Yesterday (July 22rd), I met up with an old friend. I couldn’t recall exactly when we had last seen each other, but he told me it had been a year. Perhaps my life had been too hectic for a while, because I don’t think I answered his texts or calls for some time. I could see he had been quite hurt.
My mind drifted back through our long history together. He’s a friend I’m deeply grateful for, someone who patiently put up with all my immature whining and, at times, my almost frantic complaints when we were younger. When did we start to drift apart?
As we got older, our preferred friends within our social circles began to shift. As we started our careers and got married, our life paths diverged, and a sense of growing distant felt inevitable. In fact, I too had felt a similar sense of disappointment once. We had been inseparable in high school, but after we went to different universities, I remember feeling a strange pang of loneliness as his stories became filled with his new college friends. I recalled complaining subtly about it back then, but eventually coming to understand and accept it.
As we were sharing these old stories and present apologies, a passage from a book I recently read came to mind, and I shared it with him. It was from a book called “The Paris Psychology Cafe.”
The book says that the secret of people who keep good friends by their side even as they age is this: “to understand and accept the changing shape of friendship over time.”
There’s a saying, “Wine and friendship get better with age,” but that doesn’t mean their depth increases just by sticking together unconditionally. Sometimes, we face periods where we need to be apart to focus on our own lives. The important thing is to respect each other even as we meet and part.
We need to give our friendships some breathing room. Being “best friends” once doesn’t mean you will forever be “best friends” in the exact same way. Before resenting a friend for changing over time, if we can watch over each other from a respectful distance, offering support, we can comfortably enjoy an enduring friendship for a long, long time.
On my way home after our conversation, I felt that our friendship was entering a new season. Perhaps it is just now beginning the first stage of becoming a “fine, aged wine.”
