Anatomy of a Friendship: A Postmortem Introspection

 Time and Distance Friendships take work. Close friendships take work, communication, honesty, vulnerability.  Time and distance is only so useful.  It exists as a tool to take a step back, reassess, calm down so that you can come back to the table ready to talk, compromise, and resolve things.  It's not a fix in and of itself. This last fight dragged on and dragged out for a month over text.  Yes, we both stepped away, pausing to take a breath, gather our thoughts, feel our feelings, and calm down.  Within a day or two I was always ready to come back to the table.  Ready to own my own faults and actions.  Ready to talk things out and resolve things.  To find a way to come together and move forward, stronger than before. We had both walked into this with hurt feelings.  We both had our feelings hurt worse as we texted back and forth.  There were misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions on both our parts.  I, at least, had re...

 So, it's not hard to see why we became such good friends.  We are both compatibly neurodiverse, we have kids the same age, we share many of the same interests, and we're mostly politically aligned. It started with our kids becoming friends and realizing we absolutely vibed with each other.  We shared so many similar interests, we could relate to each other's traumas.  It seemed like a perfect match and for a good number of years it was.  As the title of the blog gives it away, we aren't friends anymore.  It imploded and looking back, I think there was no real way to avoid that. There's no villain in this story. No right, no wrong. Just what seems in hindsight to be an obvious core emotional incompatibility.  How did we miss this?  How did we manage to become so close despite this? Finally, what changed that it broke the status quo?  That's part of why I'm writing this.  To take a good, hard look at myself, hopefully to become more emoti...