I haven’t been good at friendship.

I didn’t learn how to be a friend when I was a child. My parents didn’t have friends. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I remember them having people over, and I’d probably have a couple fingers left. I guess my parents might have stayed in touch with a few people by letter, but I wasn’t included in that. I didn’t have any models of adult friendships.

I started elementary school in a suburb of Johannesburg, where I made friends with a girl named (I swear this is true) Rosemary Primrose. When I was seven, we left South Africa and my friend, and moved across the ocean to Saskatchewan, in the middle of Canada. After we settled in, I wrote a letter to Rosemary. I neatly folded the thin blue paper, put it into a matching envelope, addressed it and took it to my mother for help stamping it and mailing it.

She looked at the carefully lettered envelope and said, “Oh, they were just renting – they’ll have moved from that address by now.” She didn’t seem bothered that I couldn’t stay in touch with Rosemary, and so I learned: friends get left behind, along with school uniforms, pets and furniture, irrelevant in the next place.

We moved a lot. We didn’t ever live in the same place for more than three years, so all my childhood friendships were short-lived. I learned that friendships are ephemeral, not something to honour and sustain.

In learning to leave friends behind physically, I also learned that there’s no need to repair friendships. If something happened between me and a friend, I could abandon the relationship and move on to new friends.

Two lost friends

I have left behind many friendships, but I grieve the loss of two in particular.

Janet

I met Janet in high school. She lived a long drive south of the city we went to school, and I lived a long drive north, so we didn’t hang out much outside of school hours. But we packed a lot of love and connection into those lunch hours.

We shared an obsession with Guns n’ Roses, and we spent hours in the school library poring over every lyric, liner note, and Rolling Stone article.

Janet was smart as hell, determined, pragmatic, and funny. She was intensely emotionally intelligent, in a way that seemed like witchcraft to me and the rest of our socially awkward crowd.

It would be fair to say she helped raise me, filling in some of the gaps in my emotional and social skills. I would not be the person I am today without her.

After high school, Janet moved to Saskatoon and I moved to Waterloo. But after a couple of years, she moved from Saskatoon to Waterloo. A few years later, she moved again to Toronto when I settled here. At the time, I took this for granted. I didn’t think she moved to be near me — in fact, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she just happened to move to where I was, time after time. Because I would never have moved to be near someone else, it didn’t occur to me that she might.

When we were in our 25th year, Janet started going out with someone I didn’t like. She was smitten, and I didn’t get it. He seemed like a dick. I didn’t want to hang out with him, or even talk about him. I was angry with her for making a choice that seemed so wrong to me, but I didn’t have the skills to talk to her about it. I didn’t know how to tell her how I felt, ask for her perspective, or set boundaries. And so I ghosted her.

I haven’t spoken to her since.

Christina

I met Christina early in university. We were in the same year of the same program, although she was brilliant and I struggled. We graduated together (she with Honours, me with…out), moved to Toronto at the same time, and started our careers together.

Together we explored the city and ourselves, dancing until closing time at Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar and Pope Joan. We were together for the beginning of our adult lives: university, graduation, relationships, and the start of our careers.

A few weeks after my first baby was born, I tried to get together with Christina for a coffee. I was overwhelmed with the work of tending a newborn, and when she missed our date twice — once because she had forgotten about it, and once because she was hungover — I didn’t try to make another date.

I told myself I was a proper adult with responsibilities, and I didn’t have time for unreliable people. Instead of telling her how important she was to me (I didn’t know) and figuring out a way to make her free-spirited life mesh with my new, domestic life, I gave up. I let her go.

I have barely spoken to her since.

I lost so much

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think every friendship is a forever friendship. I think it’s natural for friends to come and go from your life. But those two relationships didn’t naturally end — I abandoned them, because I didn’t realize how important they were, and because I didn’t know how to express my pain and ask for what I needed.

I still grieve the loss of those friendships, losses that are almost entirely my own fault. In casting aside those friendships, I discarded love, shared history, a different perspective on me and my life, and the gifts of wisdom, strength, and goodness that those two women gave me.

I’m not good at friendship, part II

The other way I haven’t been good at friendship is that I didn’t understand what it required of me. I mean literally, in a nuts and bolts way. I thought of friendship as something like television: always there when I needed entertainment, but neither something to put effort into on a regular basis nor something that might need to be prioritized above other things in times of crisis.

