Friendship

I would not say I am a great acquaintance. It is hard for me to remember to care about people that I know a little bit. It’s like go ahead and be my best friend* or just be a stranger, ok? Is that too much to ask? I struggle sometimes to live in the tension between extremes. I don’t know if that’s become apparent yet in this fledgling collection of essays.

I am also not great (or at the very least under-practiced) at romance. I was a quasi-only-child in my family, and as such, I developed an interesting combination of neediness and distance that I understand is not for everyone.  All I ask romantically is that someone shows me unceasing affection while also giving me complete independence. Does that seem reasonable?

If I had a non-academic major in life, though, as in the field of study for which I have earned the most extra-curricular credits, I imagine it would be friendship. This is not to say that I am a perfect or even an excellent friend, though I think that I’m probably better at it than a lot of folks. I don’t say this to suggest any great virtue on my part.

I mean, is it this charm-for-days that has me swimming in pals? Sure.

A nearly scientific ability to ask the perfectly crafted question? Of course, it is.

Is it the rapier wit, the 1000-watt smile, the humility despite all odds?

Yes! Yes! A-thousand-times yes!

Mostly though, it’s just a combination of my own private pains and predilections that have led me down a particular relational path in life. I am an extrovert, so it is easy for me to strike up conversations with people. I am risk-averse and plan-forward, which makes me seem reliable, even if a better word might be fearful or rigid. According to enneagram teachers, I flatter to win people over (but guess what ennea-nerds people LOVE flattery). In general, like so many people out there, I got the sense somewhere in childhood that I was neither very lovely nor very lovable, which is a bummer, but also quite an effective emotional crucible for developing a very intense work ethic. And friendships, like all relationships, are acts, not only of great love but also of great labor.

I have been pleased in recent years to see friendship (as a concept) sort of coming into its own and finally beginning to get some long overdue public credit. I have a million books on the subject sitting on my shelf now,

·      Friendship,

·      Big Friendship,

·      Radical Friendship,

·      Thank you for being a friend (a Golden Girls compendium)

This is as it should be. In college alone, I read 200 books on how to be a good wife, and I haven’t used a word of it. Does the word helpmeet send shivers down anyone else’s spine? I had probably read less than five books on friendship before a few years ago when this current heyday got up and going. One of the books suggests that even our everyday language—the tendency to describe someone as “just a friend” demotes the relational status subjugating such relationships over and over again to the “real” goal of “true” love.

For many years, I went along with this notion. “There is no greater love than that of a man for his wife”, save maybe “a mother for her child”. All other experiences were “in-the-mean-time”. I bent over backward to assure people that I understood my place in the relational ecosystem letting them know that I knew what I had going on in my life was merely a consolation prize and certainly not anything that could teach or shape me meaningfully as a human being.

“I know I’m not married, so probably my opinion is garbage here, but I’ve found in my relationships that sometimes I get angry at someone for not doing a thing I never even asked them to do in the first place.”

or

“I’m childless so obviously, my thoughts on parenting are as fruitless as my uterus, but did you ever try maybe giving your daughter a choice? That’s just something I learned in graduate school and then in my years of school social work practice, so you know, pretty much worthless.”

 It's always amazing to me how far we will bend to make our lives match the definitions we’ve been given, despite all evidence to the contrary. In college, I got a pair of fashion glasses that had a sticker on them that said, “UV protection”. I took this to mean, for some reason that they were sunglasses and proceeded to describe them as such to people despite the fact that the lenses were completely clear. My friends were confounded (obviously). “Is this some kind of bit, or do you truly believe these things are shades?” I was confused right back at them.

.

“It said on the tag that these were sunglasses,” I insisted.

“Uh huuuuuuh, okaaaay, but are they, would you say, for instance, blocking the sun’s rays from your eyes?” 

“They must be.” I shrugged. I’m telling you, it said so on the LAAAABELLLLL.  

