You Can't Spell Friend Without 'End'

Friendship takes work. This is what I tell my daughters: It takes work, and it’s not always easy. That’s not to say keeping friends is difficult per se, but again, it takes effort. You have to do the little things—phone calls, text messages, conversations no matter how brief. You have to show an interest in the people you like, and listen to them, even if it’s only occasionally, even if you never get into anything serious. Casual contact matters; it’s essential if you want the friendship to survive, evolve, and deepen.

And still, even if you make the necessary effort, friendships end, or fail to take off, for a million different reasons. Some of my best friendships in high school concluded dramatically, in ways that I’m clearly not over. Both involved sets of brothers with whom I skateboarded nearly every day. With one set, we were out skating a few towns over, and the day was getting late—I needed to be home for dinner with my family. One of the brothers, intent on landing a trick, got mad at me—furious—and punched me in the jaw. I calmly picked up my board, went to my car, started it up, and waited for everyone to get in. Then I dropped them all off and never spoke to them again for three decades.

The other brothers I broke up with a few years later—again in my car, again driving them and some other friends home—after an idiotic argument about Jimi Hendrix, at the end of which I had an epiphany: They had no respect for me whatsoever. I dropped them off, and when they called the next day to make skating plans, I told them I couldn’t be friends anymore. That was it. We were over. The older brother I never saw again; the younger one I spoke with at his brother’s funeral 10 years later.

As I am with many things, I was decisive about quitting those friendships. Lines had been crossed, and could not be uncrossed. I don’t regret my actions.

But I still feel like I failed somehow.

I’ve always made friends easily. Maybe it’s because my family moved when I was young—around Massachusetts, to England and back, down to Virginia—so I got used to being the new kid. As the new kid, you get a few weeks of fascinated attention at the beginning of school, and that’s when you figure things out—who can be your tribe, who are the aliens. And as the new kid, you can approach anyone, and they’ll understand. Perhaps they were once the new kid themselves. Unlike how the movies and TV depict it, kids tend to understand.

When, as an adult, I began to travel widely, this approach served me well. When you travel, you’re always the new kid, and you can get away with simply going up and talking to people. As a grown-up, you might be overwhelmed with self-consciousness, but once you get over yourself, you can talk to almost anyone. Especially in the more far-flung corners of the globe, you can make friends in an instant. During my decade as a travel writer, I amassed hundreds of new pals—perhaps you, reading this essay, are one of them.

Being willing to just speak to people is one important element of making friends. But there’s another factor that’s even more important, and has always felt like a bit of a secret, one that grants you incredible strength. It is this: I like everybody.

Everybody? Yeah, everybody—with the exception of people who are outright mean to me. Those people can fuck off and die. Kidding! I don’t actually care what happens to those jerks. Karma will get them, eventually. But the remaining 99.99% I genuinely like.

To like everybody isn’t just a decision, though. It requires an attitude adjustment that can be a little tricky and, if you are quick to annoyance or anger, difficult to stick with. But it has worked well for me for decades. In short, I like everybody because I find them interesting. I view everyone I meet as a character in a novel, complex and multilayered, revealing their true selves bit by bit. As I get to know them, I learn their back stories, their motivations, the traumatic or bathetic events that continue to inform their personalities. I get a sense of their arcs, and I relish the opportunity to play a role, whether starring or walk-on, in their development. The world is full of such characters, and it’s our privilege as human beings to get to meet dozens, maybe hundreds, over the course of our lives. I like everybody because they—which is to say, you—are just so damn entertaining.

There are degrees to this, naturally. Some people are less entertaining, or more bothersome. Others, like those who subscribe to this newsletter, are top-tier, as compelling psychologically as they are charismatic and attractive. The point is not to discriminate among them—it’s to appreciate the mind-blowing diversity of the human experience.

And that, too, makes friendships come more easily. I try not to judge—I try to take you as you are written, with all the foibles and frustrations your author has endowed you with. Although he screwed me up for life, Fred Rogers was right about one thing: I like you just the way you are.

Strange but true: Not everyone likes me just the way I am. One of my closest friends from college—a guy who made movies with me, who visited me in Vietnam, who shared a U-Haul with me on our move from Baltimore to New York—vanished from my life before the 20th century was over. We’d been planning to see a movie in Manhattan, he failed to show up, and I waited for him to schedule a new hang. I waited and waited. He never got back in touch.