I’ve had to learn how to be a friend as an adult. I’ve learned to put in effort to stay in touch with people (even if it takes an app to remember). I’ve learned that people really appreciate it if you take the initiative, and I’ve learned how lovely it feels when someone else takes the initiative. I’ve learned to make time for friendship.

And I’ve learned how to drop everything and look after someone.

Sometimes you have to drop everything and look after someone

Even though my mum didn’t teach me much about friendship, in the end my biggest lesson about sacrifice and care came from her. In April 2015 she got sick and had major surgery, followed by a rapid and dramatic decline. She died less than four months later.

I dropped everything to be with her. Dropping everything to do anything is not my style — I’m deliberate and orderly, not inclined to grand dramatic gestures and unplanned activities. But I made an exception in this case.

I excused myself from work, left my kids in the hands of my Toronto family, missed a birthday and a concert and who knows what else, and took to my mother’s side. It was undoubtedly the right choice. It’s a joy and a privilege to take care of someone you love, and it deepened our relationship in its last weeks.

I’m so glad I decided to drop everything and take care of my mother, but it was an easy decision to make. The fact that she was my mother made it easy within myself: I loved my mother madly, and we enjoyed each other’s company. There was no ambivalence in my choice to look after her, apart from missing my own children and my life back in Toronto.

The outside world made it an easy choice, too. Nobody will ever give you a hard time for looking after your dying mother; the seas will part to help you. It’s one of the most sacred things you can do, in this society and probably any other.

What I learned in those four months was the mechanics, the literal logistics, of how to drop everything and take care of someone. I already had the “taking care of someone” part down pat, from twelve years of motherhood. But the “dropping everything” — I had never done that before. I simply had never made the choice to set aside my everyday activities and put someone else’s crisis first.

And because I had never done it, it had never occurred to me to do it, until the person who needed me was my mother.

A missed opportunity to take care of someone

A few years before my mother died, my brother had been hit by a car and broken his knee. He had a pretty big surgery, was in hospital for a few weeks, and then went home to months of physio and recovery.

At the time my brother got hurt, I had never spent time with someone in hospital; I had never helped someone recover from major surgery. I didn’t understand the boredom, the frustration, the tedium, the helplessness, the loneliness.

I learned about that stuff when I took care of my mother and saw it all first hand. It was only then that I realized what I had left my brother to face without me.

To be fair, my choice not to drop everything and take care of my brother was complicated by the fact that he lives in Tokyo, and my children were quite small at the time. It’s very likely that, even had I realized the depth of his troubles, I would have made the choice to not go to his side. But it would have been a choice, rather than the gormless oversight that it actually was.

I’m not mad at myself about it — I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But as Maya Angelou said, now that I know better, I can do better.

An opportunity to do better

One afternoon last summer, I was scrolling on Instagram and came upon a post by an acquaintance saying that they had been badly injured. I knew this person didn’t have family in town, and they probably could use someone to take care of them.

Here was an opportunity to restore my karmic balance by taking care of someone the way I failed to take care of my brother. And to pay it forward, since my brother was taken care of by a friend.

I ended up accompanying my acquaintance — who soon became a friend — through their whole hospital stay, from days in the hallway of an overfull emergency department through surgery and months of recovery. Because of COVID restrictions, I was one of only two people who were allowed to visit.

As is true for many of us, my friend’s friends are scattered across the continent and around the world. For every person in Toronto who might have been able to visit (if there were no pandemic restrictions) they had half a dozen people who could only send encouraging text messages and UberEats gift cards. Those things are important and wonderful: messages and gifts lift your spirits and help you feel cared for. But they don’t substitute for having someone physically by your side to rearrange your pillows, fetch you ice water, and just be there.

I’m not trying to say I’m a better friend, or diminish the other peoples’ gestures of love and support. It was not all that much of a sacrifice for me: I enjoy taking care of people and I’m good at it. And practially, it was easy for me to help — I didn’t have to travel far to the hospital, and I had plenty of free time that summer.

But that’s the point. Our lives are set up so that it’s really hard to take care of each other.

We live far apart. When I was yanked away from my friendships every few years as a kid, I didn’t realize how unfair and harmful that was. But as adults, it’s considered fine to live far away from friends. We move across the city or around the world in search of a bigger house, a better job, or a new adventure. We stay in touch by text message and video call, which is awesome — until you’re in hospital and you need someone to bring you ice water.

