T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the cruelest month — January is. It’s cold and bleak and days end in premature darkness. And worst of all, it’s the month when friends start to dump you.
OK, maybe not you, but definitely me. Here was my January dump tally: two ex-girlfriends, one lover, five friends (three I thought were close friends) and one person I never wanted to be friends with in the first place.
And get this: I do what’s called “befriending” for a local charity. It involves calling people who feel lonely and isolated on the phone and talking with them. The woman I’d been befriending for over two years suddenly said to me, “Please don’t call me anymore. This relationship isn’t working for me,” and just hung up. There were no thanks. No goodbye. Just instant disconnection. There’s nothing so hurtful as being unfriended by someone who doesn’t have any friends.
When I complained to my last friend standing, he told me, “You’re being paranoid. People are just busy — it’s nothing personal.” We like to tell ourselves, Yes, that’s it — they still love me and they’re still my friend; they’re just a little busy right now! So relax. Phew.
I’m sorry to spoil your little delusional fantasy but the fact is, we make time for the people we really want to see — and we leave the rest behind. So actually, it is personal. Your friends are seeing other friends — they’re just not seeing you.
And often it’s not a conscious or cruel dumping — it’s the dump of indifference. Slowly you drift away from each other. At first you try to maintain the friendship with catch-up lunches. Then you have the catch-up drink followed by the catch-up coffee. At some point the catch-up is replaced by the give-up and you float out of their lives like an abandoned helium balloon.
Of course, if they ran into you, they’d be happy to see you; they just don’t want to make the effort. And by the way, when you have that chance encounter and they don’t say “call me” or “I will call you,” that’s a clear sign the friendship is dead.
How do I feel about that? I admit there was time when having been dumped by a friend would have produced a six-week sulk and a solemn vow never to speak to that fucker again. Now I’m more curious than furious. Why would someone want to stop being friends with me? Is it because I’m needy, neurotic, too eccentric and overemotional? If that was a problem for them, why would they have become friends with me in the first place? I’ve always been that way.
Or worse still: is it possible that they find me boring? That thought terrifies me. I grew up in a showbiz family where everyone was trying to be funny and entertaining all the time. My family motto was: Be funny. Be interesting. Or be gone. The worst thing you could be was boring. It was worse than being bad in bed or having bad breath.
But now I wonder if everyone — eventually — gets boring to someone. Even great raconteurs and wits run out of material eventually; it’s the entropy of entertainment. Did close friends of Oscar Wilde think: One more of Oscar’s witticisms and I’ll scream! Did Gore Vidal’s think: Please, not another anecdote about Tennessee Williams or his falling-out with Jack Kennedy! Toward the end of her life Dorothy Parker thought the great wits at the Algonquin Round Table were dull and shallow.
I had one very close female friend — or so I thought — who one day just decided to end our friendship. At first, I thought it was because I was boring, but the curious thing is that all we ever did was talk about her. So that can’t be it. You can never bore a narcissist — as long as you’re talking about them.
You have to be married to someone to get really bored with them. This is the kind of boredom you can’t defeat. It’s the product of time and familiarity. I was married to my first wife for ten years and I was never bored — but she got bored with me. The thing is you don’t actually spend that much time with a friend to get bored so in theory it shouldn’t happen.
I should confess that since the start of the New Year I’ve let a few friends go and I feel bad about it. I didn’t reply to their texts. But what are you meant to do? There’s no real etiquette for ending a friendship. With a marriage you get a divorce, but with friends… what? You just don’t call them back. There’s nothing worse than seeing old friends because they’re old friends and not because you actually enjoy each other’s company anymore.
The one good thing about being famous is that you never get dumped by friends. Nobody says, That boring George Clooney keeps calling! I can’t face doing lunch with him again. I’m going to have to dump his dull ass.
Well, thank heavens January is gone. It’s now warmer and the days are longer. But I’m still waiting for friends to call!
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2024 World edition.
