Column: Other People's People

Picture this, you're sitting at your computer and see that you have a new email. It's from a close friend you haven't seen in a long time—life and circumstances have given you differing schedules despite your best efforts. Your friend is as sad about this as you are and suggests you meet up that weekend. You check your calendar, the weekend is surprisingly free. You both discuss new restaurants, maybe that fancy new bar that just opened? Maybe your friend could come over for a drink first? And then she says something that puts a chill in your heart: “okay, we'll be over at eight!”

 

We.

 

People seldom talk about the relationship they have with their friend's partners. But it's actually an important one. When you were a teenager, you might have had a best friend with whom you spent every free moment. As you grew older, you both dated people, and suddenly your group of two became a group of four (or usually, more awkwardly---three.) You loved your best friend, but her boyfriends weren't automatically your best friends too. In fact, there was almost a tug of war between the two of you; you with your long summer day's main occupation being hanging out with this person and his with exactly the same agenda. Sometimes you were the one with the boyfriend (or girlfriend) and even though you longed for your best friend to just get it and fall in line, it was always slightly awkward.

Except for the times it wasn't slightly awkward and the two of them got on so well, your partner turned to you as you said goodbye and said, “Wow, your friend is great, we should all hang out tomorrow!” and you were really happy that they got along but also wondered, should they have got along quite so well?

 

Later, there would be friends your partner hated, and partners your friends hated. There would be friends who would be swallowed up by matrimony, so deeply entangled with the minutiae of their new life that the few times you did meet you felt like you had to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of a conversation, and by the time you found the corner pieces, your friend had to leave again.

 

There were the friends with the bores, the opposite sex friends whose partners were threatened by you, so you had to curl yourself up into a self-effacing ball, the friends who  were with people who were so wrong for them that you didn't want to see them any more because you'd always wind up having the same conversation, giving the same advice, and in the end, your friend would go back to that person anyway, and repeat everything you said, and you wouldn't see her again, until she emerged from that relationship. (Sometimes she never did.)

 

Read more by the author: These Boots Were Made For Walking

 

But then, for all these unhappy stories, there are the good ones. The friends who brought new friends into your life. The ones you went out for dinner with, and sitting across from your friend, you watched as he laughed at something his new partner said and then she made you laugh as well, and you exchange a look with him which says, “oh now I get it.” The partners who remember your birthday without your friend reminding them, the partner who becomes your friend—not independently of your original relationship, but along with it, so they make your relationship deeper and more valuable.

 

Isn't that what we're aiming for in the end?

 

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books, most recently a YA novel about divorce called Split and a collection of short stories about love called Before, And Then After. The views expressed here are her own.