LIFE
My Husband Makes Friends Without Even Trying
The effortless art of making friends
He sat untying his boots in our hallway. I had heard him come home and dashed to meet him at the front door. Not to greet him with a warm smile and kiss but to ask if he knew the middle name of someone he would have once described to be his “brother from another mother.”
“What’s John’s middle name?” I asked my husband.
They had been roommates and work colleagues for almost a decade. When they weren’t working, they were together; playing PlayStation, drinking beer, and watching football or comedies. They had the same humor, the same charisma, the same kindness. We hadn’t had contact with John in about four years. My husband and I married and moved away. John got married and the distance multiplied.
My husband looked at me confused. “Ummm… Theodopilus — Aristotleplus? I don’t know.”
“Do you even know if he has a middle name?”
“Not sure,” he replied.
In the first episode of my , I had a conversation with my husband about his experience in Germany. He moved to Germany from England when he was fifteen. He attended an American high school, established in Germany for the US military personnel and civilians. Being in the military community meant he had people coming in and out of his life frequently; they would be around for a year, or two, three at most — yet he valued these relationships. He can tell lengthy stories about the fun he had with his friends from school.
Staying in touch and keeping connections was not as easy in 1990, when my husband graduated high school, as it is now in our age of social media and the ubiquitous internet. Even today, my husband doesn’t use social media and never sends emails outside of work. A few years ago on a trip to Seattle, my husband reached out to two of his high school friends who were living there to let them know we would be visiting for the weekend. More than thirty years had passed since their last catch-up. They exchanged a few brief messages to arrange the reunion — other than those messages, their prior communication was limited. When they met up again, it was like they were family. The bromance was real.
Once upon a time, my husband put a used fridge on eBay for sale. When the buyer arrived to pick it up, he went downstairs to meet him and help load the fridge into the buyer’s van. Two hours later, my husband was nowhere to be found. I looked in the driveway, there was no one there. I called his phone and heard it ringing in the kitchen — he’d forgotten to take it. I tried logging in to eBay where he had placed the ad, to see if I could get in touch with the buyer. If my husband was already in the bathtub full of ice and they hadn’t started removing organs yet, I needed to know what it would take for me to get him back. While I hunched over my laptop trying to figure out the login details, my phone rang — it was a number I didn’t recognize…a ransom request? No, it was my husband. I heard laughter in the background and joy in his voice. He had gone with the buyer to his house, they shared a few beers, he met the family and he was calling to invite me to their house for dinner.
I had never thought about the effort it takes to make friends, because most of my friends were from childhood — friends since ten or friends since eleven or maybe twelve years old. My childhood friends remind me of all the people I was before I became the person I am. In every phase of my life, retrospection has always been a fundamental element for being grateful for what I have, being grateful for what I lost, and being hopeful for what is to come.
By nature, people change with age, with new experiences and new environments. I hold on to the relationships I have with my friends to remind me of who I am at the core. These relationships are my roots and they keep me grounded. As a foreigner, it is easy to lose sight of who I am, when I consider the labels draped over me like ankle-length necklaces of plastic pearls, “gifted” to me by the society I live in. Necklaces that are so long they are easy to trip on and get tangled into. Or to use another metaphor, I’m like a tree. All the new branches sprouting from me are exposed to the elements. They can be bent, and broken and grow in places where they are not wanted, where they are at risk of being chopped off by someone who feels offended or averse to the presence of these limbs. An unwanted presence, a nuisance, an eyesore. Chopping the branches can hurt and scars will remain, but it’s not the worst thing to be removed from a space as long as the roots are intact, the roots are healthy, and the roots are strong. The roots allow me to take a new shape and grow again.
Even in situations where I meet a new person and we just click, for me, it takes time and energy to nurture a new relationship as an adult. My days are consumed with nine hours of work from home followed by six hours of childcare. If a friendship feels like “work” I’m inclined to neglect it, along with the several other things that slide up and down the priority list of my life. For me, making friends in adulthood takes time because I place so much value on nurturing deep connections. Meanwhile, my husband is getting invited to weddings and making lifelong friends in the time it takes to move a fridge from a garage to the back of a van.
I’m trying to figure out if there’s some kind of evolutionary explanation for all this. I imagine when our species became sedentary and the women were left back at camp with the babies, they formed bonds with each other based on their children and the complex feelings that motherhood evoked. Even with their differences, their reliance on each other for survival and growth would have created a bond held up by emotional connections. Becoming a mother has made me vulnerable and forced me to open up in so many ways. From having a total stranger clean my vagina and change my bloody diapers after giving birth, to having my toddler teach me about my triggers and how I deal with stress.
The women are back at camp, grinding some root vegetables between rocks. I imagine them nursing their young, talking, sharing, explaining, showing, screaming, crying, laughing. The male hunters are on a days-long hunt. Two hunters are kneeling by a fire one is skinning a carcass with a blade, and the other is removing the organs with his bare hands — he’s up to his elbows in blood and offal. I don’t imagine they’re talking about how the howling of the night wind makes them anxious and gives them nightmares. I don’t imagine they are talking at all. Both males and females are bonded in their experiences but in different ways — and there is beauty and purpose in both.
And it has become clear to me, that I think too much. The effort isn’t in the relationship with others but my all-or-nothing attitude to friendship. Not all friends are the friends you video call in a crisis to ugly cry. Not all connections need to be that deep. Sometimes there is meaning in just sharing a laugh, sharing a story, sharing a meal, sharing a drink, or passing the time. Even with these interactions or relationships, there is something of value being added to this tree. Even when the roots are strong and the roots are deep, what kind of tree only has roots?
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