Goodbye, old friend

That was beautiful if difficult to read, I'm sure we've all been there in one way or another. Thank you for taking the time to share that.

I know that it's hard, as humans, not to dwell on the negative but it sounds like you guys did share a beautiful, years-long, relationship. I can't quite see that it was glaringly transactional if you still spent years together after stopping reading each others material but relationships, as well as life, can be very complex. More than one thing can be true at once. Perhaps there were transactional aspects of your relationship but that there was still a very true and deep undercurrent of friendship underpinning it all.

My only advice (and I acknowledge any is unsolicited) is try not to be too hard on either him or yourself. For all you know, being vulnerable with you about his mental health may have been too much for him and he's pulled away out of shame or embarrassment. Or perhaps he found himself in a rut and needed to reorient his life and maybe that sadly didn't include you. I'm in no way dismissing his avoidance but only advocating that you remain charitable to him and yourself until you understand otherwise.

But what you're doing sounds so right to me. One of the few healthy powers that we actually have in relationships is to set boundaries and that's what it sounds like you're doing here. It is entirely okay for you to pull away and I commend you for being there when or if he returns, and that might mean just being there to hear his apology before ultimately deciding you don't want to continue the relationship or maybe you just want to reduce it's importance to you or the change the way you approach the friendship from how you did before.

I think it is, however, important not to accuse him of using you or the relationship being transactional. Whenever you do talk to him, remember that if anything his actions made you feel as if the relationship were transactional. It's about how what he did made you feel, not actually labeling his intent because you don't actually know what it was. In fact, maybe once your feelings have settled a little more consider reaching out to him about how you're feeling and a simple request to understand what's going on with him. At the very least you might get some clarity, if not more, or maybe you never hear back and you know to walk away yourself - however much that may hurt.

Everyone knows men are bad at friendship. I know I am bad at friendship.

Men were not always this way, the narratives modern society projects on us makes us this way. Men used to be affectionate, close, and open with each other. Being bad at friendships is a subconscious choice we're making when we submit to modern society. You have the choice to be good at friendship, even if your friend is himself not able to reciprocate. You have a choice to the good friend, even if that means coming to the conclusion to wallk away.

Sorry to hear man. I don't know if it's any consolation, but in the US having kids is often a big fork in the road for many friendships as life's path diverges pretty hard.

Goodbye, ex friendship. That was a beautiful eulogy to a large and important part of your life. It sounds like it was a formative part of your life and worth shedding tears over.

[You did not ask for advice and I will redact it]

I hope you find closure, and peace. What a wonderful number of gifts you will have ready for your son: your writing, your gentle mentorship, a treasure chest of your writings, your experience with building and maintaining male adult friendship, good respectful working relationships, forbearance, kindness, consideration, and both non transactional giving forgiving.

You may never know, but this crucible may one day prepare your heart for blameless, patient and gentle waiting if your son ever wanders (hopefully) briefly from under your wings.

...or a useless rant.

Rants are not useless. And in this case, you were effectively used. Whether he did it knowingly or doesn't know how to build proper relationships otherwise doesn't matter. In the end, those are his actions.

And when that happens, it makes sense that you needed a space to express these feelings.

Maybe there's a gender aspect here, but this happens with women just as much as men. I've watched as female friends of mine had decades long friendships just fizzle out because their friend met a new group of people and decided the original friend wasn't part of their life anymore.

It's happened to me too, and it really sucks. I have one friend who I get along with because he shares my interests more than anyone else I've ever met. We work in the same field, have the same hobbies, are interested in the same aspects of the work and the hobbies, and although I have lots of other friends I'm closer with, I'm not similar to them in the same way I am with this friend, so I always feel drawn to him because we can nerd out for hours upon hours talking about things that most of my other friends would get bored of within five minutes.

He has a new group of friends and over the past couple of years has drifted away, unfortunately. He answers texts about half the time, rarely ever hangs out anymore, and I feel replaced by his new "cool" crowd that he absolutely under no circumstances allows me to interact with. It sucks, but it happens to everyone at some point I think.

I think you're better off just focusing your energy on other people. It's never too late to make new friends, and sometimes you end up being friends with people you could never have imagined getting along with before you met them

Is what it is. But I do think this may be overthinking things

He has an online presence, and I can see that he takes part in multiple social events related to his career as a writer. Book launches, lectures, online talks, academic events. Surrounded by people, calmly smiling and perfectly content.

As opposed to this being an indication that this person is a two-faced Machiavellian who only talks to people for their benefit, networking for your career is both necessary and the most beneficial to publicly display on social media. This can just be selection bias.

Also, I wonder if they may just not want to meet your son? It may be worth seeing if they just want to hang out at a more third party place like a restaurant.

Yeah, lou. I just wrote on the male friendship thread about walking away from most of them in my 50s. This business we’re in doesn’t help. There’s something specific to the cutthroat nature of the entertainment industry that reinforces this behavior.

My daughter is in film school in SoCal. She was filming her final project and having trouble finding a location. So I called some old friends to see if anyone could help, including my old producing partner.

We had been in college together and after school I had become a playwright in San Francisco while he had become an intern at MGM. When Hollywood called, I asked him for guidance and we worked together pretty well for a dozen years.

