Giving up on the ghost

I was inspired to write this because of a HerStories Project writing exercise about friendship at midlife. I submitted it to them, but since it didn't get chosen, a close friend said I should share it anyway....

Fifteen years ago, the concept of “ghosting” didn’t exist yet. It happened to me though, and I didn’t know how to define it at the time….

I had a great friendship with a girl I connected with during the end of my second to last year of college (back in the late 90s). We had a lot of interests in common and so much to talk about. We’d e-mail all the time and even tell each other stuff that was deeply personal.

During the summer before my last year of college, she moved out to my neck of the woods, so I tried to connect her with some people to make her adjustment that much easier. One attempt was to introduce her to a guy as a potential love interest. That was a minor fail because she fell for his friend and they got married about two years later. For a while, we still had stuff to talk about, but less in common, as she was embarking on this whole grown-up, career-driven, married, suburban life and I was still at home with my parents after graduating college and having trouble finding jobs while in a dead-end dating relationship. It sometimes felt like she was judging my relationship at the time and looking down on me for it, but it also was a gentle nudge to say that it wasn’t the right relationship for me, even though I couldn’t see it yet.

Later, I was in a better place in my life (I had just started dating my husband and was living on my own with a stable job) and she became a mom around that same time. I was really happy for her. Things were good between us for a while, even though she was busy with the demands of motherhood.

That all changed about a year later, when she disappeared off the face of the planet. This was shortly after she and her toddler had visited me at my apartment one afternoon. I was a bit nervous because my place wasn’t child-proofed, but I still enjoyed having her child there. Afterward, I made efforts to stay in contact, but they were not reciprocated. The most contact I had from her was a short reply to a party invitation saying she wasn’t available to attend. After some deliberation, I eventually decided not to invite her to my wedding or any parties leading up to it.

I’m disappointed that we lost contact and that I never had an explanation as to why. I guess that’s her choice and I’ve made so many other good friends since then. Sometimes I wonder what things would have been like if we had stayed friends. A couple of years after she cut off contact, I had my first child. I imagine that we would have had a lot to talk about and that I would have asked her for parenting advice. Especially since both our firstborns are the same gender. Would we have stayed in touch when I moved to another state? Would we have been connected on social media? Fifteen years feels like a lifetime, and I’m only in my early forties. That’s a decade and a half of experiences we didn’t get to tell each other about.

What I also wonder is if she ever thinks of me. I try to keep her out of my mind, but things will come up that remind me of her. I still remember her birthday. Sometimes I see celebrities who look like her on TV or in movies. She sometimes appears in my dreams and we have conversations. And I wonder how I’d react if she ever realized the error of her ways and came back to me to ask forgiveness. I don’t see that ever happening, but I would hope I would have it in me to hear her out and forgive her.

I feel like being ghosted by this friend has colored the way I see my friendships since then. I have a hard time trusting the friendship, even when I probably have nothing to worry about. If I don’t hear from a friend for a certain amount of time, I get all paranoid and emotional about it and over-analyze everything I’ve said and done in their presence or via e-mail. I do have a lot of wonderful friends whom I trust, but there’s always that nagging feeling that I’ll do one little thing to mess up the friendship and it will be like this situation all over again. And given that I have so many fulfilling and meaningful friendships now, why do I still think of this one friend and what could have been? The one thing I have learned from this is to not ghost my friends. If it’s a mutual parting of ways, that’s one thing, but I won’t put a friend through what I have been through.

Some parts of this post were taken from a post I wrote in 2010: Friends 'til the "end"