I just broke up with a friend of afew years.
We met in college, she changed my life for the better, I'll never have a friend like that again.
3ish years ago she moved to a different state, we haven't hung out in person in forever. We talk on whatsapp all the time. Recently she got into some trouble and asked me for help, I should have refused. Not like it would have made a difference, we haven't talked in weeks.
I feel like I get "going through a hard time" better than everyone. Things suck right now but I have such a deep comprehension of how much worse-off I can be, I'm happy I'm not starving.
But I still manage to reach out, I still manage to grow and change and do new things. Why can't she, why can't my friends stop being so broke-minded when it comes to me.
Everything I want to do is 10x harder or 10x more expensive simply bc I suggest it but when others bring up the same ideas it's fine. How can it be impossible to manage in 10x difficulty when I do it all the time?
I cannot be special, that's against the rule that everybody is special therefore nobody's special therefore I cannot be special. So how is it possible that I can feel so aweful all the time and still drag myself to go out and have fun even though I'm at a bar alone. I can do it. It's not hard. Just go out and get a drink and stand there and be ok.
If you're feeling sad and a friend texts you then you have to text back, if you asked a friend for help and they helped you should owe them back atleast how hard it was for you to ask. You should have to give back something. And if you don't what does that mean for me? Do I gain the privilege to do something? Should I do something about it? What can be done?
So I decided to break up with her because even if I didn't help she can go months without talking to me and that's the same as not having friends to me so what? Why is it different? Why shouldn't I make something out of this empty pipe between us and fill it with a push, people have pushed me out, does that mean that I get the privilege to push people out too? Should I (I already did)?
All I know about making friends at my age is that the ROI is bad bc the cost is actually that daunting. The benefits have not increased since childhood but the difficulty has. And at some age I passed a threshold where the difficulty line rose above the benefit line and it's just going up and up and I can't stop it, I can't get ahead of it.
I can't do anything but loose people. My last friend is married, she'll be having kids in afew years, she's on the other side of the planet. We're effectively not even friends anymore but what can I say about it? Tell her to slow down for me?
I want community
I want my old cat back
I want to be a child again because I can't face an inevitable future where I know how much less I will have.
I mean, it's bullshit.
It is harder, but that's not the same as impossible.
It is, however, true that you can't make old friends. You have to luck into that. To get an old friend, you have to get a new one and do the work. You have to figure out if that work is worth it at some point as well.
Thing is, while all relationships need to be balanced, they don't have to be totally equal. It doesn't have to be 1:1 on every specific aspect. As an example, you might be the one that has to reach out more often, but they might be the sort to go the extra mile when they're available. You might do more emotional support, they might do more activity based support. All that really matters is that a given friend be active in the friendship, and that both have needs being met. If won't ever be the case that a given friend can meet every need because nobody can perfectly meet another's needs that way.
It is also much harder to maintain a friendship when one person or the other moves. Believe it or not, really deep and meaningful relationships can form long distance. It's when the people involved have built their relationship on in-person things that then disappear that you run into trouble. There's a lot to be said for physical presence in relationships, and losing that aspect is very, very difficult to recover from. It's possible, just way harder.
But when you build long distance, you start without those assumptions, so the lack of physical presence means less. Mind you, you can run into trouble if/when things transition to an in person interaction because a different set of assumptions is in place that can be disrupted, but that's tangential to what's bothering you currently.
You're right though; if a friend can't at least give support in bad times, are they really a friend? That is part of the point of social relationships, that there's a tacit understanding of mutual assistance, regardless of what form that takes. If one party isn't carrying that basic idea, then balance breaks entirely.