My best friend got engaged last week. She goes home to visit her family about once every 18 months or so, and this time she brought her boyfriend, a lively Scottish man with a playful sense of humor, with her. Everyone seemed to know what it was about: her family and friends on both sides of the world apparently all saw it coming, so when she made her phone calls to all her girlfriends, they squealed with delight and rejoiced with her that she would finally be joining the marriage bandwagon.
That is, everyone except me.
I can't really say that I was surprised, either - as soon as I saw that it was her calling, I knew what was up - but when she told me before leaving that she was not ready to get engaged and had no intention of doing so on the trip, I (perhaps foolishly) believed her. So when she rattled off the story of his rather unimpressive proposal (in her parents' garage, with no romance or fanfare), made in spite of the fact that she had asked him to wait, I held back my internal cringe, smiled, and offered a muted congratulations.
We had a fight about it over Skype a few days later.
I have been doing a lot of hard thinking about what it means to be a good and faithful friend, and trying to figure out if those two are somehow mutually exclusive. The aforementioned friend has always said that she believes that "honesty is the best policy" in just about every situation. While I have pretty much always disagreed with her, I did believe it to be true within friendships...until now.
Case study #1: When I was in college, I made a friend while living in a Catholic community house the summer after my freshman year. She was a beautiful girl, gentle and cheerful, and it seemed like nearly every guy at the university Catholic student center wanted to date her. Somehow, she managed to pick the absolute worst one. He belittled her, disrespected her (hell, he showed up over an hour late to their first two dates), repeatedly broke his promises to her, and one night she even showed me an e-mail exchange between him and some woman he'd met online that indicated that he was cheating on her. All of her roommates and her sisters told her over and over again that he was bad news and that she deserved better. And she cut us all out of her life and stayed with him, until she dropped out of college and moved back home, and her father finally confronted her about it. Now she is married to a much better man, but it was over a year before she started talking to me again.
Case study #2: After moving back to Texas from Cincinnati, Joel and I were happy to plug back into our old group of friends (and make some new ones, too). We were all a pretty close-knit group, and in groups like that there are very few secrets. One of my girlfriends was really distraught when she and I discovered (what we thought was) really strong evidence that a mutual friend was cheating on his girlfriend. Several of us went around in circles trying to decide what to do about it, until I finally decided I was tired of it all, and just called her. I told her that I didn't know anything for certain, and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it just didn't feel right. The end result: they both stopped talking to me, moved in together, and eventually got married.
Sometimes we fear that our friends are in questionable, harmful, or destructive relationships, and sometimes we know they are in them. But does it ever do any good to point it out? Does it make you a good friend to be the voice of reason, or to present evidence of infidelity, or even to voice concerns? The logical answer seems to be yes, but now I am not so sure. In all of my experience, and in all the stories I have ever heard told like the ones above, the person confronted always chooses their significant other, without fail. Never once has someone taken the counsel of their friend to heart. Instead, more often than not, they shut them out of their life completely.
Back to my recently engaged friend. She has only really known him well for about five months now. I have never met him in person, but based on the 10-minute Skype conversation I had with him once, I like him a lot, and I am glad that he makes her happy. But based on some details of his past history, and the age difference (she is 27 and he is 36), I just think that it would be prudent for them to date for a while before getting hitched. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person in her life calling for restraint. We got into a spat when she called me while waiting for her flight. Turns out she didn't like his proposal either, and she was also uncomfortable with getting engaged so soon - basically, the same things that were bothering me - but she was upset with me because she "needed me to be excited for her."
What?
What does it mean to be a good friend - should we place value on being honest, or being comforting? Should we wish our friends to be well or to be happy, when those two seem to oppose each other? Is it our duty to share fully in joy or sorrow that may not be good for our friends?
Does it make me a good friend to confront someone with the reality that they are being disrespected or abused by the person they love, if they are not willing to face it? Does presenting someone with evidence of infidelity make me a faithful friend, or just nosy, or both? Conversely, can I call myself a good friend if I see them being cuckolded and stay silent? Where do you draw the line between minding your own business and being a faithful friend? Can that line even be drawn? More importantly, how would I react to friends bringing these same concerns to me?
Friendships are difficult here. We create bonds so much more quickly than back home, because our time here is so short (at least for most of us), and it is so hard to know where the traditional boundaries fall. It's hard not to wonder if it is worth making friends at all.
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