Monday, June 13, 2011

Friends

I recently read a blog article about how hard it is to make and keep friends as adults.http://www.incourage.me/2011/06/love-and-prayer-and-grace.html
I have no answers to why it is so hard, but it does seem the older I get, the harder it is to make new friends and keep the old ones. My only guess is because other things just get in the way. Husbands, jobs, children, hobbies. When we were little kids, our friends were our lives. We lived and breathed to be with our friends and as we get older there are more and more people demanding our time and attention. It gets blurry where we should distribute ourselves and some people, get left off the to-do list altogether.
At the same time though, I think the older we get, the wiser we get about who we keep as friends and who we work hard for to keep as friends.
In the last 9 months or so, I  made a new friend, or so I thought. We talked at our son's sports events, which led to texting frequently, which led to us hanging out and hanging out with our husbands and children. She is younger than I am by a few years. We have different backgrounds and probably very different religious backgrounds. I never really thought about any of this, because we were pretty casual friends. But after I went away for a week for an anniversary trip with my husband, she stopped speaking to me cold turkey. And well, that's not 100% accurate. We did text some. We haven't spoken a single word in person though and there have been many chances. Its very weird. I text'd her to see if I had done something that had upset her and I thought things were weird and she said that she hadn't noticed. This left me with a thousand questions. I wanted to keep on her, ask her again what the deal was. But then it hit me.... this was not going to be a good friendship. I have been friends with women just like her before and it never worked. She wasn't the kind that cared about what you were doing, she was the kind that only wanted to talk when it was about her or whatever troubled her at the moment. Fly-by-night friendship is what it was. It really bugged me for sometime, but once I realized that its much better that it ended this way I felt much better. Like I said, the older I get the more aware I am of which friendships I want to fight for and which are better left to dissolve on their own. This is just one I wasn't willing to fight for.

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