The Friendship Bulls-eye

Every December, whenever I start thinking about the year ahead, I end up mining the year behind me for clues as to what I should focus on. Inevitably, that always leads to analyzing my relationships. And, for me, that always winds up being a study of the gap between expectations versus reality.

Only, this year seems to have brought a scintilla of maturity with it. I seem to have gained the ability to accept things as they are with less of a fight. Most adults like to call the process I’m in “personal growth,” but I think I’ll stay with the tried and true term I used when I was a kid. I’m “growing up” and probably will be until I die.

This year, instead of stressing over how some relationships aren’t what they were supposed to be, I simply cried over what feels like a loss whether there really had been a loss or not. And, I actually let myself feel the fear of fading relationships without going into a kind of denial that it was happening at all.

However, it took me a little while to accept that what I feared most was my being content, for the most part, with direction in which some of the fading friendships seemed to be heading. In other words, I was almost happy my struggle to make something last past its expiration date was over.

Moreover, I was able to be happy about the room that had been made in my life for the old relationships that fit best, that probably should get more of my time, and for the new relationships that have come my way.

All this grown-up acceptance led me and this measuring, quantifying, chart-loving brain of mine to create the friendship bulls-eye.

I drew a bulls-eye on a piece of paper and put my name at the center. Then I added friend’s and family’s names on it at varying distances from the center, indicating how close or how far I felt each person was to me

Then, I put a dot or an arrow next to each name. I used the dots to indicate that the relationship is stationary whether the name is close to mine or far from mine. The arrows I put next to some names point either toward the center, where my name is, or away from the center which would indicate whether the relationships are growing or fading.

I made all these determinations within a couple of minutes, based on pure instinct without thinking about it much.

After taking the time to mourn the gap, between what is and what I think there should be once again now that it’s on paper, I decided to figure out why the relationships are the way they are, why they’re moving in the directions they’re moving and why some aren’t moving at all. I wrote down each persons name below the bulls-eye and listed events we’d shared or issues that have come up between us that might explain their position on the bulls-eye.

Much was revealed. About my friends, even my fading friends, I found out that they aren’t going away because they’re bad people. Some just don’t fit anymore and it is likely that some never did.

While most human beings, say they have the same values (honesty, sacrifice, justice, etc.), I’ve come to realize that the order in which these values are held is important to me. The order is important because we can’t all do these things perfectly no matter how much integrity we have or we’d like to have. Values toward the top of ones list may never be compromised while those toward the bottom may be...justified, rationalized, or even thrown away when they get but so inconvenient.* Consequently, people whose values are ordered more like mine are, for better or worse, are closer to me.

Specifically, I found out that the people that don’t come clean about their own flaws aren’t close to me as they should NOT be. I also found out that one friend is evasive as a matter of habit and spending time with her only when I want to go out and have a good time, and not when I am having a deep personal problem, is a good thing. I found out that people who leave things out in order to give an alternate and false impression really are lying and deciding not to participate in this sort of behavior isn’t just a personal preference of mine.

One new friend seems content to be distant. I wish that weren’t so, but maybe she knows something I don’t about how many friends she needs or how good a fit we’d be as closer friends. Who knows?

In any case, what was most interesting about this exercise was what I learned about myself.

I’ve known for a while that I like to fix people and have actively refrained from doing so, but I didn’t know that some of my relationships weren’t based on much else--and therefore it’s time for them to fade to the background.

I also learned that part of the acceptance that I’ve gained has been based on my learning to let what people say go in one ear and out the other (no matter what their relationship to you) while paying closer attention to what they do. My feelings used to get hurt quite often in years past because I had the tendency to the opposite. Nowadays, I am not nearly as engaged with people who say they are close to me as I am with people who act out their closeness on a regular basis.
. And in the final psychoanalysis of me within my relationships, I have discovered that I believe that the concept of “equally-yolked” probably applies to more than just the number of religions within one marriage.

The friendship grid has enabled me to make some decisions:

1) I’ve decided to be grateful to God for the friendships that are moving toward me and have prayed that He will help me enrich those relationships by being a better friend.
2) I’ve decided to let some of the fading friendships slide to wherever they land while hoping they may change for the better some day.
3) I’ve decided to try to put the brakes on other fading friendships before they get so far off the bulls-eye that we don’t even exchange cards at Christmas time, wishing one another well.

I believe that doing the friendship bulls-eye every year and making New Years decisions instead of New Years resolutions will help me keep my eye on the following ball for duration of my life:

A friend is as a friend does and a family is as a family does too...and that’s okay.


(I like to think I can just say I didn’t do X like I should have because I just didn’t have it in me at the time about the bottom dwelling values or about minor issues within higher values. For example: A woman at a movie theatre caught me sobbing over a particular movie that probably wasn’t that moving for most folkes. When she comforted me and asked me when so-and-so died, I said 6 months ago instead of the truth—which was so-and-so seems dead to me sometimes. I didn’t want to go into it with a stranger and when I was on the spot, I couldn’t think of anything except a lie within the 2 to 3 seconds I had to answer. I failed at truth-telling. I simply failed. Some people don’t have the ability to say this about themselves—but that’s another blog for another time)