Even when we do live near our friends, our time is filled with work and tasks. We’re expected to devote time and energy to more “important” relationships like family and romantic partners. Friendship gets the dregs.

Four things I’ve learned about friendship

In the last couple of years, especially since the start of the pandemic, I’ve learned a few things about friendship.

1. You need to live geographically close to at least some of your friends.

Sometimes you just need someone to be by your side, in a way that a phone call or an online-ordered gift can’t substitute for.

I learned this during the beginning of the pandemic, when we were sharing flour and sourdough starter and the desperate joy of a front-yard conversation shouted across two meters of social distance.

Not being able to touch my friends made it abundantly clear how much I need friends I can touch.

This realization left me with the still-open question: Should you live near where your friends are, or should you make friends near where you live? The answer is probably, both. Of course, you can maintain friendships with people who move away or you move away from, and that’s delightful. But from now on, when I move I’m going to put “make friends with some neighbours” at the top of the priority list, along with “find the library” and “get internet”.

2. Friends are undervalued (and romantic partners are overvalued)

Recently a different friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. (I guess I’m at that age where shit starts happening to my friends.) I didn’t leap to her aid the way I leapt to the aid of the injured friend, and when I thought about why, I realized it was in part because my friend with cancer is married. On some level I thought, “Oh, her partner will take care of her.”

How unfair! It’s a huge burden to put on someone, to be responsible for a sick partner. And yet we do it all the time. I have another friend whose parents are in turmoil because her mom is declining and needs lots of care, and her father is the only one to take care of her. He has even put off his own heart surgery because he feels like he can’t afford to be in recovery. It’s heartbreaking.

Like the kid in About A Boy says, two people aren’t enough. There’s just not enough redundancy, slack, or energy in a couple to be able to take care of each other through a big crisis without external support. And yet, that’s exactly what we expect of people when they get married: that they become an island of two.

3. You need to have slack in your life so you can take care of people

I’ve written about slack before — it’s the idea that you keep some amount of spare capacity in your life so that you have something to give in a crisis. It could be money, to give to people and organizations. It could be space, to offer a friend in need somewhere to stay.

Or as I’m talking about here, it could be time and energy, so you can show up – physically show up – and help when someone needs you.

There’s a lot at play here, though. The world is not set up to encourage slack. The disparity between the rising cost of living and stagnant salaries means that most of us have to work more hours just to stay in one place. Having slack in our lives, whether to be able to take care of others or just for our own leisure and rest, seems like a luxury. It’s definitely a privilege.

Feminist thinker Kelly Diels invites us, at times like this, to toggle up and see the bigger picture. Who benefits we don’t have time and energy to take care of each other?

Companies benefit by being allowed to squeeze us for maximum hours of work without recourse. Gig economy companies like UberEats and Instacart benefit when people use delivery services to substitute for the in-person kindness of bringing groceries or a tray of lasagna.

And of course, people in power benefit from the status quo when we’re too busy to see how our neighbours and friends are struggling, and too tired to protest.

4. Tell your friends that you love them (also, notice that you love your friends)

We don’t usually tell our friends we love them. The idea of love is reserved for family and romance.

A friend of mine once told me, almost by way of warning, that they tell their friends they love them. “Don’t be alarmed,” they implied. Just the fact that they felt they needed to warn me is telling.

When my friend said that, my first response was, “That’s cute but I could never do that. How awkward it would be.”

It got me thinking, though. I thought about what it means to love a friend. I wondered if I share enough with any friend to say that I love them.

In all about love, bell hooks defines love as the will to nurture another’s spiritual growth, made concrete through acts of care, respect, knowing, and responsibility. She says love is a combination of recognition, trust, honesty, respect, care and commitment.

Do I offer all that to any of my friends? Not entirely. But I’d like to. I want to commit to my friends, and work through problems instead of walking away. I want to offer them care. I want to nurture their growth.

And so I’ve started telling my friends I love them. It’s not as awkward as I thought it would be; the words kind of spill out. True, the aftermath can be awkward, especially when the friend in question is also English — but the feeling of completeness I walk away with is worth it.

On being a better friend

I said I haven’t been good at friendship. But I am changing. I’m making time to care for my friends. I’m telling them I love them. I’m making friendship a priority, because friendships are not just fun. They uplift us, they protect us, they reflect us back to ourselves and help us become better. Friendships are worth it.