Friends

I’ve had a dream featuring one of my former friends tonight. I can’t even remember the dream anymore, but it made me think about the friends I’ve had.

I’ve never been someone with oodles of friends and acquaintances. Even as a small kid I only played with relatively few other kids (even in kindergarten, yes). And most of those were rather acquaintances than friends, of course.

When I was a kid, I had three good friends. One of them was the butcher’s youngest daughter, one was a bit older than me and related to me by X relatives (don’t ask me how many, okay?) and one lost her upper front teeth just weeks after she had gotten the final ones (life sucks, doesn’t it?).

At the end of primary school, only one of them still remained in the same school with me (Germany has three different types of secondary school). I held contact with my slightly older and slightly related friend most easily, as she lived not too far away. My third good friend I lost, though. She went to a different school, found different friends and developed differently from me.

My only friend left (the one with the missing upper front teeth, of course she wore a dental prosthesis) moved from my area when her mother married again (I’ve never met her real father, even though I first met her when we were four or so), but they stayed in town and she still went to the same school. But then she had to leave for a different type of secondary school and soon afterwards moved to live with her father (she’d never liked her mother’s new husband and her new sister much). So our friendship ended as well, we wrote letters to each other for a while and then simply let it drop. (She is the one I have dreamt about tonight, by the way.)

My slightly older and slightly related friend simply became a more and more distant friend. She went to a different school, started working a good deal earlier than me (because not all different school types in Germany take the same time to complete). She was a different type than me, too, much more easygoing (no, not that way…).

Through her I met another friend I had for quite a while. But my friendship with this friend ended, because she developed mental problems and dropped them all on my shoulders. After a while I couldn’t take it anymore (I had problems of my own, too, at that time), so I ended this friendship.

Heike, which I have mentioned before, became my friend in secondary school, but her parents moved out of town rather soon afterwards, so for most of our friendship we have mainly communicated by letter (as this was in the dark times before cell phones and texting). We had quite some breaks in our friendship, once her relatives simply made sure she didn’t get my letters any longer. Once she was on the run from her former husband, hiding from everyone, including me. Then it simply slipped away while we were both having a lot other things on our mind. Currently she seems disinterested in our friendship and has so for over a year. I have no idea why.

Friendship is a strange thing in many ways…

It comes and goes

I might have lost my friend Heike again. I’m not completely sure, but there are certain signs. Which signs?

Well, since the start of the year, I have hardly had any news from her. At first, I was not surprised, because she had just started a new job and I know it’s hard when you start a new job in a call centre. But 3 short messages in a month (last year it was the average of 5 messages a week) isn’t much. She’s commuting by train and in Germany that means quite some spare time before and after work.

Two out of the 3 short messages I’ve had were, in addition, merely written to tell me I couldn’t phone her during the weekend, because she were on tour with her boyfriend. While I certainly do not begrudge her the time with him - during her last job, they didn’t have much time for each other -, I do not really buy she doesn’t have at least 15 or 20 minutes for a phone call.

It’s been a year since we had contact again (after about a year without it) and it seems to be over again. It hurts, it really does, especially as she’s my only close friend. (I’m not the type with oodles of friends, anyway, and we’ve been friends since we were 12 or so.) On the other hand, I’m not stupid or dependent enough to cling to this connection when she quite obviously has no interest in it any longer.

So I’ve written her an email, stating that I will not continue to bother her with my messages if she doesn’t want any contact. I’ve also told her that my address, phone numbers and email-address will stay the same for quite some time (I’ve had each of them for at least 4 years now). If she wants contact again, she knows how to reach me.

Am I too sensitive about this? I don’t think so. There’s no point in clinging to a connection the other side has lost interest in. It’s better to take the pain now and cut off the connection than to stay connected and feel the pain every time my messages are not answered.

Loosing a connection

It seems, as a post of Teacher Lady has shown me yesterday, as if I'm loosing a friend at the moment. Well, I can't say it hurts all that much - I've already accepted it subconsciously.

Heike and I have not had contact in any way (phone call, letter, e-mail or SMS) for quite a while now. I know she's got a lot to do - as have I -, but that does not explain why there hasn't even been a single SMS from her. I have held some contact by SMS for a short while, but I've been growing tired of it by now.

In addition, we've had two arguments this year alone, one direct and one over phone and SMS (and one last year when she misunderstood me and immediately thought the worst of me).

I'm slowly realizing that she has a very different idea of friendship than I have. Heike seems to think - as I can only guess from her actions and words and not look into her mind - that friends, especially best friends, should be very much alike, not argue and always understand each other perfectly. I doubt that is the way it would be with the two of us.

We are alike in some ways, but very, very different in many others. I cherish that, because I see diversity as a good thing. And I don't think arguments that stem from having different approaches on some things should be ignored or smoothed over. Sometimes you have to have an argument, sometimes you have to discuss things. That's nothing against the friendship as a such, it's just how it works between humans. How can we get to really understand each other's thoughts and ideas without talking about them and arguing sometimes? And I doubt she really understands me - or I do understand her. She, I think, can't understand my interest in computers and technical things and I can't understand why she's so set on getting me into a relationship while I'm perfectly fine without one. She's very religious, too, and I'm what you'd call an agnostic. I believe in some higher being, but not in a special religious way. Technically I'm Christian, but I don't see myself that way while she has become very religious herself.

Take our two arguments this year:

Even after all this time she has not understood that instead of doing it discreetly, I respond better to people talking to me directly. So, instead of showing me a newspaper clip (from a newspaper I can't stand, anyway) of a woman who has lost weight very quickly (giving me the impression as if she wanted to say "if that woman could do it, why can't you, too?"), she should just have asked me if I still went through with my diet and was doing the best I could to loose weight. So I felt attacked, she felt I was attacking her and we were arguing - when we could have talked about it far more easily, had she taken the direct route.