Once or twice a year since then, I have a dream where we meet. Sometimes it’s on the streets of the city, sometimes it’s at a party or social event. Wherever, however we meet, we always know we’re going to have to talk about how our friendship so silently failed—but this being a dream, we never do.

Something similar happened with a close friend from grad school, too: We snowboarded together, went to parties; I attended his wedding overseas. And then, at some point, he stopped responding to my emails and DMs. Long before we had the term ghosted, he ghosted me.

It’s maddening, not knowing why a friendship has failed. Did the other person decide to cut things off and not tell me? Or have events just conspired to wither the connection and send us in different directions? And how am I supposed to feel about this? It’s like a TV show that ends partway through its first season: no closure, and not only no closure but not even enough of a narrative to predict how things might have, should have ended. It’s pure frustration.

Inevitably, when I reflect on these failed friendships, I turn in on myself. I may make friends easily, but perhaps I am not the greatest friend. I don’t reach out enough, I don’t listen enough, I treat people superficially—more Olive Oyl than Anna Karenina.

I can be thoughtless.

I can take advantage.

I am not there for my friends the way I imagine myself to be.

Most horrifying of all: I am not as funny as I think I am.

Whoa there! This is getting a little dramatic. It’s also possible that I’m romanticizing friendship out of all proportion—and for that I would like to credit/blame The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest piece of literature.

For those of you who don’t remember, a précis: Gilgamesh is the strong, brilliant king of Uruk, but he’s a handful, wild and willful. (Also, he spends all his time enjoying the droit du seigneur with every lady in Uruk.) So the gods create for him a friend, Enkidu, just as powerful and courageous as Gilgamesh, but different, the king’s natural complement. When they first meet, it’s like a Marvel movie¹:

Gilgamesh finally pins Enkidu, his anger vanishes, they embrace and kiss, and the two become “true friends.”

From there, they go on adventures, fighting and defeating the monster Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh helping Enkidu through bouts of terror, and Enkidu doing the same for his friend. They are there for each other. They are two unique individuals who bond through hardships and discover that each needs the other to be complete. There’s certainly a sexual element to their relationship, but they’re more often described as brothers, even if they’re closer than many siblings. They’re the pre-platonic ideal of friendship.

Reading the Epic back in high school, I was entranced—it seemed like everything a boy could aspire to: glory, adventure, a perfect partnership. For men, maybe, there aren’t that many models. Heroes tend to be monads, at best with sidekicks. Rarely do narratives feature male heroes who are equals, and treat each other that way. (They can do so in a group, like the Avengers, but will always jockey for primacy.) So I loved this story, and was blinded to how toxic the friendship was.

Because Enkidu dies. The gods are annoyed at how powerful the two are, so Enkidu gets sick and, over the course of twelve days, dies. That’s it. It happens, and there’s no recourse. Enkidu’s last words are an accusation:

Distraught beyond words, Gilgamesh flees his city in anguish, heading east in pursuit of Utnapishtim, a survivor of the Great Flood whom the gods have made immortal. Confronting scorpion people and Stone Men, Gilgamesh fights his way east, boards a boat, and sails to the Waters of Death, where he encounters Utnapishtim and dives into the depths to retrieve a plant that may grant eternal life. Is Gilgamesh hunting the plant to bring Enkidu back from the grave? Nope! It’s for himself—he covets eternal youth. In the final chapter of Gilgamesh’s epic, Enkidu is not mentioned once.

Instead, Enkidu lives and dies just so Gilgamesh can experience friendship and loss, ecstasy and anguish. (I guess that’s why he got top billing.) Pity poor Enkidu, betrayed at death and forgotten soon after, his tale a mere thread of another’s epic. Strangely, I think it was always his tale I identified with: the one who participates in the friendship but is also outside of it, observing, commenting, aware of what goes into sustaining the connection and aware of where the narrative might lead. Enkidu may be the supporting actor, but he’s the better friend. He’s the one who makes the effort. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: How Things Work

Love the attitude of this newsletter:

Notes

1. I’m quoting from the very readable adaptation by Stephen Mitchell.

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