After talking about the love between humans and beasts, here I am thinking about friendship, this art which, like the rest, sometimes spreads in the new configurations of the time, while always making its way through its essentiality in our lives. I think of it first of all by its reverse side, if you will, that is to say by its loss, by this moment when, in our lives, it happens that friendships withdraw, break, bump into each other, stumble or wither away.
They do not always pass the test of time, or else of the becoming-itself which makes these trajectories move away which, before, gave the replica in perfect completeness. If love breakups find, in the social world, a setting, an ear, a series of more or less collective symbols and rituals, friendly breakups are often experienced in the greatest of silences, in our homes, our newspapers, our hearts or even only told to our shrinks.
I gathered from my therapist’s chair countless stories of broken hearts that spoke not of this eros that passes through our bodies, but of what the Greeks designated as Philiathis feeling of camaraderie, of loving, according to Aristotle, a being for what he is and not for what he brings to us.
We talk so little about our friendship losses, in adult life, because there has not always been an announcement, a message to teach us “I am no longer your friend”, as in kindergarten, during recess, sulking or a game of rivalry. No, we grown-ups don’t say those things anymore, preferring to just do them, by ceasing to invite, by distancing ourselves, by leaving long unanswered messages. I did it, you did it, they did it to me, they did it to you.
Because we don’t always take the time to describe, name and announce what suddenly no longer sticks, no longer passes, has hurt us, pushed us away or revealed to us a part of us that we didn’t want to dwell on. Because friendship summons its requirements, just as much if not more than our loves. Who else, yes, than our friends to plant in the depths of our soul this gaze that reveals to us that we are moving away from ourselves, that we are falling back into the same love traps, that we are no longer laughing, that we are missing appointments with the real, the essential, that we are aging badly or too quickly or too far?
For my part, it seems to me that I have had more pain and longer from the few friendly breakups in my life than from each of my heartbreaks. Each time I had the impression of ending with a worse reflection of myself, a profound work of questioning to be carried out, an unavoidable invitation to look at myself without complacency to sort out what fell to me in this friendly fall, which is not so bad, basically.
But what suffering, all the same, to see that we are no longer part of the life of a person with whom laughter as much as tears had flowed without a hitch, in this confidence, this abandonment which always makes us the most beautiful of us! It seems to me that the friendship breakup often summons the worst of childhood emotions — from jealousy to the most primitive feeling of rejection, to the cruelty of schoolyard setbacks — to the worst of adult life emotions. Faced with this bitter observation that existence can sometimes take on the appearance of a journey made up of (composed?) of cumulative losses, it seems to me that the loss of friendships is one of the most difficult to accept, for me at least.
I have often thought that friendships deserve the same radical investment as that which we offer to our loves, the same arrangement, the same work of truth, commitment, loyalty, the same communicational “hygiene”. Because it is also often misunderstandings that keep people away, unspoken words, wounds inflicted by protagonists most of the time without their knowledge of what they were generating in the other.
Rare are the friends who take stock, put the cards on the table, settle things by daring to unpack the real, the vulnerable, the difficult to put into words. Withdrawing is often the best way to say “I don’t love you anymore, my friend” (a nod to Manu Chao). Be that as it may, my friends will nevertheless live with me for the rest of my life, even if I sometimes no longer have the luxury of seeing them. The trace left by each and every one of them is indelible, as vivid, if not more so, than those left by lovers. Because without them, the story of my life seems to me to be totally decayed, without “connection”, fragmented, without narration.
Basically, it’s up to our friends, present and past, to tell who we are, much more than us. They know so much more than we do what we’re really made of, where our blind spots are, what we unconsciously carry in our wake.
But it’s hard for us to hear about who we really are. It is difficult for us to let the co-authors of our life, to use Paul Ricoeur’s formula, mix their story with the one we like to tell ourselves in the evening, to comfort us in the path we have taken. We then often only have the space of the imagination to write for ourselves this message never received, or never written, which announces the breakdown of a friendship. The writing exercise, even if it is only for us, often allows us to digest a little of what can keep us awake for a long time in our ruminations, our pain, our mourning.
It’s summer, we just have time to write.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.