Love just ain't enough
Lasting friendship takes work
The message came in the middle of a text exchange. We were catching up on her dad’s health (not great) as well as hers (she’d been sick for a while but was on the mend). She was telling me about how her dad listened only to her and no one else when it came to his physical therapy and taking his medication. How that put a lot of pressure on her at a time when work (she’s a data privacy lawyer) was also piling on the stress. I was trying to commiserate.
Then she broke in with the news: I just got word from my visa guy. The next visa appointments at the U.S. embassy won’t be until April.
It was January. I’m getting married in March. She was supposed to be my maid of honor – and now she was telling me she couldn’t, legally couldn’t, travel from Manila to Washington, D.C., where the wedding will be.
My fingers quickly typed and sent: You’re going to miss my wedding? But her words had put me in a state of shock. Hadn’t I told her about the wedding a year in advance precisely to avoid this scenario?
There must be some kind of mistake.
I’M SO SORRYYYY, she said. There had been so much going on. To be honest Bis, she added, using the shared nickname she’d bestowed upon us when we were freshmen in high school, I was 50-50 on asking you. . . I kind of don’t feel comfortable leaving my dad at this rate. She followed up with a photo of him on a hospital bed, wearing a medical gown and a face mask, tubes attached to his too-thin forearms.
My heart broke. For her, and her family, and this man who in my memory had a belly and a big smile, and a presence that my friend had inherited. I had not realized how badly he’d been doing.
It also broke for me. Because although I understood that she might need to stay home to care for her ailing father instead of traveling 8,600 miles for what was essentially a party, I also felt like that wasn’t really why she wouldn’t be coming. The fact was, she hadn’t dealt with her visa even though she’d had a year to plan. And that neglect felt like a rejection.
Worse, this was coming from one of the most reliable and driven people I’ve ever known. Either I was missing something. . . or our friendship wasn’t as solid I as I’d thought.
As the reality of her absence set in, disappointment flooded my system, filling my chest until I felt I was choking. We exchanged a few more messages. For what felt like a long while, I sobbed quietly in my home office. But by the time I’d made myself presentable for my 9 a.m. work meeting, I was furious.
We met the very first day of freshman year. It was typical in Manila schools for teachers to seat us in alphabetical order at the start of the school year, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. Her last name starts with an L, mine with an M, and thus a friendship was born.
Of the two of us, she was always the leader. I generally got better grades, and was the first between us to run for student government, but in everything else she was always more motivated, more passionate, more involved. She was forever joining clubs, volunteering for causes – and dragging my lazy ass along with her. In junior year I let her convince me to start training as an officer for ROTC, a full year ahead of when it would be mandatory. I suffered through endless Saturdays of marching drills, obstacle courses, camping out at our school soccer field. . . all to become a staff officer – basically a glorified teacher’s assistant – at the end of it all. She, naturally, was assigned the rank of cadet major, with her own squadron of unhappy seniors to command by the time we actually had to be doing that stuff.
She ran for class president senior year and won handily. I was elected vice president, and together we. . . I don’t know, did whatever it is high school kids do when they’re in (fake) government: Organized the senior dance. Told other students what to do.
It was a neat thing to have on those college applications, anyway.
But we had fun. We recited memorized notes to each other before tests, ate lunch together (when we had time for it between student government meetings), slept over at each other’s houses. Her parents were strict, and I was one of the few people with whom she was allowed go anywhere without her brothers' supervision.
In college, we drifted a bit. She was on track to go to law school, I was figuring out what to do with myself. We stayed friends, went to a lot of parties together, and at one point dated a pair of best friends. And while we weren’t inseparable anymore, our shared history kept us connected, even as we graduated and I started working as a radio host and she went to get that law degree she’d been aiming for from the time I met her.
My move to the States didn’t sever that connection, but distance is a tough thing to overcome. What had once been endless conversations turned into a trickle of texts, sent hours or even days apart because of the time difference. We had a brief resurgence during the pandemic – some high school friends started a group chat that saw a burst of activity for those few years – and then we went on with our lives.
We still called each other “bis,” a Filipinized bastardization of “best friend.” I think we still believed that we were each other’s best friends, or at least a best friend. Every time I went back to Manila, we would pick up generally where we left off. And when I got engaged, I knew right away she would be the one I’d ask to be my maid of honor. It just made sense.
Except. Except.
I didn’t talk to her for a few days after she told me about her visa. We’d gone much longer stretches without communicating before, but this was – on my part, anyway – intentional. Thinking about the whole thing made me so deeply sad. . . and so blood-boilingly angry.
I couldn’t bring myself to make the first move. When I didn’t hear from her, I retreated. Tried to talk myself out of being angry. What’s a wedding, anyway, right? In hindsight I realize I was on the brink of turning away, of pretending it was all fine, without ever really addressing the root of the problem or resolving anything.
Then I talked to another friend, who shared her experience with someone she was close to who also didn’t go to her wedding. She told me how much it stung – and how it brought out long-simmering feelings of resentment. She said she’d felt for ages that her friend had never put as much effort into their relationship as she had. The decision to skip her wedding, for reasons she didn’t feel were entirely valid, was the last straw. They’ve managed to stay friendly since, but their friendship never truly recovered.
