my dear friend,
there is so much i’ve never said. maybe it’s a bit late now. i’m mostly past it, and i have a confident hope that you are completely. good. i am almost positive our friendship will never be the same, and perhaps it shouldn’t be. and that’s okay. but in the name of our past friendship, here are some things that, whether or not you have ever needed to hear them, i have, at least at one point, needed to say.
first of all, thank you. you have been really as great of a friend as i ever could have asked for. and though i think talking about deserving is usually unproductive, i don’t believe i deserved your friendship. but still, you gave it fully and wholeheartedly, holding nothing back. you were there during some of my roughest times, when few others were, and defended me against threats, both concrete and abstract. you have consistently shown me grace and gentleness, while still challenging me to grow more and more like Christ. your role in my life has been a unique and irreplaceable one.
secondly, i’m sorry. that is, i’m sorry, but not for the reasons you probably think. possibly this is why i never told you any of this sooner. but i see i’ll have to rewind and explain more, so please understand that i’m not trying to defend my own conduct, only explain my thinking. when we parted, i knew it would be a hurdle, but i honestly thought it would come out all right in the end. (i suppose in a way it has, but not how i would have necessarily expected or hoped.) i was sad for the space between us, confused at how it had come to that, confounded by my own feelings (er . . . lack thereof), and confident that i was making the right choice . . . but also hopeful about the future of our friendship. (to be clear—which apparently is not always my strength—these are the feelings i wished to convey to you when you first brought up the subject of an expansion of our friendship. i was grateful and relieved that you were unwilling to sacrifice what we already had if a more romantic direction wouldn’t work, so i’m afraid i utterly failed to communicate my main points at that point.)
anyway, when i reached out to you i was somewhat surprised that you still needed more space from me. (please keep in mind that i had never been in love before, so my context for these types of feelings and injuries was sketchy at best.) and the longer you didn’t reach out, the more i grew frustrated and even a little bitter. i knew in my heart that you were the one with a right to be hurt, not me. but part of me was a little angry. i felt that i was forced to be the bad guy, which to be honest, is probably something no one actually thought. i thought that i had given you no false leads, though that was clearly not the case. and i was kind of hurt that a friendship in which i had equal investment was being intentionally atrophied, and there was nothing i could do about it. the security i had felt that our friendship would weather anything had failed, even though neither of us could have realized that this is how reality, rather than theory, would play out. it tore me apart, but given the perspective of things, i felt like i had no right to feel that way, which only made me more frustrated.
it is this for which i want to apologize. i’m sorry i held you responsible for things that weren’t your fault, and i’m sorry for the bitterness i had towards you. i allowed my pain and entitlement to turn into blame toward you, which wasn’t fair or representative of the love of one friend to another.
i don’t know if this will make anything better or if it will just come across as me being a jerk (again), but i have never regretted my decision itself. i’ve thought about it many times since then. “what if i had chosen differently? maybe those feelings would’ve come. maybe our relationship would be better than ever. or at least maybe we would still hang out. why wasn’t i able to feel that way anyway?” but to tell the truth, every time i’ve gone down that road, i’ve only come away more convinced that i spared you more pain than you went through. given the same set of circumstances today, i would make the same choice.
all this is not to say that we can’t, or won’t, or shouldn’t be friends. but friendships with married people are different than friendships with single people, and long-distance friendships are different than see-you-naturally-all-the-time friendships, and friendships that have been stopped and then started back up are VERY different from friendships that have been consistent. and from what i hear, friendships with someone that you used to like romantically can be both challenging and dangerous, even under the best of circumstances. this is not a dismissal, only a recognition of things that were never addressed once we were back on speaking terms. i feel like we’re out of practice. and that’s okay too.
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