On a daily basis, I teach kids. By kids, I mean teens to college-age, sometimes mid-twenties. When I started teaching, I was still a kid myself, so I was careful to refer to my students as students, but now I feel a distinct gap. Kids talk a lot about their friends. For any length of time that you allow them, they will bring up this friend and that friend and a birthday party they went to, a concert, a sleepover, a study sesh, another party, the mall, a Starbucks run, the movies, a two-week trip across Asia which they’re planning to take or have taken with friends. Kids don’t usually talk about their families. Sometimes I’m taken completely by surprise when, months into our knowing each other, a student mentions having a twin. I suppose hearing the constant chatter about friends has made me consider my own, and how hard it can be to maintain these bonds as an adult. Mostly, what I notice is attrition: I lose more friends than I make.
An obvious reason for that attrition is marriage. Friends get married and their spouses become their closest friends. My husband is now the person I spend the most time with. Face to face and over text. I tell him everything and anything, because I’m a chronic oversharer and I trust him with my thoughts, however stupid they may be. I used to be the same way with friends, but more and more I check myself. My ten-second rule: write the text but wait ten seconds before sending it; evaluate whether it’s truly vital to pass on this piece of information. When I tell friends something now, I must accept the possibility that they will tell their spouses, with whom I’m friendly but not friends. A friendship is truly strained when you don’t like the spouse. Here is my person, your friend proclaims, flag in the sand, and you must tread carefully. Sometimes this new person is so far removed from what you imagined for your friend that you wonder if you knew your friend at all.
After marriage, any walls that already existed between two friends invariably thicken. A friend who used to discuss things with you simply to work through them stops doing so, and updates you only on definitive good news, never the bad, the ugly, or the in-progress. All of that, you suspect, she saves for her partner. In other words, you’re no longer included in the problem-solving. Of course, some matters belong first to the marriage: the stuff of intimacy, finance, family. To have or not have children. To want children but not be able to have them. Increasingly, my friends leave me out of these big conversations, and vice versa, but when an outcome is certain or a plan set, we do update one another, which reminds us that we’re still, in fact, friends, but also boils the friendship down to a PowerPoint.
If I don’t have kids, I will lose more friends. This is not a hypothesis. It has already started to happen. Friends, during pregnancy, assure you that nothing will change. You contribute to the diaper fund, attend the baby shower, and, once the child arrives, you try to see them, plan for dinner at 2 p.m., between nap times, but, somehow, something always comes up. Next time, yeah, next time, let’s hang out soon, yeah, soon—but no one proposes a new time, and months go by, years. You never see them again, you never meet the child, and that begs the question of how close you really were. You consider the possibilities. Perhaps you said or did something irrevocably wrong. To avoid ever saying anything about a child that could be misconstrued, I overcompensate. I never bring up the child or ask after it, or, if I do, I make the mistake I just made, and refer to the child as an “it.” A likely scenario is that my friends, as new parents, went down their friend list and crossed people out. Having friends without kids is harder for them to justify. What is our baby going to do at their non-baby-proofed place? And remember that time they referred to our child as an it? An it! But I could be overthinking. Doing what writers do, adding nuances to interactions that aren’t there. A simpler reality is that my former friends just don’t have time for me. Parenting is hard enough without their having to worry about my feelings.
I do greatly appreciate the rare friends who stay with me after kids. We meet, as we used to, at restaurants, bars, shows, or, when child care gets hard to schedule, we meet at their apartment, the office now a nursery, now a toddlers’ room, now a girls’ room, and, throughout dinner, the girls (twins), who are supposed to be in bed, come out, one at a time, sometimes together, to tell us that they would like to be read to, they would like to drink an entire glass of water, they would like to go to the bathroom, they would like new pajamas, they would like chicken nuggets, they would like to have their hair combed, they would like a specific teddy, they would like a hug, a better hug, they would like to see a rainbow, they would like to go to the bathroom again, they would like more water, they would like to know if it’s tomorrow. For the short duration of an evening, I greatly appreciate being part of this.
There’s a Grace Paley story that I think of when I think about how friendships end. A woman named Cassie asks her friend Faith, a writer, why she has written about their other friends but never about her: “You let them in all the time; it’s really strange, why have you left me out of everybody’s life?” Faith doesn’t have a good answer and asks to be forgiven.
