My Best Friend and Other Animals

My best friend is a man. More specifically, my best friend is a man I used to date. The breakup story we have come to agree on is that I was crazy and he was an asshole. This is not always the most comfortable kind of best friend to have.

The other day we had the following text message conversation:

Me- Today [my son] stole a screwdriver and took it to school in case he needed to escape. Then he knocked a kid’s tooth out with a bowling pin. Can we hang out tonight?

Him- Not tonight please.

Me- I am so sad and scared, and it’s hard when you don’t seem to care.

Him- Why do you need someone to care?

Me- Fuck you straight to hell. That is the second nastiest thing you’ve ever said to me. You don’t deserve to have any friends.

In the morning, it occurred to me that maybe he actually hadn’t meant to be an asshole. So I called him. Sure enough, he had been genuinely baffled as to why it was important to me that someone care about my feelings. “Because that’s what people do!” I sputtered. “Not me!” he said smugly.

The whole thing left me wondering just how typical this exchange is. I was raised in a family with a high capacity for empathy and an even higher one for drama. We tend to feel—and express—our feelings thoroughly. My friend was born with a little less empathy than most, and was raised (as an only child, no less,) by an emotionally unavailable father and a demanding, manipulative shrew of a mother. (I’m not just taking his word for it. I met the woman.) Is it any wonder that we didn’t last long as a couple? And yet we are still friends.

According to the text, men seek out friendships with women as a place for emotional disclosure and empathy. We had some of that in the beginning, certainly, but it seemed to have been derailed by that whole dating thing. Hmmm. I text him again:

Me- Why are you friends with me when me=girl with feelings and shit? Looking for pithy quote for paper.

Him- Pity.

Well! I admit it has been my annus horribilis, but dang, that’s cold. So I call him up and after we talk for several minutes about the crucial difference between “pity” and “sympathy,” he agrees that the dating relationship did disrupt our earlier friendship, and that we had not quite regained that quality of friendship. “So why do you still want to hang out with me?” I asked. “Inertia,” he said.

Fair enough.