As I age, I measure my friendships through the template of honesty. Why bother, if we can’t be truthful with each other. Why bother, if the world we present to others is a lie. Real friendship is about being vulnerable with each other in terms of the difficult complexities of our lives, families, careers, relationships. Honesty connects. As humans, we’re drawn to it.
I’ve distilled my friendships over the years, because after all, I’m heading towards the pointy end now and life is too short for anything else. I don’t want to waste precious time on those who exhaust me, nibble away at my equilibrium, flatten with little barbs. If I don’t feel like someone’s got my back, honestly, what’s the point.
Then there are the people who may mean well, but there’s an edge to them. Competitive, combative, I’m not sure; but something doesn’t feel quite so nurturing there. It’s like they snuff out the light I hold within – that we all hold within – and it feels like self-preservation to detach.
Covid was a great turning point. Over the past year or so I’ve distilled my life in so many ways, flushed it clean, and friendships are one aspect of this recalibration. If I dread connecting with certain people – do the catchup out of a sense of duty – there really is no room for it anymore. I want to feel safe and comfortable in a person’s presence and if they rattle my soul, rather than nourish it, I no longer have the time.
My coterie of joyous, blunt, vulnerable, hilarious, bravely honest females I hold close are my circuit-breaker from the grind of motherhood and wifedom. I treasure my time with them. They uplift me and energise me, give me strength to plunge back again into the family fray. True friendships are therapy. As Alice Walker said, “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
There are people I’ve known for years who’ll never be quite honest with me. In conversation they present their children as suspiciously perfect, their lives untroubled oases of order and calm, their world a pinnacle of achievement. It’s as if we’re all in some competitive mother-race, and perfection wins. Why? No one is perfect, and all these women are doing is creating a barrier to true friendship. It feels like the opposite of what Toni Morrison described so beautifully in Beloved: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
Sex and the City is returning to our screens in a spin-off series, but without Kim Cattrall’s voraciously sexual Samantha Jones as part of the famous quartet. “In real life, people come into your life, people leave,” Casey Bloys, the chief content officer for HBO Max explained.
“Friendships fade, and new friendships start. So I think it is all very indicative of the actual stages of life… they’re trying to tell an honest story about being a woman in her fifties in New York. So it should all feel somewhat organic, and the friends you have when you’re 30, you may not have when you’re 50.”
Yes, friendships morph, and some fall away as you move into other worlds. Conversely, Covid has also made me realise some mates are very, very dear and I need to work harder at holding them close by reconnecting more regularly, by reaching out. The friendships that endure are those where we can be truly honest with each other; where we connect through the power of recognition. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Friendship... is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself...’” Life is too short for dishonesty, for friendship ghosting and games and for those who make us feel lesser. Here’s to the heart lifters as opposed to the heart sinkers.
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