust involved, and no I’m not talking about romantic relationships, and closeness I think is probably even harder to maintain in non-romantic relationships), I need you on a consistent basis, not just haphazardly, and I need to know that you need me too. I need to know that when I see you there’s going to be a next time and I need to know when that next time will be and that when next time happens the relationship will not be at a lesser level. I need to know that you’re going to stay, and that you’re not going to go. I can’t understand haphazard, I just can’t. I have to have some type of routine or structure, or else I just get confused and nothing feels safe or certain, and then I panic and I don’t know how to act.

I understand the world doesn’t revolve around me, and I understand that if you are my friend, I need to give you your space when you need it and recognize your life can be too busy or hectic to maintain the type of contact I want. I need you to let me know you will come back and really mean it when you say it. I want to be available for you when or if you decide you need me, and I hope that you do actually use me sometimes. If you are my friend, even if it’s not the right word or it’s not appropriate to say it so explicitly but I know no other way to describe the feeling, I love you, and I want you to know it somehow. However, if you are my friend, I need you to understand that I myself am at a particular place in my life, and I need you to be willing to accommodate me too. If you’re my friend, I need you to talk to me very directly and not leave much for me to guess or assume because I will usually misinterpret your intent.

There really aren’t people out there willing to accommodate me with all this, and yet I’m not at a place in my life where I can handle anything less in close friendship if I am to have one at all. I thought I was direct in stating my intention and what I wanted. I tried changing my behavior and way of thinking based on advice I got and made some sincere efforts… maybe they weren’t the right efforts or maybe they weren’t in the right proportion. Whatever I did or didn’t do turned out to be not enough.

I’m odd in many ways and I’m not the easiest person to get along with, but I’m sincere, I’m loyal, and I’m a nice guy or at least I try to be. Maybe I just think I’m all these things but I’m really not, or there must be something else wrong with me that I can’t make relationships work. Whatever it is, I’m not going to figure it out now. I’m not strong enough to keep trying this at this time, I’m just not, and I can’t keep putting the rest of my life at a standstill while I’m hopelessly stuck here becoming more and more miserable in the process. I can’t make people give me what I want (I’m not sure that I would want to anyway), and I’m tired of trying to force myself into some framework of social interaction that is normal for everyone else but that I don’t get. If I don’t stop this now, I risk literally ruining certain other aspects of my life.

I need to change my focus to things at which I can be successful. Once the closeness is gone I can’t continue to know people I once knew or thought I knew deeply in a more superficial way going forward because it will be too painful since I will only be reminded of the feeling that I have lost. I can’t handle that now. I’m not sure in the immediate future it would be a good idea to try knowing people I only know superficially in a deeper way. After all this, I’m still not sure I can manage my expectations, and I’m not well equipped to handle the loss that inevitably happens (at least in all my past experience). If I don’t think about the possibility of being close to someone or what it’s like, then I think I can eventually be okay again… Being okay… I can’t really say with any certaintly that I was “happy” before I started on this supposed quest. Trying to evaluate happiness in retrospect is a tricky exercise because we could never recall with total accuracy or precision just what it was we felt at some past time because our recollections are clouded with our biases of today. That said, I’m still positive I wasn’t this miserable before…

I’ve been thinking about this lately… You can make whatever effort you want, doing your best even if it’s still imperfect or even doing perfectly all the right things, and you can have the best intentions, but all this could be totally irrelevant. I’ve come to realize that none of it means anything unless the other person wants the same thing you want. You can have no control over what other people want. It seems there has to be something (intangible and elusive to me) that causes people to form a connection and to over the long term both continue to want to have this connection and work to maintain it so that it doesn’t become uneven and break over time…

So, how do you find this, or if that’s not possible, how do you become emotionally detached so as to not care that the other person (or persons) doesn’t feel the same way back? I wonder…

What do you do when you really miss someone and you just want to talk to them and find out how they are doing and offer support somehow, but at the same time you know they may be very busy and dealing with certain issues and you want to give them their space? I’ve been told that to keep silent and wait is a dead end, but when does not keeping silent become too intrusive? The last two e-mail messages I sent within the past two weeks have gone without response, and this person hasn’t contacted me otherwise. I have wanted to but decided against contacting this person in any other way because I respect their need for space, and in my message I clearly offered support if they wanted it.

My thinking is that I just need to wait for this person to contact me when they’re ready, but the feeling of helplessness is agonizing. I’m always afraid that the passage of too much time without meaningful contact will deaden the bond and feeling of closeness and make the relationship more distant such that it fades away, and if it fades away what was the point of all the previous effort we had each spent on it?

What I write here is inspired by a comment under my prior entry under this goal where I lamented the prospect of having to constantly lose people. It brings up another problem I have in maintaining friendships. I have several acquaintances, but as for friends, I don’t need all the fingers on one hand to enumerate them all. Because I’m so afraid of losing them, I may tend to cling to them too much which could in turn drive them away, and that’s what I don’t want.

There’s one friend in particular I have in mind as I write this. I’m so afraid that every time I see this person it could be the last time I see him that I feel compelled to say something usually near the end of the conversation that emphasizes how important the friendship is to me or how much I appreciate it, and every time I’m with him never feels like enough time. I don’t want to be in a situation where I lose my opportunity to say everything I needed to say. I don’t mean that every time I think it’s literally the last time I’ll see him but that it could be the last time being at a certain level of closeness. People are constantly changing in subtle ways and with enough time subtle changes compound to mean big changes, and then I can’t get through anymore no matter how much I might want to. I feel like it never matters what I want but that I am always at the mercy of the other person’s will… it seems like I always want more than what I’m supposed to have.

I understand that people change and that it’s the natural reason they grow apart, but what I hope is that over time we can see and understand how each other is changing and still be able to find common ground so that the connection doesn’t pass with the season but stays perennially and grows stronger.

I’m wondering if I should just tell this person about my fear of losing the friendship and how it’s the reason I might often say things that I think could make him feel awkward. If he knows then maybe I won’t feel the need to say such things all the time. I do think this person is used to and understands my quirkiness, oversensitivity and tendency to say odd things, so he may be receptive to hearing this…

I went to Vancouver last November, where I have a friend whom I’ve known over 6 years. I let him know I was going to be in town, and when I got to town I left him a message telling him how long I would be in town. I finally got a hold of him on the phone, and he told me he would love to meet up and that he was excited to see me. He said to call him or he’d call me in the evening Tuesday night, and we’d go hang out.

So… Tuesday came and I waited for his call. When he didn’t call me, I left him a message. No response. I left another message that also got no response, and finally it got too late and I went to bed. I left just one message the next day asking since he couldn’t make it Tuesday if he wanted to meet up on Wednesday, my last full day in town. I never heard from him again and never got any sort of explanation. He totally blew me off! If he didn’t have time or for whatever reason just didn’t want to meet up with me, I would have completely respected that if he had just come out and said so straightforwardly. I’m just kind of disillusioned now. As far as I know, we were on completely good terms, and I was careful that all of my messages were completely cordial. I haven’t tried contacting him again, and the holidays came and went without him giving me any kind of greeting as he usually has in the past. I don’t know if I should bother contacting him, because in any event he almost never responds to my e-mails and doesn’t return my calls on a timely basis under ordinary circumstances.

I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with me or my approach to people that lately whenever people say they’re going to hang out with me and even make plans to do so, I either get stood up or a cancellation with some vague, undefined future date that never comes…