The Friendship I Was the Only One Maintaining

I stopped messaging her on a Sunday in February, and I did not tell her, and I did not tell myself either.

I want to be accurate about that, because the honest version is not "I made a decision". The honest version is that I was tired on a Sunday and I did not send the thing I would normally have sent, and then on Monday it was slightly easier not to, and by Thursday I had noticed what I was doing and decided to keep doing it and see.

I have been the one who messages first since we were nineteen. Eighteen years.

What happened next

Fourteen months.

She liked two photographs. She sent one message in November, at eleven at night, which said "thinking of you!! how ARE you" and nothing else, and I looked at it for a while and then replied warmly the next morning, and she did not reply to the reply.

That is the whole record. I checked, because at some point I started checking.

What I expected to feel

I expected to feel vindicated, and there was some of that for about a week.

What I actually felt for most of the fourteen months was a specific low-grade humiliation, which I did not expect and which took me a long time to name. It was not that she did not miss me. It was that I had spent eighteen years believing I was maintaining a friendship, and it turned out I had been maintaining a mailing list.

Eighteen years of remembering her mother's surgery. Eighteen years of the message on the anniversary of her father's death, every year, which she never once acknowledged and which I am now almost certain she did not know I was sending deliberately.

The part I got wrong

Here is what I think now, and it is less flattering to me.

She was not taking anything from me. There was no exploitation. She is not a bad friend and she has never done anything to me. She is a person who does not initiate, with anyone, and I knew that at twenty-four and decided it was fine, and it was fine, and then at some point it stopped being fine and I did not say so.

I never once told her that it bothered me. Not in eighteen years. I ran an entire private accounting system and then held her responsible for a debt she was never told she had.

If you had asked her in that fourteen months whether we were friends, she would have said yes, warmly, and she would not have been lying. She had no idea anything had changed, because from her side nothing had. The silence was only loud on my end.

What I would tell somebody at year two

Say it. It is one sentence and it is not a confrontation:

"I've noticed I'm always the one who messages, and I'd like that to be more even. Not a criticism, I just don't want to stop being in touch with you."

I did not say it because I was afraid the answer would be that she did not want to be closer. But I got that answer anyway, at fourteen months, without any of the information the conversation would have given me, and without the chance that she might have said "God, I'm sorry, I'm terrible at this" and actually tried.

The silent test feels like dignity. It is not. It is a conversation you have with yourself and then hold somebody else responsible for losing.

Where it is now

We are back in touch, lightly.

I messaged her in April, about somebody who had died, because that is the sort of thing you tell a person who knew you at nineteen. She was kind, immediately and properly, in a way that reminded me why this lasted eighteen years. We message every couple of months now. I still start it. I have decided, this time deliberately, that I am willing to.

That is the difference and it is the whole essay. I do the same thing I did before and it costs me nothing now, because I am not keeping score against a total she was never shown.

What it cost

Fourteen months of a friendship, given up to find out something I could have asked in one message.

And something smaller that I mind more: I do not get those fourteen months of her back either. Her sister had a baby. She changed jobs twice. I know these things now the way you know things about somebody else's life, as a summary rather than as they happened, and there is no way to be present retroactively.

I would not do the silence again. I would ask on the Sunday.