The State of Friendship

I’ve never been fond of final goodbyes. Everybody always insists on brightening their parting words with lofty optimism and half-hearted promises. It’s a ritualized dance of mutually understood pretense that facilitates graceful exits. To acknowledge the truth is to create opportunities for awkward guilt and self-reflection. And so we lie to our departing friends, and we lie to ourselves within those final effusive moments. “Let’s keep in touch,” we always say. “We have each other’s information, so don’t be a stranger.” More often than we’d like, though, the memories of our departing friends are fated to fade and to slowly reform themselves into unfamiliar shapes.

One of the sad truths about friendship is that proximity often defines it. While humans can be loyal and communal creatures at best, there’s no getting around the fact that our minds and our hearts perceive the world through crude, imperfect increments of measurement, like distance and time. A friendship is a fairly simple thing to maintain when your friend plays a role in your daily, weekly, or even monthly routine. But if one of you should ever pick up and move halfway across the country, you’ll eventually notice your mutual affections tilting on a gradual decline. It’s an inadvertent kind of slip, which somehow excuses the callous inclination to live on and forget.

There’s no use taking it all too personally, though. The hardness of the world has conditioned us all to become emotional mercenaries. We’ll love passionately, listen attentively, and care with all sincerity, just so long as our lovers and friends reside within driving distance. We spend our entire lives in transit between one uncomfortable context after another. Consequently, we’ve developed this urgent desire to seek out relief at every opportunity. And so we’ve devised clever devices like ergonomic chairs, easy-grip handlebars, rubber and foam wrist supports, and, of course, convenient relationships. We’re only human, I guess.

No, I don’t honestly believe that every long-distance relationship is doomed to failure. I do have to wonder, though, why we allow such a trivial thing like distance to end so many of our friendships. Every relationship hinges on common ground, whether it’s common interests, common sensibilities, or merely common affections. When distance suddenly divides you from a loved one, the common ground that brought you together doesn’t magically disappear. So why should distance matter? We all know it shouldn’t. But ultimately, we all know it does.

And yet we lie to each other’s faces during our final goodbyes, pretending as if we’re above such corporeal contrivances like distance and time. And that, my friends, is why I’m not a fan of final goodbyes. We’ve reduced our parting words to the caliber of soulless, disingenuous greeting cards. Real friends don’t tell each other to “keep in touch.” Communication is the sort of thing that’s implied when you find yourself in a genuine friendship. At the end of the road, I prefer sincerity over pretense and tact–a heartfelt hug or a sturdy handshake, and an exchange of stoic words like, “Good luck out there, man. Take care of yourself.” And if I feel like phoning or sending the occasional email sometime afterwards, I’ll make sure to carry through–just the way a real friend should.