The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

  The development director of a large corporation, whom I have known for years, told me recently that her best friend in high school had accosted her after class one day and said, “I’ve just realized that you are everything I don’t want to be”—and avoided her forever after. Her voice trembled when she recalled the incident. A Web designer recalled how an attractive and cosmopolitan woman she had met twelve years earlier when they were both new mothers precipitously stopped returning her phone calls and began making excuses to avoid lunch dates two years into their close relationship. “I run into her occasionally, and it really throws me,” she confessed. “I still mourn. I have a day of being disrupted when I see her.”

  I was in my third year of college when I experienced my first major, frighteningly slow-motion abandonment by an intimate friend, one that still baffles me. She and I, randomly assigned and wary freshman roommates in a tiny cell of a dorm room, discovered that we were soul mates the day we moved in. We became inseparable and resembled each other so much physically as well as psychically that people assumed we were sisters. There had been an older girl in high school that I’d loved and idolized (I chose my college because she went there) and maintained contact with for years until we grew apart, but I had never before known anyone who was as deliciously, naturally intimate as my roommate. We bought each other perfectly apt gifts, had similar quirky tastes—she introduced me to the short stories of Thomas Mann that I still love, and I showed her ancient Greek poetry. The ease of our comradeship was unprecedented for both of us; we looked at the world the same way. We both did not suffer fools, disdained hippies because they weren’t as intellectually serious as the Beats, visited each other’s parents, and exchanged notes in class that I copied into my diary, so full of her arch, pointed observations that I can still hear her voice when I read them. I was overjoyed to find by sheer luck someone who spoke my language and even added to my vocabulary when I had felt so alienated. At a critical time in the formation of my character, I heard my own voice more clearly because she was listening. Never had I opened myself so deeply or felt so intuitively understood and prized by a peer; my own mother once had this role in my life, but bitter adolescent struggles for independence had interfered with our communion.

  I was heartbroken when my roommate took a leave of absence to travel to Europe in our sophomore year (she never told me exactly why she went and may not have known herself), but we maintained our dialogue by letter. I kept nothing from her; describing my experiences in detail to her—mostly about passion and loss—was the way I understood them best. Her responses were comforting, empathic, and astute. When she came back to school in our third year, to my relief and delight, we decided to share an apartment. I could hardly wait.

  But, to my horror, she had changed. After only a few months, she turned distant, bitter, and cold, and then utterly silent. Even the expression on her face went from animated to sullen; it was as if an alien being had taken up residence in a familiar body. She would disappear for days without telling me where she had been and responded to any request of mine for explanation or conversation with contempt and hostility. I thought I knew everything about her, and now I knew nothing. Meals together, which had been such a pleasure, became monosyllabic and then ceased altogether. She hadn’t replaced me with anybody but retreated into a solitary world that she barred me from entirely. The only clue, which I failed to read at the time, was that she’d made it clear that she detested my new boyfriend, even though he liked her. I kept hoping that she was going through a phase and was too shocked and hurt to ask her to leave. It was bizarre and bewildering to go from virtually perfect accord when we lived five feet apart to excruciating enmity in a cavernous apartment, from shared lives to an armed camp. I was certain that I was the same, but she had become unrecognizable, unapproachable, a different species. Had she gotten a personality transplant? In the middle of our second semester, she precipitously moved out and left town for good, never saying good-bye, telling me where she was going, or paying her share of the rent. By then, her exit relieved me more than it grieved me; I never heard from her again.

  One can only speculate on the motivation for rejections like these. My corporate friend’s chum, I assume, turned on her after she came to project qualities she feared or disdained in herself onto her. Underground envy probably destroyed the relationship of the young mothers; their rupture happened after the Web designer had a second child (which she conceived effortlessly) and her sophisticated friend was unable to do the same. After my roommate’s departure, I spent a long time speculating on possible reasons she turned on me. Could she have felt abandoned or replaced in my affections, especially since her replacement was a man she considered beneath her, and rejected me in revenge? Did this situation evoke some trauma from earlier in her life that we had never discussed, such as her older sister’s—they also resembled each other physically and psychically—preferring a new boyfriend to her, thus ruining their special bond? Only in recent years have I considered that the real reason my doppelgänger repudiated me so cruelly might have been that she was in love with me. Such experiences are close to universal and do not fade but are rarely discussed.

  * * *

  One of life’s most powerful illusions is that real friendships—at least after the tumult of adolescence and early adulthood quiets down—last forever. Sentiments asserting this supposition adorn countless T-shirts, inspirational plaques, and greeting cards, which suggests how much we need to assert it because we want to believe it. A close friend is the latter-day representative and reedition of the unconditionally loving parent—always available, unchanging, all-forgiving—who never existed, and we have the same fantasies about the one as we do about the other; our lifelong quest for this unattainable ideal confirms one of Freud’s most profound observations: “The finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it.”2 Losing such a life companion evokes the earliest losses of trust. Like the models on which they are based, these bonds are more ambivalent and far less permanent and guaranteed than they seem; while lifelong bonds with friends do exist, for most people, there is a disconcerting rate of friend turnover over a lifetime.

