May 21, 1999
She admits to a critical temperament; she could fault the bluest of skies. That's why she was surprised when she and her husband were utterly charmed by another couple.
Trusting her judgment, she dropped every guard.
When the friendship broke, she wept for days. Blue blood, brains -- none of it shielded her. "It was worse than a divorce," she remembers.
Eventually, she, her husband and the friends made a slight comeback. But, as they held the fragile egg of friendship, their hands trembled. Things were never quite the same.
Some questions come up when I think about best friends and bad ends.
First, is it true, or just my impression, that friendship catastrophes are less discussed than marital ones?
Second, why does the collapse of some friendships exact such a high price?
I put those questions to University of Kansas psychologist Allen Omoto.
About our tendency not to discuss broken friendships as we do marital breakups, he noted that friendships typically don't end in the same dramatic way. They just fade.
But if a friendship does end abruptly, in the style of a romantic breakup, the surprise factor can give the breakup an extra emotional charge, Omoto says.
That observation triggered a set of questions inside me.
Might not a person wonder why he or she had such potent feelings for a friend? Perhaps an unspoken and uncomfortable truth surfaces, a recognition of idealization and longing thought to be confined, at least conventionally, only to lovers. Maybe this recognition heightens shame and self-consciousness, intensifying the sense of loss.
Perhaps that's why people don't like to talk about the subject.
Now to the second question: why some friendships seem so much more loaded than others.
Omoto says the difference comes from the degree of interweaving of our lives with those of our friends.
Do you help paint each other's houses and bowl and drink together? Do you see each other at the Presbyterian Church and also at the PTA? Host one another's parents when they come to town? Shop together? Discuss the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver? Fantasize about Venice?
Omoto says, "Those with whom we have lots of contact, with whom we do many activities and with whom we have a relationship of mutual influence -- those are the most painful losses."
My final thought here is that you can call one relationship a marriage, if you wish, and another a friendship. In the end, though, these labels don't get at a relationship's potency.
Some marriages are less than the word implies, some friendships more. The extent to which our lives, minds and imaginations are interwoven dictates the pain we feel when the stitches are ripped out.
When we disconnect we learn the true name of the relationship we've had.
And what we learn may take us by surprise.
Column by Roger Martin