Our Changing Relationships

Learning to accept the flow of love

In my twenties I thought my friends were a kind of family. Maybe they were really. But those friendships changed over time as we all did. Growing up and making a new life will do this, but so will a maturing personality. Something initially held us to each other that may no longer exist.

Photo by Ximin Lin on Unsplash

How love changes

Exes are like this too. My parents could barely tolerate each other after they’d divorced. My father had a terrible nickname for my mother, and she always thought the worst of him. They seemed like absolute opposites and yet, at some point they found delight in each other. My sisters and I all have our own explanations for this relationship that started before we did but we didn’t really know them then. In fact, some of the secrets that slipped out after their deaths showed just how much we didn’t know.

My father tried to explain his interest in her to me. I hadn’t asked, but by then they’d spent so many years despising each other that maybe he felt an obligation to describe who they used to be. “Your mother had orange eyes.” This was meant as his big revelation to me. Of course, she did not have orange eyes; they were brown. But he went on to describe slivers of a warmth in her eyes that mesmerized him. I think he liked that she was a bit exotic. I know that her cooking was something he missed too. These few things, along with the old photos of them as a city couple, helped shape my image of them when they still held love.

But a little bit had slipped away here and there until they reached the foul-nickname stage. Maybe each child brought a burden. Maybe each swallowed glass of scotch intensified the ugly view they were each beginning to have of the other. Maybe complaining and judging and minimizing got bigger and bigger until, poof, an out appeared and one of them ran for it.

In those years that followed, my mother had a lot more distractions than my father. Distractions can be fun, and they can be deceptive. I know at some point she looked in the mirror and laughed at herself. She told me she didn’t know who was in the mirror because it certainly was not her. Some of the distractions had fallen away, as they do with age, and there she was maybe a little more like the young woman she’d been before she ever married: afraid, uncertain, not knowing what to do with the complex emotions that never resolved, only now, alone with it.

We are drawn to people for reasons we don’t always understand. Sometimes we never do. Maybe if it falls apart (in romance or friendship), we find a way to make sense of it. We think we see back over our histories and recognize how impossible our pairing ever was, or some purpose it lost over the years. But sometimes, there is no big insight. We just were, and then we weren’t.

I’m not talking about death here, of course. That decides for us. It’s a little different when we’re choosing not to be with a person who’s still on the planet somewhere. Especially if these were people you once thought of as family. But even families sometimes choose not to choose each other.

If what started your relationship with a person was a transient need, then it’s unlikely to endure. But we all change over time, and you cannot be sure that your relationships won’t change too. I think it’s a little easier entering a friendship with a person when you can accept that at the outset. It keeps you fully on your own ground rather than leaning over too far in their territory. We may love and support each other but each of us—no matter how connected we are to another—is here going through this experience on our own. Only you will see you to the end with certainty.

That’s a good reason to be kind to yourself, at least as much as you would be to the people you love. Keep loving them as long as they’re a part of your life; just make sure to give yourself the same grace and respect. The best support comes from those who are good at supporting themselves.

Thanks for reading. This is usually where I say I’ll be back next week, but I won’t. It’s August and I’m taking my little summer break. Paid readers will continue to get a Friday message but it will be a little shorter and a little more personal. Enjoy your summer.