That final line, which is also the last line of Paley’s “Collected Stories,” strikes me as brutally honest and true. When I have trouble forgiving a friend, my husband says it’s because I go all in. I pour everything into a new friendship, the honeymoon period, the getting to know each other. I have an incurable habit of sending pop-up holiday cards. I’m a big fan of digressive group chats. Here are my deepest, most authentic feelings, friend. Please kindly tell me yours. But when that gesture is not reciprocated, when I sense the wall coming up, I’m so mad at myself for having revealed so much that I withdraw.
Sometimes I ask my students to write about a time when they were blindsided, or an incident that made them take stock. More often than not, they turn in stories about a friend betrayal. In one class, a student mentioned that their parents didn’t have any friends. Around the table, everyone nodded. It seemed that no one’s parents had friends, and my students couldn’t fathom this, couldn’t fathom it when I admitted (foolishly) to having fewer friends in my thirties than I’d had in my twenties. Horror. Pity. I tried to defend myself. More horror. More pity. How could this happen to a person? How could a person let it happen? No, it would not happen to them.
The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends. For me, common qualities and habits help. Female. About my age. Sense of humor. I would not choose a friend who went out dancing all night on Ecstasy. No offense to dancing or Ecstasy, but in comparison with those things I would be a total bore. I would not choose a friend who had a second home somewhere like the Hamptons or Lake Como or Austria. Of course, it is superficially nice to be invited to garden parties or SoHo lofts, but I don’t want to be the lone Asian woman in that garden wearing a cotton dress and sensible shoes, my only topics of conversation being work, the grind, and not that new art gallery down the street. In other words, the supposed freedom of friend selection goes only so far, and, given how deeply my choices are informed by my background, family, and upbringing, I wonder if they are choices at all.
I’m the only child of immigrants who are not only children but whose siblings and parents stayed in China. I have no cousins here. No aunts, uncles, or grandparents. As a kid, I was distressingly lonely, and, like my students, my younger self placed grave significance on having not just friends but the ability to make them. To befriend was to assimilate and to speak English. To have a friend was to have an ally. I still fear the time when I am alone. Statistics predict that I will outlive my husband, and then what? I get through my last decade texting my friends? Having kids is a solution. I could spend the last decade texting them, or their kids, and getting wrapped up in all that. But I don’t see myself having kids.
I live in a building where the parents are friends because their kids are friends. Hard to say if they would have been friends without the kids, and that makes me wonder if friendship is genuine if the choice to stay connected and on good terms is not entirely a solo one. My husband and I have friends in our building because our dogs are friends. We have a group chat, named after our dogs, with this other couple, and we pet-sit for one another. Our friendship is so rooted in our dogs that, when we ate out together for the first time, dogless, more than a year after we’d started looking after each other’s fur babies, we all felt that it was kind of weird. But then we did it again, and it wasn’t so weird. I used to think that our friendship with this couple was one of convenience, but I don’t think that anymore. Sometimes you have close friends because they are close by and have compatible dogs.
If a friendship is meant to be a give-and-take, an ideal friend should, in theory, give as much as she takes. But this, then, opens the door for the frustratingly fair friend. She weighs every gesture and transaction, splits every bill down to the cent. She remembers every favor, every imbalance of favors. She looks up the price of your birthday gift to her, in order to give you an item of commensurate value. In Chinese, chi kui means “to eat a loss.” This friend will never chi kui, yet is shrewd enough never to seem like she’s taking advantage. Technically, the fair friend is not in the wrong, and if I’m noticing her behavior, then I, too, am guilty of keeping score.
But do I accept the friend who takes more than she gives? The taking is not always tangible. There’s the friend who keeps forgetting her wallet, and then the friend who expects you to be there for her at whatever cost. Inconvenient as it may be for you to step out of class, mute the Zoom screen, get off the subway, this friend is having a crisis and she would like your opinion, even though it’s not an opinion she’ll take; she would still like you to hear and validate her crisis. I’ve never known a crisis friend to have just one crisis, and, before you know it, you’ve read and replied to thousands of texts about her problems, which are all interrelated and endemic, and soon, mired in another emergency that you’re coaching her through, she throws up her hands and announces, “I’ve had it. No one in the world cares about me. I can’t rely on anyone anymore, except myself.” She sighs with profound feeling. You blink, balk. You think, What the fuck have I been doing? What the fuckity fuck has every conversation we’ve ever had been for? Then you realize that what your friend wanted from you is a mother, and, when you couldn’t measure up, you, too, became part of the cold, unfeeling world.