G8 Pals / The Difficult Parts

When Lives Diverge And There Is Nothing To Say

Sometimes the friendship is intact and the overlap is not, and pretending otherwise makes the visits worse.

One of you has small children and one of you does not. One of you has money now and one of you is counting. One has moved to a farm and one is working nights in the city. The affection has not gone anywhere, but the raw material of conversation has, and both of you notice it about twenty minutes into every meeting. This is not a moral failure on either side. It is the ordinary consequence of two lives that were once running in parallel taking different turns.

The instinct is to keep meeting in the old format and to conclude, sadly, that it is not what it was. Often the format is the problem rather than the friendship. Conversation for its own sake exposes the missing overlap, whereas doing something together supplies new shared material. A friendship that has run out of things to talk about can frequently be revived simply by going somewhere, fixing something, or taking on a small project together.

It is also worth being honest that some friendships genuinely become dormant during particular seasons of life, and that dormant is not the same as dead. People come back. The years when somebody is buried under young children, or care of a parent, or a job that is eating them, are not the years to judge whether a friendship still works. Keep a light contact, expect little, and do not decide anything permanent about a person on the evidence of their worst decade.