Some of our most painful experiences can be the unexpected dissolution of friendships once thought to be robust and dependable.  The memories of shared joys persist, troubling our consciences with conflicting and perplexing emotions.  How did the collapse happen?  What degree of culpability do I share in this outcome?  What, if anything, might have been done differently?  These thoughts, and many more like them, haunt and oppress our retrospective inquiries.

There are many reasons for the collapse of friendships.  Perhaps the most important reason involves the question of value:  each party to the friendship may place a fundamentally different value on its maintenance.  One man esteems it highly, and cares to nurture it; while the other sees the relationship as something transitory or disposable.  This, it seems to me, is the root cause of most failed friendships.  We currently live in a world that celebrates the self, the one, the individual; everything else, we are taught, exists to feed this insatiate ego.  With this ethic, people become as fungible and dispensable as any other consumer good.  I myself have experienced this situation several times: that is, a situation where I mistakenly placed a higher value on the friendship than did the other party. To me, it was important; to the friend, it was not so important, and he allowed our connections to lapse. Many are not aware of the true rarity, and hence value, of friendship.  It is, as Petrarch said in a letter to Ludwig van Kempen (“Socrates”) written in 1350,

[A]n alternate self, the basis of our status, a soul’s light, the guide of one’s plans, the torch of one’s studies, the peace of disputants, a participant in worries and business affairs, a companion in voyages and domestic pleasures, conscientious not only at home but also in the country, and in war on land and at sea…

How widespread are such lofty sentiments? How many truly place this kind of value on friendship?  I suppose there are many that do; but I also suspect that most are quick to modify their appraisals of this value when visited by life’s many external shocks.  Priorities suddenly change; the equations of cost and benefit suddenly take precedence over all else.  What was once thought to be lasting and impermanent is now seen in a very different light.  The winds and currents of life can send men drifting in very different directions, in such ways that the lose sight of each other’s outlines on the horizon.  It often happens that jealous spouses grumble and intervene, resentful of the persistence of prenuptial ties to which they are not a party.    

Perhaps some of this is unavoidable.  Friendship can be very dependent on location and time; that is, its formation and strength was originally associated with a distinct time and place.  The relationship springs from accidental circumstance; and once the time and place recede into memory, so does the friendship.  The parties seem to drift unavoidably apart, never able to bridge the change in temporal or locational conditions.  Such maintenance would take effort and commitment, an investment in energy and time that some are simply unwilling to make.  So I believe that these two factors—differing conceptions on the value of friendship, and changes in time and location—are the most common reasons for their collapse. 

But I find that there is another reason, perhaps a more regrettable and insidious one.  As life takes its course, leading us all in our separate directions, it may happen that one party to a friendship becomes resentful of the other.  The reasons for this are many, for human emotion is a complicated thing.  Jealousies, repressed resentments, failed ambitions, secret grudges, or unhealed wounds can fester with time, and poison what once was a strong fraternal connection.  Personality traits or behaviors that might once have been tolerated, gradually become intolerable.  Recollections of hurtful statements or callous actions percolate to the surface, and overspread the waters of our consciousness.  In such conditions, it is only a matter of time before the friendship is doomed. 

But I do believe that it is possible, in many circumstances, to rekindle broken friendships.  It is not an easy matter, and takes a considered effort, but it is nevertheless possible.  I have a friend who experienced precisely this with someone who was once implacably hostile to him.  Just as things can change for the worse, so also can they change for the better.  Currents may again converge, drawing together what was once thought to be separated by insurmountable barriers of antagonism.  These restorations may require some sort of intermediary to smooth the wrinkles of anguish and resentment, but it can be done if goodwill exists.  Sometimes the refurbishment of such friendships can lead to a new and far richer interaction than what had previously existed. 

And this is why, where the collapse of friendships is concerned, we must never allow ourselves to go too far; we should repress our anger and subdue our pain, and not permit words to be said that cannot be withdrawn.  For words, once uttered, do not retreat.  The man of wisdom and understanding will not lash out in suffering or rage; he will adopt a philosophic posture, and accept that the preservation of some friendships is not within his control.  If he finds himself the recipient of the anger and unjust recriminations of a former friend, he must never descend to accommodate it.  Some paths were meant to diverge; and if Fortune desires them to reunite, she will again link them in futurity.   

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Read more on this subject, and related topics, in the newly published essay collection, Centuries.