I have never been in love. But I have loved and do love. Without judgment, without remorse. I do not find it tiring and I have never felt a limit. I am good at loving people unconditionally - it is one of my many unmarketable skills.
I subscribe to the Jeannette Winterson school of emotion: Love isn't a commodity so it doesn't have to be in short supply.
My friends are the only form of permanence I accept. As peers and allies, they are fundamentally associated in my mind with safety, happiness and fun as, I believe, they should be. I have always taken a rather binary approach to my relationships: you're in, or you're out. The great loves of my life are - and always will be - my friends. And, as a gun-shy feminist with few role models of successful, non-damaging relationships, I never intend or expect my friendships to be superseded romantically. So when one of them, arguably the one I loved the most devotedly over the years, turned her back on me with no warning and no reason, 15 years into what I assumed would be a lifelong friendship, it was something that changed my life.
I have never found it difficult to make friends. On paper, that was arguably unlikely, especially when I was in school. I was overly-engaged in the work, spoke differently to everyone else and the only other person who looked like me in my rural, English schools was my brother. But, nonetheless, I never struggled to relate to the people around me.
“I preferred (as I still do) to get to know someone one-to-one, to get to know them properly - you get closer that way.”
It was never the sort of friendship you are used to seeing on television or reading about in Enid Blyton novels, I was never interested in cultivating a bullet-proof group, each with their own characters and roles to play; I preferred (as I still do) to get to know someone one-to-one, to get to know them properly - you get closer that way.
It wasn't until I was 10 years old that I met the girl I would think of as my "best friend" for the better part of my life so far. It was the most middle-class and English of settings, at a summertime tennis day camp between the end of primary school and the beginning of secondary. I was there by myself, following a genuine interest in the sport and she was there with a friend from the school she had previously attended which, despite being a five-minute walk from my own front door, I had never seen. Nor had I seen either of them. At first, if I'm honest, I didn't think much of her. Despite being tall and blonde and pretty in a way I, even then, understood was supposed to be aspirational, she shrank behind her friend and seemed small in a way I couldn't quite get a grip on. Her friend however, was short (my height) and opinionated (like me) and seemed to me to be the far more interesting option, which she proved to be for a time. For the rest of our time practising our backhands and serves in the summer sun, the three of us formed a sort of uncomfortable trio, while my reservations about the two of them grew.
As is the way with small(ish) towns, both girls turned out to live very close to me. As I got to know them apart from our tennis whites, my opinions of the two of them started to shift. The loud one was too loud and the quiet one wasn't all that quiet as it turned out, just used to being called stupid and shy because of it.
“Weren’t the good, pretty girls - so pure of heart - always being brought low by those awful jealous ones? Not on my watch. ”
Despite the overarching narrative of this remembrance, I would say with a certain confidence that I have always been able to read people relatively well. Which is why the loud one faded away when I saw just how much of her confidence was derived from putting down the quiet, pretty one. Had I not been warned about this in countless books, films and pre-teen TV shows? Weren't the good, pretty girls - so pure of heart - always being brought low by those awful jealous ones? Not on my watch.
So I befriended her and set about (both consciously and unconsciously) ridding her of the burden of a youthful, misguided friendship with someone who was using her to bolster their own flagging self-esteem. I wasn't wrong, but I also didn't see what I was doing was stepping into her shoes.
Over the years, we were friends. With all that goes with it. There certainly were ups and downs but, looking back on it, it was no more or less a remarkable friendship than any other. The only difference between us was that I tended to find things a bit easier, although in the spirit of honestly, I have to note that I did work significantly harder. And not just on my own work. But that goes with the territory of being the nerdy best friend.
Looking back on things now, of course, I realise that even in those early years I did much more than I ever got back. But, I'd received my early training in a small Anglican school and had been taught to expect no different. And things continued on like that until the eventful day fifteen years later when she just stopped returning my calls.
I say it was a fateful day - and it was. I was, at the time, in the middle of what I now call the worst two years of my life; the crisis of that particular moment was a surgery to remove a tumour before it reached its full cancerous potential and caused some real damage. She, my best friend, was the only one who managed to send me a message early enough in the morning that I saw it before I went under. I was touched and comforted. That was the last time I heard from her.
In the weeks that followed, I was in pain and on drugs and upset about neither of those things. I cried every day, not because I couldn't walk or because I was scared, but because deep down I knew what I was refusing to accept, that this relationship - one that I had cherished for the majority of my life - was over. I can't tell you how I knew that, but I did. And sometimes I still can't believe it.
“the death of our friendship now has a sense of self”
Since that horrible time, I have - in bits and pieces from mutual friends - gotten an idea of why I was abandoned at one of the most difficult times in my life, by someone I had always pictured in all the imaginary vignettes I had conjured up of my future. It is about as unsatisfying as one might expect - save for the fact that I was so repulsed by the reasoning (or lack thereof) that it made the whole thing easier to swallow. But over time (it's been about 18 months now - the death of our friendship now has a sense of self), my reaction to this has provided me with more clarity as to who I am as a person that anything before or since.
I am a woman with what is often (somewhat uncharitably) described as "daddy issues" and being - for lack of a better word - abandoned by a close friend unsurprisingly hit a lot of my emotional trigger points. It confirmed to me something that I had believed for a long time, that I was special... in a bad way. That I was for some unquantifiable reason, an unappealing prospect. If someone like her, whom I had loved and helped so much, was incapable of returning even a fraction of my loyalty, who would? Who could? Who would even bother to try?
This is, of course, a line of thinking that all women (and I assume, most men) fall into at some point and I am not ashamed to admit that sometimes, I live in that thinking still. I spent a long time trying to come up with excuses for her behaviour (as I had done with my father when I was a child). Even now it's hard for me to type this but, friends, I did nothing wrong. I have gone over and over it by myself, with family and with friends, and I have been forced to conclude that for what I felt, crying alone in hospital and during my recovery, there is no justification. Not that one has been offered. Of course. This is a horrible thought.
“sometimes, maybe even often, the people you love don’t just hurt you accidentally; they take time to think and to plan and to reason and they do their best to make you hurt in a way that will last”
The reason I spent so long trying to excuse the inexcusable is one I am sure I will never in my heart truly accept. No matter how much I parrot the thought to friends and family in their difficult times, I just cannot rationalise the fact that sometimes, maybe even often, the people you love don't just hurt you accidentally; they take time to think and to plan and to reason and they do their best to make you hurt in a way that will last as long as you do. And sometimes, maybe often, they succeed.
So what did I learn? That I'm an emotionally frail naif, desperately hoping to one day find somebody, anybody who will show a glimmer of humanity in the face of my fragile ego? I already knew that. No, what I learned was something altogether more obvious, though it still doesn't feel that way. What I learned is that I've been loved and respected all along and the people who have supported me through this (and my other, more practically real problems) were probably the people I should have been focussed on all along. Through our shared crises, my family are closer than they have ever been. My friends, both old and new have rallied around me in a way I never would have expected or, if I'm honest, even dared to hope for. I would like to thank them, but I won't. There aren't enough thanks in the world.
Because at the end of the day, I am grateful to my former friend. My blind loyalty to her would have got me in the end and - though it was patently unintentional - she did succeed in saving me from myself.
I have wonderful friends, I always have, she just was never one of them.