When the separation that ultimately became my divorce happened, I received some calls and messages from friends assuring me that they were on “my side”.
This confused me, because I didn’t know I had a side. I didn’t see separation and divorce as an adversarial thing, and neither, I think, did my now ex-wife. Divorce is common — perhaps too common — and there are mechanism to make it go smoothly, which it more or less did.
I was reminded of this because I heard recently that some mutual friends of mine are no longer talking to each other. I don’t know the full details of the dispute, but it made me sad.
While I acknowledge that there are serious transgressions of friendship from which there is no going back, I’m pretty much a believer in the let-bygones-by-bygones / forgive-and-forget / move-on / life’s-too-short school of thought.
I guess there are one or two people from my past I’d rather not see again, but as I get older and mellower, that list shrinks — especially when curiosity kicks in. I sometimes think that I wouldn’t mind catching up with the school bully I last saw nearly 40 years ago just to see how his life has turned out, and perhaps to ask him why he behaved the way he did.
And there are also a few people I’ve known over my life who I may have hurt. I’d like to see again so we can talk about.
Perhaps it’s true that time heals all wounds. I hope my friends do resolve their differences one day, but I know that there is nothing I can do to make that happen.
