Throughout my relatively brief time on earth, I have had a frankly staggering amount of friends. I don’t say this to try and boast, it’s just a fact, one that I’m not particularly proud of but can’t seem to change – I go through friends like there is no tomorrow. I’ve spent years trying to figure out why this is and I still cannot explain it, each friendship always seems to come to an abrupt end and, although there’s always an explanation at the time, surely there has to be some fundamental, underlying reason as to why I can’t seem to commit to the most basic assumptions that form the premise of most friendships? 

If you look at it objectively, it might seem that this is just me talking rubbish. Many of the friends I consider closest to me now have been in my life for almost a decade, some of them for almost two and a couple have been here pretty much since the day I was born. I love these people more than I love life itself and I can’t imagine a world in which they are not a part of my life. You may then ask, entirely reasonably, that if this is the case, what on earth is the problem? Plainly, if I’ve been friends with these people for years and years, then there can’t be that big of an issue? 

This is where, in my opinion, things get complicated. Yes, I have been friends with these people for years, but there is not one of them that I haven’t fallen out with at some point and then proceeded to spend a significant period of time avoiding their existence. These are not, as I often like to portray them as, little tiffs that are resolved after a few days, much of the time they are serious arguments that I deem significant enough to end a friendship. In my head, rightly or wrongly, I convince myself that the person in question has slighted me to such an extent that I should no longer speak to them and I operate on the basis that they will never be a part of my life again. Therefore, whilst it may seem that I’m just spoiling for an unnecessary fight, most of the time I am genuinely prepared to completely cease contact with that person, yet, as I have previously stated, my friendship circle has remained strikingly similar over the past decade. So how on earth do I reconcile these two facts – I regularly fall out with my friends but I’ve had the same friendship circle for a decade now? 

To further complicate things, there are times when I have fallen out with people and, whilst I have eventually made up with them, things are never the same as they once were. Sometimes the argument was unjustified and I feel immense guilt for damaging a perfectly good friendship for no reason, sometimes the argument was entirely justified and I’m not even sure why I start speaking to them again and sometimes the water is muddied and it’s easier to be just be friends with someone than continue an argument which neither of us can even remember the origins of. It is weird because, as readily prepared as I appear to be to remove people from my life at a moments notice, I also seem to be unable to follow through on said removal for longer than a few months, or a few years in extreme cases. Regardless of whose fault the argument was and whether there is any friendship left to salvage, I always seem to drift back to the same people I choose to distance myself from.

Perhaps it’s to do with missing people. It is very easy to look at the past with rose tinted glasses and once someone is no longer a part of my life, I struggle to prevent myself from focusing solely on the positive aspects of our friendship. Occasionally this is a good thing as it leads to my sudden realisation of what a huge mistake I’ve made and I can apologise for my behaviour and pray that they give me another chance (I purposefully haven’t said second chance because I lose count of how many chances I’ve had with most people). Frequently, however, focusing on someone’s positive aspects simply results in my forgetting of all the negativity they brought into my life and I find myself longing to return to the ‘good’ days of our friendship when, in reality, the good days were far outnumbered by bad days. 

I believe this is what you could describe as missing the ‘idea’ of someone. You miss the thought of them being there for you and enjoying each other’s company but it’s a myth you feed yourself to mask the grim reality that your friendship was fundamentally flawed and enjoyable for neither of you. It’s a depressing thought to contemplate and it’s abundantly clear as to why you’d want to ignore the truth of it but, in the end, you come to realise that the idea of the person you’ve created for yourself is nothing but an illusion, something I have repeatedly figured out the hard way after I’ve exhausted myself attempting to sustain a friendship that is essentially unsustainable. 

I am aware of how this may seem like I am just overthinking for the sake of it but I do believe there is a point in there somewhere which I have already alluded to in a previous untitled piece I wrote a few months ago. On the most basic level, you never really know anyone properly and this, for lack of a more elegant turn of phrase, scares the shit out of me. It took some time for me to realise but now I think that the reason I can be so insecure in my friendships is because the thought of being vulnerable to someone else terrifies me and I’d rather shut them out of my life completely than allow that to happen. I constantly flip flop between accepting that I must allow myself to be vulnerable in order to form proper emotional connections with people and convincing myself that I can go through life without ever having to reveal my true self, which inevitably leads to consistent flip flops in my friendships. The closer I am to someone, the more likely I am to fall out with them as I attempt to avoid the unavoidable task of having to ‘open up’. 

Whilst this may explain some of the situations I get myself into, it does not explain all of them. More often than I care to admit, I find myself being an arsehole to people for entirely unexplainable reasons. I convince myself that these people are out to get me in order to justify going after them myself when, in reality, I’m probably just being unreasonable and attempting to rationalise my own poor behaviour. It is important to emphasise that I do not do this on purpose, it just seems to happen, although I accept that this is no excuse. As far as I am aware, there are a couple of people who’ve had to endure this behaviour and I’m confident that I’ve identified these situations and apologised to those few, yet I don’t doubt that it has happened many more times than I even realise. I just hope that, as I become more and more aware of my behaviour, I manage to deal with it appropriately. 

One downside with identifying my own faults in this area, however, is that it’s now rather difficult for me to identify where the fault lies in an argument. I fall out with people so readily that it has become second nature to me to just assume that the fault lies with me and I have noticed that certain people have attempted to use this against me. A recurring argument I’ve had with a few different people over the past few years is that they don’t put enough effort into our friendships and at first, when I inevitably go back to them after a thaw in relations, I am made to feel like it was my fault for being so “high maintenance”. I now realise that the points I was raising were entirely legitimate and my own tendency to be argumentative was being weaponised against me to avoid reasonable criticism. 

Therefore, whilst I am ready to accept that I can be quick to be unfairly argumentative, it has become difficult for me to recognise when I am being unreasonable and when I am not, which leads to a whole other quandary in itself. Do I try my hardest to avoid arguments and potentially let certain friends get away with behaviour I deem unacceptable, or do I continue to be prepared to fall out with friends who aren’t there for me as I’d expect them to be and hope that, when my behaviour isn’t to the standards I aim for, my friends are willing to accept my mistakes and forgive me? 

Although it may seem like a very minor issue in today’s world, it’s a problem I have grappled with for a while now and I’m still not sure if there’s a solution. I suppose all I can hope for is that the people I genuinely care about are mindful that this is the case and forgive me some of my more foolish actions because, even when I quarrel with friends, those who I consider myself emotionally close to should remain aware that I do so not as a result of an innate viciousness or deceptiveness within me, but because I am often unable to express how I am actually feeling and even less able to properly understand it. It may seem very self-pitying but the truth is that my mind likes to make things hideously complex and, as much as I hate to admit it, I often need help trying to understand how I feel. So, in conclusion, I’m sorry for being a wanker, but please don’t mistake this apology for an invitation to take advantage of the fact that I’m slowly beginning to recognise my own flaws. To those I’ve hurt, I am genuinely sorry, but to those who hurt me, you can get fucked.