A reader asked for a post about married friends a few months ago, and I’m excited to finally dive into this topic which for some reason has never made it into a post in my four years of blogging!
One of my first posts was about engaged friends (the story behind that is that my childhood BFF got engaged at 21 and it was extremely disorienting and disconcerting to me and I knew when I started my blog that I wanted to revisit that and share empathy with anyone going through the same experience), but in actuality, most of my close friends were single at the time I started my blog. A number of my friends got married since then but I think because we were “single together” for awhile before their weddings (my closest friends were 24, 25, and 26 when they got married), my relationship with each of them was in a place where their marriages didn’t really get in the way of our closeness.
Every so often, someone writes a letter or an article in a frum magazine about being “dropped” by married friends. Maybe I haven’t addressed this in any post because…it never happened to me, probably for the above-mentioned reason — my friendships were very deep, we had shared a lot between us, and there was no way a ring and a wig were getting between us. I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that honestly before sharing my thoughts.
Friendships can wax and wane over time. Different people need different things from their friendships at different times. Sometimes there is a mismatch in the interest level between two friends and that is sad for the friend who wants the relationship to remain at one level when the other friend wants it less. But the reality is that this happens. Even when friends drop friends — it’s not the kindest and most thoughtful thing to do but it is a possibility — so many things go on behind the scenes of our friends’ lives and we often don’t really know what makes them do what they do.
We don’t always realize that the loss of a friendship or a significant change in a relationship leads to grief — not only for the friendship but for what it represents in our lives — but it does. And I think that the most helpful thing someone can do for themselves in a situation like this is acknowledge the pain and go through a grieving process. Anger is a part of grief and I think that’s where the letters to the editor are coming from. But that’s only one piece of the grieving process, and letters to the editor are unlikely to change the fact that friendships wax and wane.
That being said…
I’ve certainly experienced the shift from one day to the next that happens when a friend puts on a shaitel. Yes, there is an elephant in the room. She is married, with all that that means on every level. And it can be awkward. Such is life.
What’s really helpful is when your friendship is such that you can communicate about the elephant in the room, or communicate about not being able to communicate about the elephant in the room. And those friendships, I believe, are the ones that weather a friend’s marriage. Friendships between two people who have grown enough in the context of their relationship to be able to clearly communicate, to deal with discomfort in a mature, respectful way…these are the friendships with the elasticity and the bandwidth and the adaptiveness to reconfigure themselves between two people of differing marital statuses. And I will be honest, I think for a lot of people, these friendships come with age — not exclusively, but it’s simply more likely to me that where two 20-year-olds are lost, two 27-year-olds are much more comfortable.
So it seems that after writing all this, I don’t actually have advice, only observations. I think friendships that can last will last. I think friendships that aren’t meant to be anymore, or for a time, will come apart. I think we need to grieve what ends and continue to develop ourselves as people so we have the capacity for deep and adaptive relationships at every stage. And finally, I think it’s important not to blame anyone, including yourself, when friendships change or end. Such is life. At the end of the day, it is always only us and G-d. And my hope is that I always remember that, too.
