When a Relationship Doesn’t Fit the Mold
Recently, my friend brought up the name of someone I hadn’t heard in a long time. She mentioned that this person was moving back to the city and they might hang out.
It brought a quick flutter to my stomach. The girl she mentioned was my best friend — who dumped me.
I mean dumped, in the same level of agony a romantic relationship holds — and this actually leads into the bigger issues that were present.
We had known each other since we were 5, with ebbs and flows in our relationship, but we became very co-dependent in college. We were both unhappy and felt like failures for not loving college.
Despite living in different cities, we knew more about each other’s lives than anybody else On social media, we obsessively pumped each other up, commenting about the others’ beauty, brains and kickass abilities. We were each other’s #1, there was no question about it.
By our senior year, I was really struggling. Anxiety, sexuality, and all kinds of things bubbled to the surface.
I wasn’t really sure about who I was, so our intense relationship really freaked me out. It felt like it had crossed into another space, like soulmates.
And that confused me, but I didn’t feel like I could talk about it with her. It touched on too many things that scared me. And she got to a point where she couldn’t handle my panic attacks, struggling to stay sane herself — and we abruptly stopped talking.
Fast forward five years later, now I’m re-analyzing it as I plan my wedding. To be clear, Not in a way that makes me question my relationship.
But like I said, I likened us to soulmates. So what does that mean?
Rhaina Cohen wrote a piece in The Atlantic investigating these relationships that operate outside the confines of romance or friendship.
‘Intimate friendships don’t come with shared social scripts that lay out what they should look like or how they should progress,’ writes the author, summing up my fears that I wasn’t ‘normal.’
How we choose to define our relationships, prioritizing them — we don’t have a lot of options. As much progress as we make, we still live in a world defined by labels and rules — we just keep coming up with new ones. And if something doesn’t fit under them, does that mean it belongs somewhere else and we’re just in denial?
I don’t think so, but I’m just starting to get to this realization after a lot of work learning to trust myself and stop looking for outward validation.
That’s why I’m writing this — not so someone else’s feelings are confirmed — but so they know other people are trying to operate in the gray confidently. Our relationships, friendships — they bring value because they are built to fit our needs and we should embrace that.
Forgive this cheesy metaphor but if you go to Home Depot, there’s hundreds of shades of gray to paint your living room with — why not do that with our lives too?
