Recently I’ve been a bit worried. It has mostly been out of my mind until the last few days. Over the last several months or more I’ve felt as though my best friend and I of the last ten years have been growing more and more distant. Meanwhile my friendship with his partner has been growing in its stead.
I don’t want to publicly analyze their relationship any more than I need to for processing this. It seems though he doesn’t have a consistently safe regular space to be emotionally vulnerable. I have this fear that every time I inquire into his internal state, unless it is directly related to his external state (including his environment), I am driving a wedge between us. I am well aware that emotional work can be exhausting for men at the best of times – let alone while physically exhausted on a daily basis.
How to repair the friendship, or how to remove the wedge is less clear to me. I don’t necessarily get exhausted by socially processing emotions. I do however only socially discuss once I have processed from a place of safe solitude. So in a way I couldn’t expect any less from him than to withdraw when and if it feels like I am forcefully prying into something he hasn’t figured out yet. Nor if I simply inquire into things that require substantial effort to articulate while he is exhausted.
The best I can do is allow the space and trust a fifteen year friendship won’t end over expressing a form of care over his present and future well-being.
It does leave me in a state of feeling a vast distance between me and my friend. And fearing I’ve caused irreparable damage to the relationship. In a way I am actually concerned about communicating with his partner as that could feasibly maintain the caution flag in his mind. What a complicated mess I find myself in.
I can’t help but wonder how much of it is just in my head. Is it just a feeling. Or is the feeling pointing at something to be more conscious of?
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