  The wearing away, discarding, and creation of new friendships is a natural and continuous process, but when the fundamental ones, those that have become woven into your psyche, are severed, part of yourself is ripped away. When a lover leaves, the world empties of meaning; when a best friend does, you are diminished—at least temporarily—because the person who heard your true voice is no longer listening, and you can no longer see your undistorted reflection in the mirror of the other’s eyes.

  Later life experience provides opportunities to recover from these ruptures even if it does not insulate us from the pain they cause. At least after the first few times, you have more resilience and a more solid sense of self that allows you to find others after your own heart; after every lost friendship in my life, I have found a new, unexpected friend—sometimes sooner, sometimes later—to sustain me in ways that are both similar to my erstwhile one and completely unique. Along the way, you also realize that you were probably not your former friend’s only casualty. This, and the recognition that the other person or the relationship has changed irreparably, allows the mourning process to begin.

  It is the false friends of adulthood—those who start off as true friends and then inexplicably convert—who shock us the most and grieve us most deeply, as deeply as lovers and spouses. Such relationships can implode mysteriously, even after decades of intimacy. These are the ones who are supposed to stand by you when all else fails; when your beloved, your family, even your health, abandon you, they sustain you. They are an unassailable bastion in an unpredictable world. Their desertion dashes the myth of permanence, of guaranteed trust—forever, for some people. The details of the endgame burn into memory—the last conversation that cannot be unsaid, the coldness that replaced the warmth you counted on, the power to make you laugh on a day you had rued. When such a confidante forsakes you, it u
ndermines your hope that there is always some comfort to be had. It is easier to accept the death of love—even death itself—than that such a friend can turn away forever and no longer wish you well. Even if you eventually find another truer and more stable companion, the original one can have no exact replacement, because people are not fungible.

  These ruptures are different from the fading of shallower ties based primarily on proximity in school or jobs or stages of life, which end as interests and experiences diverge—one moves away or marries or has a child or a successful career, and the other doesn’t. Those endings seem natural; the traumatic ones are against nature, cut off even though we expect them to continue as long as we do.

  What underlies the death of serious friendships? Subtle envy and competition (always underground elements in even the more enduring bonds) eat away at trust; changes in fortune that could not be anticipated create barriers that eventually become unbroachable. The causes may never be known, but they shake one’s emotional foundation and undermine a cherished and tenacious assumption: that there are at least a few people whom you can always count on no matter what, that their love transcends any conflict, that you can always talk it over, that you are as indispensable to them as they are to you. Such a friend is more than a latter-day parent or manifestation of an ideal self; he or she becomes an auxiliary self. Part of you is destroyed when the other leaves you.

  Even in maturity, we maintain the fantasy that we have fewer fantasies about friends, whom we expect to be more akin, than we do about lovers, which makes it more excruciating when we are proved wrong. Their role is to accompany us throughout life, and we think we know that we will never be alone as long as they are in the world. Even when it happens, it still seems inconceivable that someone who can finish your sentences and elevate your mood, who has been at your side for decades, suddenly cannot or will not understand you. How can it be that your lives will go on, and end, without each other? I still find it hard to accept that the most intimate friend I shall ever have, my soul mate for a quarter century, is lost to me forever, our bond severed irreparably. We cherish the notion that we choose our friends more rationally than our lovers, without the pressure of desire. No longer being able to reach them makes us doubt that we can count on anything, including our own judgment.

  ONCE BURNED, FOREVER SHY

  The lure of friendship and its rewards are too great for most people to resist seeking replacements, even after grievous injury. But returning to the fray means accepting vulnerability and taking another chance, typically multiple times, which not everyone is willing to do. After I lost my beloved roommate at twenty, I longed for new friends and found several, never as inseparable as she and I had been, but warm and sustaining; additional intimacies and betrayals—by friends of both sexes—came later and also left me wounded but not inaccessible. The woman who was dismissed so viciously in high school by the girl who suddenly wanted to be nothing like her did not retreat from seeking and finding others who appreciated her afterward. However, the mother who was dropped when she had a second child essentially swore off making new friends because the rebuff resonated so deeply for her and exposed fault lines in her self-esteem. “I had a sense I didn’t measure up—she was somebody I wanted to be like,” she said. “I mourned it for a long time.” With a mixture of bravado and self-doubt, she added, “I don’t have a best friend now; is that really what everybody needs? I’m very extroverted and have a wide circle of acquaintances, but they’re kind of secondary. I’m close to my sisters, but they live across the country. I have my husband. I keep other people at arm’s length.” Not all rejections are created equal, and they do not all have equivalent effects on the victim.

  Abandonment by a soul mate brings out extremes in people; some rush out to replace a lost friend just as they do a lost lover, and others retreat to lick their wounds before venturing forth again. But a few rare people seem remarkably exempt from the anguish of losing this kind of love and the urgency to replace it—at least on the surface. They decide that the best way to prevent a recurrence is never again to get deeply involved, never to show too much or need too much from a friend. Such people differ from those who are genuinely unable to experience closeness; they have done it, gotten burned, and retreated for good into a simulacrum of autonomy that becomes a badge of courage. Emotional self-sufficiency doesn’t feel like a prison to them but a wise and rational choice. Is it possible—is it ever desirable—to swear off friendship? Who does this? What is lost and what, if anything, is gained?

