Maybe we should acknowledge that a bad friend, an unreliable friend, isn’t a friend
I’ve occasionally been told by women I know that I’m a good friend. I’m pleased, and don’t dare say that, in general, I tend not to put next to the word “friend” adjectives that refer to a hierarchy of feelings or reliability. They seem pointless to me. I would never say, for example, “she’s my best friend”, for I would have to deduce from it that I have friends I like less; others I don’t trust so much; others with whom I feel less kinship. And if I did, it would occur to me to wonder: why do I consider myself the friend of these women? Why do I consider them my friends?
The word “friend”, in the presence of hierarchies of this type, isn’t apt. Maybe we should acknowledge that a bad friend, an unreliable friend, isn’t a friend. Maybe, to be clear, even if it’s painful, we should learn to say not “a friend” but “a woman I spend time with, or have spent time with”. The problem is that it comforts us to have many friends – it makes us feel popular, loved, less alone. We therefore prefer to describe as “friends” women with whom we have little or nothing in common, but with whom, if necessary, we fill a void: we spend an afternoon in a cafe, we drink a glass of wine, talking about nothing in particular. Never mind if later, at the first opportunity, we call them gossips, snakes, sour, touchy.
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