He picked up the phone last month and was happy and enthusiastic to hear from me. He told me how his family is doing and how Covid almost wrecked his career. He told me stories of being on the front lines of the latest writer strike and how he still hasn’t recovered. We talked about seeing each other soon.

Then… Nothing. He ghosted me. I slowly realized that our warm conversation had been something of an interview. I was always the idea guy in the relationship and he had been waiting to hear my latest idea. But I came asking a favor instead. So I get nothing.

Transactional. Yeah. If you aren’t advancing the career of someone in Hollywood, then you are useless deadweight that needs to be jettisoned. I don’t expect to hear from him again.

Sorry about your old friend. My daughter is starting to learn these lessons now. She is a very sweet and emotional community builder of a producer and in Hollywood everyone thinks her efforts are some manipulative game she’s playing. That fucking place.

Good on you for trying to keep the friendship alive. In my experience it's usually the ones that start romantic relationships or families who suddenly and unabashedly forget about their friends or stop taking friendship seriously.

I'm the kind of person that frequently interacts with friends in a way that might seem transactional in the moment — the most frequent example being trying to find people to play a game with. Despite, I like to think of myself as a perfectly viable friend outside of gaming circles and I can only hope I don't come across the wrong way when I'm just obsessed with a game.

I had good friends that were only good friends when there was circumstance. Going to the same high school, college, language course - I have friends from each stage of my life that trickled away but a few stayed the way you hoped your friend would.

Maybe you put in too much effort, I hope you don’t feel resentment.

For the friends that metaphorically stayed but physically moved away, meeting up is always as if we never parted.

I know you said he doesn’t really reply or answer, but I would suggest being blunt and straight up asking why the relationship has changed. It might offer you the closure you need, whether he responds or not.

He may not have a valid excuse, and it may still be time to let the relationship go- but you have been carrying this weight for a long time and this is a good way to ease that load. He may not respond, and that will sting- but then you can be absolutely certain that it was 100% his fault and he is the one who dropped the ball.

It is easy for the brain to circle back and loop over these hurt feelings and painful memories over and over again trying to understand the unknown. Sometimes you have to confront what’s been left unsaid to move forward.

Good luck, and take care.

Maintaining friendships can be a difficult prospect for someone who is an introvert and/or suffers from high levels of anxiety. When life circumstances of a friend changes (bringing in new friend groups, starting a family, etc.), that can compound the difficulty--now I may be expected to meet and interact with new people, may have to subject myself to more travel than I am comfortable with in order to meet up, the normal predictable routines we fell into as friends no longer apply, and so on. Too much time between contact (which probably happened a lot due to the pandemic) can also lead to additional anxiety about reaching out after so much time has passed. I think these are some of the reasons I have few/no friends--for me personally the benefits of having close friends is heavily outweighed by the amount of energy drain and anxiety that maintaining those kinds of friendships over long periods of time requires. I'm not saying this necessarily describes your friend, since it sounds like he may be pretty social otherwise (I also socialize when necessary, it just takes a lot out of me), but just figured I'd offer the perspective of someone who could easily see himself playing that same role in the life of others. I suck at maintaining friendships, but entirely due to my own personal faults and generally nothing to do with aspects of the friends or relationships we had.

I'm of the opinion that all friendships are transactional. Not always in an obvious way, but there's a give and a take in every relationship. It's a pretty callous and perhaps bleak way to look at the world, but that's who I am I guess.

I like to hang out with people who make me laugh, make me happy, and make me feel good. In return, I try to do the same. That, at it's most basic, is a transaction. We trade stories, we share food, and we exchange hugs. In doing so, we are all participating in transactions, but hopefully we all got more out of it than we put in (surplus friendship). If something upsets that balance (e.g. having a kid, moving across the country), the relationship changes. Sometimes it dies, but it can also just evolve into a new form.

No one wants to hang out with the guy who mysteriously disappears every time it's his turn to buy a round of drinks for the table. Maybe they're otherwise a fun person, and you still want to hang out with them. But you're probably going to stop inviting them to meetups where they'll be put in a position to skip out on their side of the transaction. Not all social interactions are as obviously transactional as this, but most social norms have developed to a point where you don't have to be aware of the transaction itself behind the norm.

Sometimes we're having a bad day and we need more from someone else than we can give them. Sometimes we don't want to participate at all. If the relationship is strong, that's fine, there's a surplus of friendship. If the relationship is new, this is frequently damaging to the relationship, because you haven't yet built up a surplus. But if someone is having a bad day, every day, people will start to think of them as draining, and this can kill even previously strong friendships.

When you look at one-sided or abusive relationships, it's often one person trying very hard to do all these things for the other, and their actions not being reciprocated. It's easy to see when a relationship is imbalanced, because if you break everything down into a transaction, there's only entries on the one side of the ledger. That's the sign of a bad relationship.

Even this comment is transactional. I'm mostly writing it for myself, to put my thoughts into words so that I can understand them better. Frequently I write a huge comment like this and then delete it because once I've got it in words, it's good enough for me. But this time I'm sharing it with you (and the rest of Tildes), in the hopes that someone else will read it and either tell me I'm a either a visionary genius or an idiot (or more likely, something in between). And in their response, they'll provide me with feedback (their half of the transaction), which I can take, incorporate into my friendship hypothesis, and improve it.