I had no idea that you could lose friends you never actually had. In fact, I think it is the strangest kind of loss, because there is no villain. The arrangement just ends when its terms stop being met, the way a gym cancels your membership when the card stops going through.
That’s a different thing from being loved. Trust me I have never truly loved a gym membership, but alas there was a relationship there because my doctor gave ‘the look.’ But when it is a person, or people, and not a torture chamber, it can look identical to mutual love and friendship from the inside, right up until the moment you aren’t providing anymore.
For a few years, my house was where everybody came.
Wednesday nights I’d rush home from work and have the place clean by the time people started showing up. People would drift in and settle into the living room, and the noise would build, laughing over each other, telling the same stories again.
The kids ran feral in the best way. Mine were little then, two and seven, and they’d disappear into the backyard with everyone else’s kids or pile into the back bedroom and not come out until someone made them. You’d lose track of whose kid was whose. That was the whole point. That was the thing I thought I had.
Then my marriage started coming apart, and I told them I needed to step back for a while. Just for a bit. I’ve got a lot going on, I need some time to deal with my own stuff, I’ll be back. I feel like that was a completely normal thing to say. I’d been ‘working on myself’ you know, and that’s what all the gurus had told me to do. Just take a step back and make time for myself. Right in theory. But those gurus never seem to get to the messy part that inevitably showed up.
If you asked any of them, I’m sure they’d tell you sincerely that they cared about me and wished me well and were so sorry about everything I was going through. All the standard things you say while you’re slowly walking away.
Turns out when I wasn’t the put-together working wife and mom with the beautiful home and the open door, and I became the woman in the middle of losing everything, with nothing left over to give my value tanked.
And this reinforces so many of our biggest fears, right, which is why we all end up burnt out, tired, and emotional and can’t verbalize why. I was overburdened with hosting every week on top of work, kids, family, oh and did I mention my marriage that was caught in a fireball (that’s a different article entirely), so I put something down. And then I lost my community, which reinforces that it’s better to just not put anything down at all and keep it all kumbaya copacetic .
Way back in 1979 Clark and Mills put this feeling into one of those fancy standardized research studies. Apparently I was not the first person to come to this realization, shocking, I know. They split relationships into exchange and communal relationships. I’m letting you know I cut all the sciency geek out just for you. You’re welcome. So the final finding was that in a communal relationship you give because someone needs it; in an exchange relationship you give because you received something.
The thing is, I hadn’t lost my community. I was finding out I’d never exactly had one. What I’d had was an arrangement, an exchange relationship. A place in the circle that lasted precisely as long as I kept the circle fed. Belonging that ran on what I provided, and quietly switched off when I stopped providing it.
I hear this same story with different characters every day. It’s the friends who got quiet when they got sober, because drinking was the thing they did together and without it there wasn’t a together. It’s the ones who cooled off when they set the boundary, because the boundary interrupted the role they’d always played. It’s whoever drifted when they stopped being the reliable one who could always be counted on to hold it, and stopped saying yes before they finished asking.
I changed one thing about how much I gave, and found out that the giving had been the only thing holding it up.
While it was happening it felt as if the evidence was piling up against me. If they left when I changed, then changing must have been the problem, and the old me, the useful one, the one who kept the counters clear, must have been the acceptable one.
Wrong. Just wrong. And I will die on this hill. There are exchange relationships and communal relationships. Each has their place in the world. Exchange relationships aren’t inherently evil. But, it’s helpful when both people are able to acknowledge what it is. Like being work friends, but then one of you leaves. You may text a few more times, but eventually you just stop talking. You exchanged a need for friendship in the workplace.
The problem shows up when one person knows it’s an exchange relationship and the other is operating as if it’s a communal relationship. We all get busy and when we reflect on things we think it has to be this deep search into the inner lurkings of your soul, whatever that means. But, honestly, reflection can be as simple as taking a moment and thinking about who you interacted with that day. Are those exchange relationships or communal relationships? And most importantly, do you think that everyone in that relationship would agree?
Losing people is not the same as losing your people. When you have your people nobody knocks for the food. There is no food. They just want you.