“Ok.” They’d finally say, acquiescing to this madness. “Hey everybody, come look at Kerri’s new Ray-bans over here.”

And then they laughed and laughed, the way that good friends do.

I didn’t get it for quite a while.

And in fact, I still get teased about this anytime I try out some new frames.

“New shades, huh?” One of them will say with a twinkle in their eye. “Many Congratulations!”

At some point, thankfully, I did come to understand that those glasses were not what I thought they were. I just could no longer pretend that they were protecting me in any discernible way as I squinted through Texas summer after Texas summer. Similarly, I am long past the youthful capacity to twist my vision to see the world as a collection of happy families and the sad singleton leftovers sitting in the corner.

When all your friends start getting married, I’ll admit, it can be pretty horrible. They start (or continue) their sexin’ and couple’s vacations, and eventually have children that become the sun around which their entire existence orbits. There is new, fresh thing, after new fresh thing in their lives and people are throwing them parties for every home and sonogram. They start saying things like “my hubby” and “our family”, and at times it can feel like you will never be “in” anymore.

Someone’s mother sat with me as I cried at one of the 14 weddings in which I was a “maid to the bride”. “It's kind of sad when someone gets married because they are declaring in front of everyone that you are not their favorite person—at least not anymore.” She was right. That does suck. But also, in my experience, it isn’t really how things go. At least not for long, and certainly not mandatorily.

A few years ago, a friend of mine lost her mother. She, like me, had been single all through her thirties and even though she is now happily married, she would tell you that her mother was “her person” in this life.  I don’t always prefer that phrase, but when this friend says it, it seems earnest and non-performative and uncompetitive. It just seems like the truth of her still-unfolding life, and it comes as a great relief to me to hear her proclaim it. Evangelical advice always attempted to ensure that everyone would search for a singular companion in this world and further dictated that said companion, at least for a righteous person, should be a spouse.

Here's the thing, though, many of my friends are approaching or surpassing twenty years of marriage. My sister and her husband are nearing thirty-five years, my parents are almost to sixty. And I admire all of them. I LOVE marriage. I think it is a beautifully unique experience, and when done well, it is an intimacy that is incredibly impressive, transformative, and soul-stirring.

But I would be lying if I said I was never someone’s person too—even some of my married friends. I have friends with whom I share decades of experiences long before they ever so much as laid eyes on their sanctioned “significant other”.  I was the witness to those years of their life, and in that way, for that reason, I am their person. I have friends who seem to have been cut not just from the same comedic cloth but from the same centimeter of the same square on the heavenly quilt from which we humorists were sewn. When we see the same strange thing at the same mystical moment and look at each other, telepathing temporarily silent giggles that will soon grow into full-bodied guffaws, we are each other’s person. I have friends whose mothers didn’t learn how to hold them close enough, whose siblings are prodigaling at the moment, whose partner is away for the time being too—physically or emotionally- and their friend, me, in this case me, steps in to be what and who they so desperately need.  And they do the same for me. Tell me, please, how is this a lesser love?

There has been some talk recently of having DTRs and more formal breakups with friends in the name of boundary-setting.  I don’t know that I care for this approach. I would say, in general, that polyamory is not really my thing, but isn’t friendship kind of the “orig” polyamory? You get to have so many partners for all the versions of yourself.  

One friend is your “yes woman”, you go to her when you need unbridled enthusiasm. “Should I quit my job as a professor and become a part-time fashion doula?” You ask. “Of course!” She declares with no speck of sarcasm. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this sooner!”

Another one you go to get grounded. She is not your most hilarious pal, but the weight of her soul is like one of those blankets that you slide beneath in search of rest in otherwise restless times. You are warm when you are with her. Safe and also sound.

One wants to walk trails with you on occasion, as life allows.

Another sees the relationship as an always in-progress book club.

