We all grow and learn in life, and they say a man who believes the same things at 40 that he believed at 20 has wasted 20 years. Naturally when we change, sometimes our friendships change, or in extreme cases, our friends change. This swap is usually not as dramatic as it sounds though. Life takes us all on a journey that deviates from those around us at any given time. We lose touch with high school friends when we go to higher learning or start careers, and often lose touch with those people too when we change careers or workplaces and have families of our own. These are all very common circumstances.
It’s not that we dislike the people we went to school with, it’s more that in truth we don’t know them anymore. We knew who they were, but we also remember who we were, and how much we have changed since then! So when you are curious late at night and looking up old school friends on social media, you are not looking to see who they were, you are interested in who they became after you knew them.
I’ve certainly heard of many cases of people getting back together with old childhood friends and finding they no longer had anything in common or any connection, but that is certainly not always the case. I have friends that I have maintained from school years, and even then I think with some of them, if we met today we probably wouldn’t like each other. In those instances, what has grown and changed is our friendship. It has evolved with us and we have learned to love and understand the new versions of ourselves that we have become along the way.
But what happens when you have a major change, that your friends and family didn’t quite see coming? I had the pleasure of talking to a lovely trans woman a few months ago, however, she said she was sadly having to make all new friends after her transition. Not because her friends were unfriendly towards her, they tried to be supportive, but being who she is, as opposed to who she had pretended to be the rest of her life, meant that the things they had in common had suddenly disappeared overnight!
She had been born a he. He was married with 2 young children, to a wife he loved dearly and in a happy life he did not want to disrupt. But he could no longer live a lie. He had always felt he had been born into the wrong body, and he could no longer pretend. But when he became who she had always been inside, her life very suddenly changed.
She went from being happily married to separated, living in a family home with the kids, to living in a spare bedroom of a friends house and from watching footy and drinking beer with the guys on weekends to drinking wine alone. Her friends had tried to understand, but the manly man they had been friends with was gone, and in a sense, perhaps they were grieving him instead of celebrating her. In her defense, she still valued male friendships – it was what she had known her whole life, she still liked football, and she still even did like women, even if this also now extended to a curiosity about relationships with men.
But her friendships didn’t feel the same anymore. Each party felt a sense of betrayal and lack of trust for the other, and the change was so big, so sudden, so opposite – that it caused a lot of the fibres holding them together to snap. Some friends didn’t know what to say, so said nothing. This silence was heard as judgement ad fear. Some friends asked too many intrusive or offensive questions, and again this was interpreted as judgement. Some simply enjoyed a beer with the boys and no longer saw her as such. Some were unsure what they could now say or joke about in her presence, while others were not sensitive enough about what they did and didn’t say.
Of course, it is also natural after a big sudden change, that you would want to start exploring friendships with other people sharing and relating to your experiences. And eventually, start exploring new romantic relationships too. But even that was challenging, because she felt she had to disclose to new romantic partners that she was once a he, and that alone discounted her from many of the people she was interested in. Not telling them was worse.
So what is the answer when you go through a big sudden life change? Is there a way to hold on to your friendships and have them grow and change with you? I think the answer depends on the friend, and your ability to be patient with them. When you learned of this change in your life, whether like my trans friend, you had years to process this information yourself, or an unexpected diagnosis or divorce, you need to allow everyone the time and space and patience to come to terms with the change in their own time and their own ways.
Not everybody can grow and change with you, but if you find yourself feeling impatient, insistent and unforgiving, that could be a factor in driving your friends away. You need to let people deal with the changes however it comes naturally to them as a person, and not force it. It might be easy to tell yourself that you would love and support your friend even if they decided to become a frog, for example, but you have to think about how you would relate to them as a frog, how you would communicate with them and in what meaningful ways could you still connect with a frog.
I am in no way comparing trans people with frogs, to be clear, I am being deliberately ridiculous because we tell ourselves ridiculous narratives sometimes, that isn’t always practically accurate.
At the end of the day, if your friends can’t change and grow with you, if they can’t accept you for who you have become, you don’t need to change yourself back, you need to change friends. And as hard as that can be, finding those niche people will be worth it. In the meantime don’t forget your own worth, settle for less or pretend to be anything that you aren’t. If your friends don’t actually know the real you, then how can they actually love or even like you?
Stay you, stay true, and stay positive and stay patient. And if it is your friend who is going through a big life change, that advice still applies, as well as stay present!
❤ Love,
Your Best Friend ForNever
xx