  * * *

  Rachel Carlson, a fifty-eight-year-old reporter for a prestigious magazine, looks like excellent friend material—smart, attentive, reliable, and warm. She has a devoted husband and two sane grown children, as well as colleagues whom she admires and whose company she enjoys. But there is something held back and inaccessible about her; a relationship with her does not significantly deepen over time, a fact she acknowledges uneasily. She rarely initiates contact or shares confidences. By her own admission, Rachel has not had a “real” close woman friend for forty-two years and wants none now. This, she asserts, is a matter of choice and a point of pride, even with its pitfalls.

  It was not always so. The daughter of a pioneering woman journalist, Rachel naturally gravitated to working on her high school newspaper. By her senior year, she had become editor in chief, and she selected her two dearest friends as her news and feature editors. But in the middle of the fall semester, they simply stopped showing up for duty, offering no explanation and leaving her to put out the paper single-handedly. Her erstwhile deputies also stopped speaking to her for the rest of the year. “My best friends stabbed me in the back; it was horrifyingly lonely,” she said—quite an admission for someone not given to hyperbole. She attributes their abrupt decampment to her inexperience as a leader. “It’s hard when you have nobody to teach you how to lead your peers,” she said, and, judging herself as harshly as she judged them, added, “I’m sure I was really bad at it, and they must have resented me.” They said nothing, and she noticed nothing, until the damage was irreparable.

  After that, Rachel rejected friendship (at least the kind in which you confide in and rely on others) but continued to pursue journalism with gusto for the rest of her life. “The experience made me wary. Even at the time, I saw that I was okay by myself, and since then, I’ve never counted on friends emotionally; I don’t trust them, and I don’t need them, and I’m too afraid to get hurt again. But when I went to college and worked on a paper with a real organization to back me up, it was nirvana.” A well-functioning institution proved more reliable than other people.

  Now she is sociable but guarded. She maintains strict limits on what she seeks and what she gives; her connections with colleagues sound more like arm’s-length acquaintanceships. “I do more listening and less opening up. I don’t want to be dependent on anybody, so I tend to deal with stuff myself,” she says. Rachel recognizes that she is missing something and that her self-containment creates barriers. (“When I disclose, I’m vulnerable, so I avoid being intimate. It makes relationships one-way—I fear I’m a lousy friend as a result.”) Still, she never questions the need for such drastic measures. Her reticence extends even to her “unemotional” husband, whom she turns to only for advice, not consolation.

  Rachel understands that the perfectionism that has served her well professionally also makes her prey to depression and insecurity and that she has forfeited forever the antidote to self-criticism that a real friend can offer. “I’m my own worst critic, and not having anybody to temper that can get really difficult,” she admits. “I can get pretty depressed, and I don’t see a way to accept help, so I really try not to be needy. The prospect of hanging hopes on another person and not getting enough, or any, help back just seems awful to me. I wouldn’t trust anybody else with my happiness, even though the loss makes me feel empty. It’s much safer to cultivate inner strength instead.” The deepest part of a loving friendship is never to be hers, a price she
willingly pays for self-protection.

  It is as though she became, at an early age, a fervent adherent of the principles Ralph Waldo Emerson enunciated in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance: “Trust thyself,” “Live wholly from within,” “The voices which we hear in solitude … grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world,” “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” I found that essay thrilling when I read it as a seventeen-year-old, but I interpreted it as a paean to individualism, not solipsism—charting your own course rather than traveling alone.

  Assertions of self-sufficiency aside, Rachel never forgot the dark days at her high school newspaper and was gratified when the opportunity arose to show the culprits that she was beyond caring. “One of my nemeses came up to me at our twenty-fifth reunion and apologized, and I just laughed it off,” she told me proudly. It reminded me of someone having to demonstrate to a former boyfriend who had left her that she was perfectly happy without him.

  Why did Rachel view her wretched experience with the other budding journalists not as a result of immaturity, bad luck, or poor judgment but as a defining moment, a calamity to be avoided forever after, even at the risk of a lifetime of unassuageable loneliness and self-doubt? Such an abandonment would haunt anyone, but most people her age eventually take another chance on friendship, just as they do after an excruciating early love affair and accept the loss as a natural and inevitable part of growing up, not a peril so devastating that it should never be risked again. Most of the women and the men I have known have endured things like this and worse, but they all have rebounded rather than retreated. For her, however, eschewing friendship was the only possible conclusion. It seemed automatic—almost predestined by her character—as though she had forearmed herself by embracing a tough, fundamental truth. “It was soul crushing, but it really doesn’t hurt anymore,” she claimed. “I made it not hurt even then; walls went up. A door closed. I’ll never let anybody get through that door again. Even though I know it’s a little sad, I’m really glad to know I learned the lesson that friends are crutches, the enemies of my autonomy.”