The Great (Friendship) Recession
Fires out, bridges burned, and bubbles bursted
Friendships are like fire. They can keep you warm, they need frequent attention and care in order to flourish, and they can burn you. If one person stops tending to the flames, it puts an extra burden on the other. How is one person expected to keep a fire going by themself? When both people neglect to add new logs to the hearth, the fire is doomed to go out.
Fire can also be dangerous. At times the forecast calls for heavy winds of anger. These furies can stoke the fire out of control. When you add wind to a fire, it may extinguish, or worse yet, it may become a raging inferno that spreads out of control. These wildfires can take out not just the original friendship but leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Other friendship fires can be negatively impacted or outright consumed.
Torrential rains may also arrive when you least expect them. An outside source of danger that can douse a fire in no time at all. These weather fronts blow through occasionally in many forms and from many different sources. Often it is other people who cause these deluges—sometimes with lies, sometimes with their jealousies, sometimes just by mistake. A strong fire may withstand the skies opening up, you may even work together to give the fire cover. Its survival depends on the trust you’ve built in each other and the work you are willing to put in.
Over the years I have built many fires, but by age 34, the vast majority of those have been snuffed out. I have experienced all the forms of loss listed above; inattention (both mutual and one-sided), strong gusts, and even heavy floods. There are fires that I kept going well past their expiration date, ones that burned out far too quickly, and ones whose warmth I genuinely miss.
Some fires can fuck themselves, good riddance. I suspect others have felt this way about the fires we formed together as well.
Fortunately, I still have some good friends remaining who care to keep our camp warm. I also have my family. Still, I long for the blazes of my youth. Trying to keep a conflagration going without it ravaging the landscape. While I greatly appreciate the friendships I have remaining, gone are the times when we see each other every day (sometimes even once a year). Also gone are the hours-long phone calls where we talk about nothing and everything at the same time.
Nowadays I almost feel guilty making a phone call to someone. I can’t decide if that’s because the world has changed, my friends have changed, or everyone just grew up more than I did. Maybe it’s all three. Everyone is always so busy with their jobs/families/errands/housework to talk in the way that I had taken for granted. Certainly not at the level that I require to sustain myself socially.
This ends up being an extra burden on the few people who do put in the time. Those people receive more calls, texts, and “I Think You Should Leave” GIFs from me than any person should rightly endure. In my first post here on Substack, I wondered “why am I here?” The longer I am here the more it becomes clear. I just needed somewhere to work out silly ideas and have a community without bothering people by phone. The irony, of course, being by publishing on here I am bothering people disproportionately by phone.
I don’t blame most of the people who have left over the years. I can be a lot to deal with. I am not the most flexible person. I get deep in the weeds on niche topics that most people couldn’t even be paid to care about. I have been prone to blowing up at small things. I am just a passionate person.
I don’t even feel all too bad about the people that I have ended things with, either. I just long for the world that I used to live in. Where a phone call wasn’t assault and a text message was responded to. When people made plans and followed through with them without some implausible excuse that is far too detailed to be believable.
I miss my younger days. Days when you could just see someone in your neighborhood for the first time and invite them over to your house to watch an episode of Futurama. By the end of that 30-minute episode you could potentially have a friend for life.
In high school I talked to everyone. I didn’t stick to one group as so many others did. That’s not to say I was “popular” or “not super fucking annoying,” but I felt comfortable around any clique. Now I don’t even want my neighbors to know I live here. “Oh, that house? Pretty sure the guy that lived there died, but I swear if you look in the window on a foggy morning you can see his ghost.” Joke’s on them, it’s just my pale ass.
My teen years were like a friendship embarrassment of riches. One friend wasn’t available? That’s okay, there’s plenty of others who will be. Everyone was an AIM message away. If I sat here and thought about it for hours, I don’t think I would be able to even remember everyone who I’ve had some form of friendship with.
My twenties, on the other hand, were like living through some sort of horrible friendship stock market crash. The 2010s began with an all-time high in friendship investor confidence. Everyone was getting rich, but the cracks were forming. A dip here when a friend moved away to college and never came back, a dip there when another friend got a girlfriend and for some inexplicable reason fell off the face of the planet. Oh, we’ve stabilized, things are looking up. Then out of nowhere, job, job, move, alcoholism, job, girlfriend. Sorry boys, the bubble has burst. The “Friendship 500” is down 80%, we’re gonna have to let you go.
My thirties has brought in a mixed friendship ROI. I have made a couple very good ones but lost some more close ones. It’s too early to tell, but maybe things are changing.
Maybe this whole 15-year period has just been a friendship recession and we’re due for the index to rebound once the divorces finalize! I’ll start buying the calls now.
Would you like to start a fire with me?
Thank you for reading Boy Meets Void. Consider sharing this post with someone who you are friends with.
Also, let me know how your friendship stocks are doing in the comments.
In case you missed it, I am starting an ambitious project called “Poetry Sunday.” I plan on posting a new original, terrible, embarrassing, mercifully short poem every Sunday. Below is a link to the first installment.
Haha, it’s weird, but I realized we’re on totally different trajectories. I’ve even started joking that I’ve somehow turned into an extrovert as I got older. 😅 When I was young, the only people I could be friends with were the extremely clingy ones who wouldn’t leave me alone despite my lack of enthusiasm. Lol.
But even though I have a lot more friends now, I’ve lost and let go of quite a few old ones. Some people just can’t stay with us forever, as I’ve also learned to walk away from others, too.
There’s this book called Anam Cara that makes me cherish and value friendships more. My only prayer now is that friendships find me in the moments I need them most—and that I can do the same for others, too. :)
Man, this really captures something that doesnt get talked about enough. The stock market crash analogy is spot on, especially how gradual it is in the twenties untill suddenly everything's tanked. I went through something similiar when everyone paired off and started families, felt like overnight I went from having plans every weekend to havingto schedule three months out. What actually helped was being more intentional about reaching out even when it felt wierd at first.