I like that friendship is fluid.—that seasons are allowed. No one makes any vows or signs any paperwork, so there is no promise they will be around at the same intensity forever, but sadly paperwork and promises aren’t always so reliable either.

A new professor is coming to teach at my school this fall, and her research considers the death and dying process for people according to their intersectional identities. Often it is a real drag to hear this kind of report when you are a person of color. It’s always like, “Quick update some people are dying more and being put in prison more, and not being taken care of by medical professionals more, and not getting hired more and not getting married more, oh and wait, it looks as though—yep—it's all the same group, and you guessed it, it’s the one you are in. Well, ok, have a nice day. I’m off to collect more of this fascinating data!”  

It isn’t fun.

So as this woman began her presentation for us, I braced myself to take in all the manifold ways that death will be worse for me as a black woman—an unmarried one at that.

But friends! Take Heart! I did not need to brace!

In this study, my new colleague found that of allll the racial and gender identities, it was Black women who were LEAST likely to die without company when the time came. Now, I know how research works. I realize that future studies might confuse or contradict what was being presented to me on that day from this study. But it doesn’t matter. Something was righted in me in the receiving of this report. A little good news goes a long way sometimes.

I wondered as I sat there listening that day why/how this might be when so many other health indicators are so very bleak for people like me. “Perhaps”, I thought, “it is because Black women have always understood the fragility of life and have therefore known better than to diminish or demote any bond—any body one is lucky enough to have and to hold on this side of heaven. Perhaps it is because we come running when we hear the cries of our siblings—biological and beyond. There is a desperation to being the ones who are repeatedly on the wrong side of statistics. And desperate people tend to reach out, even if as a last resort.  

I like the thought of being surrounded at the end of life with a big party of people—a congregation you could call it—because that means, my sister can go to the bathroom or home for a nap at some point while my oldest companion waits with me, reminding me what it was like to be girls.

And when she needs to get home to children, to grandchildren, to herself, it’ll be ok because my soul sister will have arrived ready to pray or ponder with me.

The people who have made me laugh the hardest during my time on earth will be in and out doing bits about heaven and hell and the weird nurse who keeps talking to us all about her “Christ-centered sand art” as I lay dying. Oh, Brenda. “That’s Brenda for you!” They’ll say, these ministers who bring me the gospel in giggles.

The crew from my days out west will come to see me at my most vulnerable and unattractive and they will love me anyway, as they always have.

 During the pandemic there was a song that was the soundtrack of the most depressing days. “If the world was ending, you’d come over right?” the guy wondered time and again.

And, I know who did, so, I know who will.

So yes, for me, the phrase “my person” feels unnecessarily narrow compared to the expanses of love that I have given and received in this lifetime. “My people” now that has a ring to it. If you have found a person that is all the things you need them to be at all times, I feel happy for you. That’s a miracle, and I believe in miracles. For the rest of us, my hope is that we won’t try to force any broken label onto our lives just because someone else insists upon it. I hope that we will love and be loved unashamedly, outside the boundaries of any relational ranking system that makes us feel broken and alone, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Friendship is not something we simply settle for in this life. Friendship is the radical act of finding our people outside the lines drawn for us by the circumstances of our birth—reaching out to them, showing up for them, and over time, making them our own—as “our own” as anybody else with whom we share blood or sweat, or tears. Friendship has changed everything from my theology to my tastebuds, and it will keep forming me all the days of my life, making me more me with each version of God’s image that I get to know.

You know, there will be others at the little deathbed party I described before. People I have not met yet, people who might not even be born, and when I am preparing to depart, I will not be able to remember how it was to be living without them in the world. So, if you find yourself in more “ebb” than “flow” with friendship at the moment, keep the faith. Your people are out there waiting to be discovered or to return to you again. And if you find yourself full right now—engulfed by the love you have so freely been given, why not tell your people what they mean to you—and not just generally, but

Today,

at this particular moment in time,

which is,

of course,

tragically

and beautifully

ALL

that we ever really have.