The Death of Friendship - When a Friendship Dies

When friendship ends, former friends often become disappointed, or worse. But this need not be the case. You can experience a better closure to the death of friendship, so that a little piece of your life does not die with every deceased friendship of your past. For this to happen, you need to look at the "failure" or downfall of every friendship differently. As serious as the death of a friendship is, it can be a time to refresh and regroup, without taking yourself off the shelf at Friendship Mall.

For a redemptive end to your relationship with a one-time friend, do this:

1. Reject resentment: Say, "I refuse to be bitter or resentful towards my ex-friend."

2. Regret nothing: Instead of regretting the end to your friendship, say, "I choose to savor all the good times we spent together and the good things that came from our friendship when it was alive and well." Do the same thing that bereaved people do at funerals; moan the loss but cherish and treasure the precious memories associated with the deceased.

3. Express gratitude: Say, "I am grateful and thankful that our paths crossed and our lives connected. Somehow I believe this world is a better place, because we met and shared our lives."

4. Don't feel abandoned: Tell yourself, "Just because our friendship has ended does not mean my ex-friend betrayed or abandoned me. It doesn't mean he did not appreciate all I did for him, or what we meant to each other. There may be things going on in her life that I can't or don't understand for now, but that doesn't make her a traitor."

5. Identify a purpose that the friendship served: Say, "Our friendship has served a purpose. Perhaps it was meant to be only a seasonal or temporary friendship, which is no less valuable than a permanent friendship."

6. Believe that you remain a potential friend: Speak these words to yourself, "For my part, I refuse to consider my one-time friend an enemy. My ex-friend remains a potential friend, but I will leave that to the twists and turns of life. If he comes back, I'll be here, but I won't bank on that, and I won't put my life on hold until that happens. If our friendship never makes a come back, I'm fine with that too."

7. Work on "a better me": Say, "I will work on myself, so that the next person who is fortunate to have me as a friend will have one of the best friends they ever had. Yes, I'll remain friendly and keep the entrance to friendship a double door, ready to fling wide open again if life would have it so. To the next friend, I will be a far better friend than I was to this former friend."

Being a great friend means that you understand the value of friendship. But it also means that you've learned how to bring positive closure to a fallen friendship, so that your life is not shattered or set back every time a friendship dies.

Purpose-Driven Friendship

Why do humans become friends? Unlike animals that may flock or form packs, humans choose their friends deliberately, for better or for worse.

Every real friendship has a purpose. A friendship should be active and mutual in order to fulfill its purpose. There are at least six reasons why humans choose to befriend one another.

1. Mutual assistance: friends are to help each other. A relationship in which one person serves to enable the other falls short of the meaning of friendship. Enabling someone is an abuse of friendship.

2. Motivation: friends encourage each other. They edify or build up each other. Friends inspire each other to succeed and excel beyond mediocrity, beyond average.

3. Improvement: friends make each other better; friends sharpen each other; King Solomon described it as iron sharpening iron; friends improve each other's personhood, self-esteem, confidence or performance as iron sharpens iron.

4. Advancement or Progress: friends help each other move from one point to the other

5. Maturity: friends nurture each other to grow up, become mature, a more complete person.

6. Endurance: friendship is a coping mechanism; a true friend gives you the edge in difficult times, because she will strengthen and empower you to cope with some of life's toughest challenges; friends see each other through hardship, without being mere bystanders. Friendship can make the difference between surviving war, as prisoner of war, or life in a refugee camp.

Friendship that fails to somehow in some way make one or both friends better cannot be called genuine friendship. It may be a leech-connection, a sponge-bond, or codependency, but not friendship in the true sense of the concept. Any friendship that ceases to make one better no longer has any purpose for being kept alive.

What is Your Friendship Based On?

Every friendship has a basis on which it sits and rests. It is important to know what a friendship is based on. Friendship can be based on one of five things: affinity, personality, common bond, need or interest.