She told me that if I didn’t want that to happen in my case, I should try to find a way to talk to Bis. Be honest with her about how I was feeling.
She saved me the trouble. A couple days later she messaged me, asking if we could talk. We hopped on a video call, again right before my work day started (damn that time difference!). And we talked. Really talked.
About how profoundly wounded I felt, and how I’d been sensing for a while that she didn’t seem to have time for me. How whenever I’d ask if she was free for a call, she was always too busy. And yet she still found time to travel to South Korea and Europe for her favorite K-Pop bands. From where I stood, it seemed like I’d dropped all the way down to the bottom of her priority list. The visa thing was just the most concrete evidence of that.
She, in turn, told me about her year. How she’d been buckling under the weight of everything she’d had to carry.
Her private sector job, for which she had left a far less demanding government role and which had seemed like such a great opportunity, was eating away at her energy and soul. She was regularly working twelve-hour days, running to stay in place. Meanwhile her dad’s health had rapidly deteriorated, and there was so much pressure on her to be present – when he had his liver transplant, and as he recovered and relapsed and went back into recovery. She was so tired. She felt like a shadow of that organized, earnest, assertive woman she knew herself to be. All those trips? She would never have gone if a good friend hadn’t planned every detail, handed her the tickets, and told her where to go and what to do.
That didn’t mean she was unaware of how much she’d hurt me. She understood that this was her greatest failure as a friend, and that missing my wedding would likely be one of her biggest regrets. She swore she would do what she could to make up for it.
And as we talked, I realized that the problem was that neither of us had taken the time to work on our friendship. How did I not know how badly she’d been struggling? Sure, she wasn’t making time for calls, but why didn’t I ever ask our shared friends – the ones who were there, who saw what she was going through – what was really going on? Why did I assume that it was about me?
And why, when I asked her to be my maid of honor, didn’t she feel like she could tell me that she was overcommitted, overburdened? What happened to that person who would tell me every thought, feeling, doubt, concern, and then power forward, linking her arm with mine?
Friendship is fucking work. It needs to be nurtured, cared for. When left untended – when left to survive on nothing but shared history and old memories – it degrades.
And in that state, when it is tested, it cracks.
We decided that cracks were as far as we wanted to go. That for all our months and years of neglect, we cared about each other too much to let this be the thing that breaks us. Through tears and a little hysterical laughter, we acknowledged that we couldn’t always be our best with each other – life was more complicated than that – but we promised to be better. To be more open, more available. To be honest about where we were in our lives.
It was a 37-minute call. But it felt like a new beginning.
It’s only been a few weeks, but so far we’ve kept those promises. We’ve been better at responding to each other, at sharing bits of our lives that before all this we would have assumed the other didn’t really want to hear about. Those details matter; they’re the stuff of growth, of connection. Not that we need to know every single thing that happens to our friends. But details shape our understanding of the people we love, and when we stop sharing – or hearing about – the things that change us in small ways day by day, then we are stuck with versions of each other that aren’t true to who we are anymore.
And you can’t really have a relationship with a person that doesn’t exist.
I’m still sad she won’t be there when the big day arrives. I’m probably always going to be a little sad about that. But I look at this experience as a warning heeded. We buckled, but we did not break. And hopefully, our friendship will be all the stronger for it.
Small victories 🏅
I’ve been deep in #weddingworld lately, but I want to take this moment to celebrate a work victory for me. At the end of last year I made it a goal to publish more episodes for The Journal that I reported out – versus leaning on reporting that my coworkers on the print side are doing. So far, we’ve come out with two fully original pieces for the podcast, plus one that I contributed a decent amount of reporting for. And we’ve got a couple more in the works!
Hot mess recs 🔥
Figure I can get a twofer in: Celebrate getting episodes out, and then recommend them! The first is a story asks the question: Should reality show contestants be considered employees? A former cast member from Love Is Blind talked to us about what it’s like behind-the-scenes on set – and why he thinks the answer should be yes. Then I looked into the brewing legal battle between YouTube influencers and the shopping extension Honey. The YouTubers are alleging, in court, that Honey is stealing their money. It’s a little wonky, but I learned a lot about an increasingly popular method of making $$$ is made online. Finally, EGGS. Why are they so expensive right now, what is being done about it, and how many egg
Is there someone you care about whom you haven’t talked to in a while? Text them, call them, send them an emoji. I’ve talked myself out of these situations before: They don’t need to hear from me. They’re probably too busy, I’d just be intruding! They’re going to find this annoying. But what do you have to lose by making the effort? On the flip side, consistently not making the effort is a pretty guaranteed path to friendship atrophy. So go reach out!
To my endless delight, Sam has started reading Rebecca Yarros – yes, author of the sexy dragon rider series that starts with Fourth Wing. She described it as a cross between Hunger Games and Harry Potter, “not the highest brow of literature but thoroughly enjoyable.” I’ve read it, too, and what it does offer that neither HG nor HP does is a healthy dose of 🌶️🌶️🌶️. Sam has been giggling and blushing at all the steamy scenes.
Is it just us, or has life been moving too fast? 💌
Time’s been zooming by and it feels like we’re just hanging on to our hats. Like, how is it already March?! If you feel like commiserating, send us your thoughts, comments, rants, and expressions of disbelief at goshdarnmess@gmail.com.
‘Til next time!
Jess