And then the second time. I had a short job for three months and, of course, I'm always taking my cell to work, just in case of emergency. My parents know and accept that - and apart from them, only very few people do have the number of my cell phone. Heike, of course, is one of them. So all in a sudden, in the middle of the day, the phone was ringing. I was worried, of course. She was calling me and sounded neither distraught nor sad, but rather happy and giddy. She wanted to talk to me immediately - although I was in the middle of working and it didn't seem too pressing to me. Had she, while I was telling her "I'm working right now," just once said something like "it's urgent," I would have walked out of the office immediately and talked to her, not matter what troubles I would have gotten for it. But she didn't and later on played dead and just sent me an SMS about how well she knew now how reliable I was. It set my teeth on edge and it took quite some time before she was talking to me again. Of course, it probably had appeared differently to her, but then, after twenty or so years of friendship, she should have known me well enough to know what I'd be doing in such a case - or how to ensure me we had to talk immediately.

We've had a ten-year-break in our friendship before, while she was neither talking or writing to me nor I to her, but it was not really initiated by one of us. Her relatives, as I know now, had just sent my letters back and I was wondering why she'd never told me she'd moved out. She then initiated contact again 2003 over my parents - as she still had their phone number and I had no idea how to reach her - and we went back to writing, phoning, sending forward SMS and, later on, e-mail and also some visits.

Maybe it's just a short break coming and she'll be contacting me soon enough, maybe it will be another ten years or even forever. I don't know and, although I care for her a lot, I don't really care about it right now. It will happen as it does. (And I know she has the address of this blog and could read it.)

Relationships I don't want

A lot of people would say that I shouldn't say anything about relationships, as I don't have one at the moment and didn't have any really long ones in the past. That might have to do something with the fact that I'm a loner ... or maybe I've just not met the right one for me.

On the whole I can't say anything bad about my friend Heike's boyfriend Franz. I haven't met him very often (just once, actually), but he seemed an okay guy to me. But what I really don't like about their relationship is how much my friend depends on her boyfriend.

I know that relationship means 'two people', not just one. And where there's more than one person, compromises have to be reached and sometimes one person has to take the lead. But, even though I personally don't have a long-time relationship, I've had years to study one that's held over forty years now: my own parents' relationship. Now, to a certain extend my parents are both quite headstrong, but they've learned to make compromises and work together.

Heike's relationship with her boyfriend is quite different. She leaves almost all the important decisions to him. For example: I know that she likes to surf the internet, but her friend thought that she would do it too often if they had a connection at home, so they didn't get one (even though, with today's flat-rates, that wouldn't have been too expensive). Or right now: They do have internet now, even broadband, and they got themselves a new computer for it (as I've already written in another post some time ago), but, because her boyfriend thinks it's handy for work, he has hogged it completely. It's not the fact alone that he wants his own computer for work, but he can, in fact, write such a computer off on taxes - and could, provided his boss is okay with it, even get one from work. This way, Heike again has to go to an internet café or so in order to get online, even if it's just to check her emails. And with her shitty job, she doesn't really have the time for that.

I wouldn't allow someone else to rule my life like that, neither would any of my parents. But Heike seems to thrive on it, during her short marriage as well as in her current relationship. I don't know whether it's because she has seen this in her own parents' relationship (but given the fact that her father's a soldier, it's possible) or whether she thinks it's the only way to keep a boyfriend. As my parents are a good example for the fact that it doesn't have to be this way at all, I simply can't understand a woman submitting herself to someone else like that. I wouldn't do that, even if it were for the man of my dreams. Too proud? Maybe. But I'm rather my own person and alone than in a relationship and just someone else's puppet.

And she always tries to fix me up with someone... She probably thinks I need someone. She probably even thinks I would be more happy in a relationship like hers. But I wouldn't and I have stopped trying to talk to her about it. She wants it that way and nothing I could ever say will make her change her mind.

As I'm saying, I don't think her boyfriend is a tyrant, but he probably just assumes the role because she lets him and he's almost ten years older than she is. And I don't think the age-difference is the main reason.

I, personally, don't want a relationship in which I have to submit, I'll rather stay alone than spent the rest of my life submitting to someone just because he happens to be the 'man' in the relationship.

My best friend, her new computer and DSL

I've got one best friend; not two, not three, not twenty, just one best friend: Heike. Unfortunately we don't live in the same town or close (as I would define the term 'close', that is). So we usually communicate by writing letters, sending emails and chatting over the phone for an hour or more whenever we've got the time. About once every two or three month we actually meet in person - either I'm travelling to see her or she travels to see me, we need about two hours or so on a train to reach the other one. It's a lucky coincidence we both like reading or listening to music.

Recently she told me she was getting her own internet connection (well, I should probably say 'their' own internet connection, as she lives with her boyfriend). She's got it now which means we can write more emails, as we can both check them at home. She also wants to get the Yahoo! Instant Messenger ... she's already got an account and it will be easy for her to get the messenger. I've got it, too … but then I've also got ICQ and (as you can see on the right side of my blog) Zwinky. Unfortunately until now I mostly got bugged by guys who wanted to date me. But with Heike being online now as well, we could have a quick chat every now and then. So when we meet again in January, I'll help her install the messenger ... and hope she goes online quite often, so we can have a chat.

I'm quite happy she's got internet now (over DSL, that's what broadband is called in Germany) and we'll have a new means to communicate, but I also see quite a lot of work coming up while she learns about her new computer and the internet. After all, most people I know consider me their computer advisor.