But of course the world has changed, and the conventional family, while still very popular, is only one form of primary emotional support. Those of us who are single - either by choice or by circumstance - draw most of our emotional nutrition from elsewhere. Family can be freighted with baggage; romantic partners may come and go; but friends are the enduring furniture of our world.
Friends frequently predate and outlast partners because they inhabit the sweet spot between intimacy and not taking things too much for granted. We claim their territories without trespassing, we gladly accept what they give, and we can leave their secret selves alone without feeling shut out. We are more able to love them without burdening them with the insane expectations that we place upon other people. The expectation, for instance, that family should love us unconditionally, or that a romantic partner should be a one-person fuelling station for all our emotional, intellectual, social and physical needs.
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Facebook has done the word "friend" no favours. The word is now indiscriminately applied to everyone from dear old confidante to the person you keep running into without meaning to, to the random Facebook user you've never heard of or met who wants to add you to their friends list. I've heard the word "friend" applied to "person you need to please to get ahead", "person who might be useful in the future", "person you secretly think is a jerk", "person you're openly jealous of and would love to see dead", "famous person who is vaguely related to someone you vaguely know", and "person who manufactures spare parts for an ancillary business owned by someone who is vaguely related to someone you vaguely know and really want to have dinner with."
I'm old-fashioned about friendship. There's a difference between friendship and a social face, between loyalty and complicity, between tact and cowardice, between supportiveness and blindness. A boundary is not the same as a chain, and effort is a two-way street. Unfriendly competition - especially the unspoken kind - has no place in a friendship, and nor does a utilitarian, transactional attitude. It should put something real on the line: time, effort, and honesty. It seems like an awful waste, not to mention staggeringly boring, to spend your life pretending to be someone else, with people who are also pretending to be someone else.
You could call that rigid, or loopy, but it is the best form of human connection, willingly given and taken, willingly nurtured, and mostly free of resentful obligation.
In my experience breaking up with a partner is like getting run over, but breaking up with a friend is like being chronically ill. You can remain friends with an ex-lover (YOU REALLY CAN), but a friend who quits on you leaves a permanent hole. I have naturally drifted away from a number of people, and - since giving up on someone is easier than being given up on - I've deliberately walked away from at least one. But I have lost four friends unwillingly, and under wildly different circumstances, and felt wretched every time. Some have been closer to me than the others, some have been more acrimonious, some for incomprehensible reasons, but I've experienced each as an irreplaceable loss.
The obverse of love is not hatred, but indifference. To move someone to loathing is, at least, to move them; indifference is erasure. The universe's well-established indifference to our silly little lives is, after all, so hideous that it is the origin of all the great parent-figure stories we know as religion. And yet, the only thing worse than losing a friend, is refusing them the courtesy of cherishing what they once were to you, and withdrawing your goodwill as an act of retaliation. That just piles misery upon misery. I don't know if I will ever fully master the art of letting someone go with grace, but I will keep trying.