Signs Your Best Friend is Thinking of Leaving You
"If you used to joke a lot about retiring together and then she stops bringing it up"
If you take a group vacation together that you would describe as only moderately successful; if she comes out after getting divorced; if she stops talking about retirement with you; if she adopts a dog; you’re in danger, and worse still, you’ve been in danger for a lot longer than you realize.
All opinions are courtesy of Barbara Foerster, the narrator of my latest book, Meeting New People, available for purchase now, et cetera.
I love her very much. I would probably cross the street to avoid her in real life.
On group vacations:
“Taking a vacation together that doesn’t quite come off is is just as bad as taking a vacation together that goes ruinously wrong, only a lot of people don’t realize that. If you take a vacation with a close friend and it’s not the best goddamn time either of you has ever had in years, it was a flop, and marks the end of the good times between the two of you forever. Or if you take a vacation with a big group of friends, and at the beginning you and your best friend always pair off whenever it’s time to pair off without having to say anything about it, but by the end of the trip you’ve once or twice come down to breakfast and she’s already there talking with someone else, then it’s over, absolutely it.”
On signs your best friend is tiring of you:
“Another sign your best friend isn’t going to stick around much longer is if the two of you used to joke a lot about retiring somewhere together and then she stops bringing it up, or even talking at all about what she wants her life to look like when she gets old. Maybe she doesn’t contradict you when you bring it up, but she stops adding little creative details to the picture, like where you’ll put your rocking chairs on the porch, or what you’re going to call the part-time male nurse who has to bring you both your coffee, or whether you want to monogram your matching bathrobes. And you only realize it from its absence in the conversation, that she’s mentally withdrawn her old age from yours, and that’s a lonesome thing to realize.”
On being friends with lesbians:
“The most difficult kind of divorced women, in my opinion, are the late-in-life lesbians. I don’t know why this is, but women who come out during a divorce simply radiate smugness. I do think it may be possible to be best friends with a lesbian, except then you usually have to be friends with a lot of them all at once. Plus, I don’t think they can ever really respect anyone who isn’t a lesbian, so I’d rather avoid it if at all possible. They make good acquaintances and terrific coworkers, but in my experience, it’s best to keep them at a slight distance.”
On being friends with men:
“In theory, I am not against the idea of having a man for a best friend, as long as he is the right kind of man. He wouldn’t even have to be gay, necessarily, but it is statistically a lot more likely that the person I’m looking for will be a woman. I don’t think I’ve met more than a handful of men whose idea of friendship strongly resembled my own, and I’m pretty sure I met that entire handful back in college. In my experience, men don’t break up with their men friends as often as women do their women friends, and when they do, they claim they “just lost touch” instead of admitting they’ve gotten sick of each other.”
On being friends with divorced women:
“The biggest downside, unfortunately, in finding a best friend my own age is how many women my age are also divorced. In my experience, divorced women, as a rule, have totally lost whatever interest in behaving reasonably they ever had in the f irst place. Worse than that, they think of themselves as having been so long held back by their failed marriages that they make a virtue of acting out. Someone who has convinced herself that selfishness is actually a reward and an ethical obligation after years of repression is dangerous. I’m sure many of them were plenty repressed. But not all of them. And even for the ones who were, there’s no call to take it out on the rest of us. I make it a rule to never say anything bad about my ex-husbands. Nobody needs to hear anything more emphatic than ‘Well, it didn’t work out…’
At any rate, I’ve never listened to a woman complain about her ex-husband and thought, ‘God, I’d really like to get to know her better.’”
On being likable:
“There are some ex-friends you’re glad to see the back of, some you hardly ever think about again once you split up, and there are some where you never really split up at all, you both simply repair to separate stages, and pretend they’re your audience for the rest of your life.
Thinking about all of this in one go feels a bit chilling. Mine is not an especially harmonious record of conscientious thought and behavior. I can see that much already. I mean, most people wouldn’t look over my history and think, “Wow, it’s hard to believe that she couldn’t keep a best friend.”
But then I think, No, there are hundreds of thousands of people much more unpleasant than me, people who are leagues more difficult, graceless, embittered, stubborn, and selfish, and even they still have best friends. So why shouldn’t I have one?
On pets:
“One thing my friendship with Lydia did teach me was to avoid anyone who’s too into animals. Lydia was really into animals, even though she didn’t ever have any pets. She was always on the verge of adopting some totally decrepit and broken-down specimen she’d show me pictures of, from various shelters. The nearer an animal was to incapacity, abjection, and death, the more she liked it, which I should have taken as a warning sign but didn’t. That type of person is always adding new hypothetical trials to their pet’s backstory. They get more abject and innocent the longer they’ve had them, too: We think she was probably pregnant before. She was probably abandoned after being pregnant. We bet she was part of a puppy mill. We think they were keeping her pregnant seventeen years in a row. We think she was attacked by a gang of bigger dogs. We think she was in a dog-fighting ring.
Well, you might think that, but of course you have no idea, do you? Maybe she attacked another dog once. Maybe she was the aggressor from time to time. Maybe she even had a reasonably good home and just got lost one day. Maybe you’re not a saint for getting a pet.”
On putting yourself out there:
“I spend at least twenty minutes trying to brainstorm a list of places I might try to meet someone, and manage to come up with “At work” and “Ask friends of friends for recommendations.”
I don’t go to a gym, I don’t volunteer, and I don’t know nearly as many people as I used to. I had thought about adding “at a bookstore” to the list, but I’ve never talked to a stranger at a bookstore in my life, and I really don’t see myself starting now. The same goes for cooking classes, learning a new language, or joining a “meetup group”— all that sort of pointless adult busywork that gets recommended to the lonely, aging, and incompetent. The problem with that sort of thing is that these places are also filled with lonely, aging, incompetent people, all of whom are hoping to meet someone charismatic, someone whose life is already full to overflowing, with something worthwhile to share, and not another social vacuum. It would be wonderful if we could help each other, but lonely people usually despise other lonely people, and for good reason.”
Well for Christ’s sake what do you like, Barbara?
“I could be good friends with a cheesemonger. I could maybe even be best friends with a cheesemonger.”
[Image via]
I fear most female cheesemongers may be lesbians (as they should be)
"but lonely people usually despise other lonely people" have you read Notes on a a Scandal by Zoe Heller btw? The narrator has a thought of this kind..Book much better than the movie, as per usual. Movie was a bit Sister George.