1. In an affinity-based friendship, two friends just take a natural liking or attraction to each other. They just seem to click. It's a chemistry thing. This form of friendship tends to lean towards romantic involvement, though it may develop between two people who may never drag romance into it. Affinity friends do not have to be alike. In fact, they may actually be opposites, but as we know from magnetic poles, opposites can and do attract.

2. In a personality-based friendship, two individuals become friends because they are similar. They may both be reserved (introvert), outgoing (extrovert), or mediocre (average) for that matter. Or politically, they may be conservative, liberal or moderate in their views. They may both be secular, progressive, religious or traditional.

3. Common-bond friendship is one between persons of similar ethnicity (two Hispanics), religion (two Muslims), church (two Baptists), nationality (two Chinese), team (two Celtics fans) or life experience (two refugees). Yes, when it comes to friendship, birds of like feather do flock together.

4. In a need-based friendship, two persons came together because one of them had a need that the other helped meet. For example, you become friends with the person who paid for your stay at a motel when you lost your job or when you just got of jail.

Need-based friendship can be an uncomfortable union of unequals, unless something happens for the two friends to switch roles, whereby the one who had received help before becomes the helper in a situation that puts the original helper at a point of need. For example, the guy who paid his friend's motel bill gets evicted by his landlord and has to lodge with his friend who now owns an apartment.

Because of the usually one-sided nature of need-based friendship, it is often not a simultaneously enjoyable experience for both friends equally. Therefore, this form of friendship is often short-lived, if the "beneficiary" (needy person) and the "benefactor" do not switch hats every now and then throughout the relationship.

5. Interest-based friendship is one in which two friends share a common interest, which may be sports, music, career path, books, movies, travel, etc. This form of friendship is likely to terminate if one person replaces the interest that formed the basis of the relationship.

For example, if you and I became friends primarily because we were members of the same band, our friendship may bite the dust if our band disbands.

Interest-based friendship runs the risk of being very superficial, though it can become deep and meaningful if the parties put in the effort needed to keep their relationship interesting.

Three Types of Friendship

There are various types of friendship with reference to time or timing. Every genuine friendship is a timely relationship. As such, a friendship can be seasonal, temporary, or permanent.

1. Seasonal friendship is one that is on and off, based on the season in either friend's life. Seasonal friendship is only useful and rewarding when the season is right, or else, one person or both become a bother to the other.

An example of a seasonal friend is a person who becomes your friend because your loved one died. This friendship was created by the season of bereavement, and its only reason may have been to help you get through the period of loss. By the way, the season that creates a friendship doesn't have to be a bad season; it can be a good one, as when two persons who get hired by a company at the same time become buddies.

2. Temporary friendship comes to an end after it has served its purpose. What is the difference between seasonal friendship and temporary friendship? Temporary friendship can begin at any ordinary time of your life; it is not connected to a season of loss or any other season of life.

Attempts to prolong a temporary friendship may create disrespect for a friend, resentment or even enmity towards an ex-friend. It is often better to let a temporary friendship die, or you may find yourself playing the undertaker, regretting why you revived the corpse, the dead body, in this case a dead friendship, in the first place. Friendship can never be a forced relationship; so, when it's over, let it go; when a friendship dies, lay it to rest.

3. Permanent friendship is the yearning of everyone who values friendship. Yet a lifelong friend is a treasure too few and far between.

After more than 40 years on Planet Earth, I can claim about 3 permanent friends so far, and one of them is my wife.

The average person so desires each and every friendship to be lifelong that she tries to force the issue and keep a friendship on life support, when it would be far better to eulogize the thing and just let it go to the trash bin of human relationships.

When you find a truly permanent friendship, the circumstances and dynamics of that relationship will serve to sustain it over the years. No need to repair a temp friend to make him or her perm.

If you are a typical person, over your lifetime, you will meet and make many seasonal friends, many temporary friends, but very few permanent friends.