I’ll try not to overly belabor this post, and just paint the edges. We will see if we can come out anywhere. I’ve already written a bit about COVID and friendships anyway. (Here’s another one.)
Let me set up the back-story as best I can here:
- When I got married for the first time (March 2013), my best man was a kid named Mike; he was a friend of mine from college.
- Good times, good context, good speech, good person, etc, etc.
- I got divorced in March 2017. Here are the basics of that story, if ye care.
- My ex and I decided to break up on March 4, 2017. But, because of how leases work, she was basically like “I can move out on March 15th or I can move out at the end of March. The latter would be easier financially.” I wouldn’t say I “let” her stay, but I said end of March seemed cool.
- The March 2017 dance was very awkward. Basically we tried to avoid each other a lot. Our anniversary (“anniversary”) would have been March 16, 2017, and I think maybe we watched a movie that night, largely in silence. It was a very awkward time.
- Near the end of March, she was moving out across a Friday-Saturday period.
- Now, I had a few options for that weekend. I wasn’t going to sit in the apartment as she was moving stuff out; that seemed depressing. I also felt like if I stayed in town, I would just drink myself into a stupor both days and then stumble home, probably bump into her with a lamp or something in her hand, and the whole thing would be a mess. So I figured I should get out of town. I have a friend here that has some ranch property, and in hindsight I should have gone there. I also have a friend in Rochester, NY who I consider a pretty close friend, but he had two young kids and I am not sure his wife ever liked me that much, so I punted on that option.
- Instead, I went to Tucson to hang out with this kid Mike (best man), his wife, and their two daughters (and I think a few dogs too).
- On the Thursday I left DFW, I got delayed at the airport — ended up about eight beers deep — and we got re-routed to Los Angeles, then I missed my connector. So I had to stay in this random LAX Airport hotel where I watched a Rockets game on TV and ate some shitty calamari. Then I had to get up at 6am, hungover, and fly to Tucson.
Been following along?
Cool. Here’s where we net out: I had just spent this hugely awkward month living with someone who I was breaking up with. I was definitely drinking like a fish at this period. I had no idea who my friends were or what my next steps in life looked like. I was scared and depressed and one time I cried in a closet, another time I cried in front of a boxing gym. It was a mess. And then bullshit with airport travel happened too.
So I get to Tucson, and broadly this weekend is fine. Mike is a great dude, but I wouldn’t call him super emotional; most guys are not. He had met my ex-wife twice total — once in Phoenix, once at the wedding. It’s not like they were close or he had a lot of context for anything. And he’s raising kids, trying to build a career, etc. Even though we’re talking about one weekend, which shouldn’t be a big deal, in hindsight I shouldn’t have sprung my emotionally-messy ass on him. That was my mistake.
On the Sunday I’m there, we went to some kids’ talent show at a bar with some of his couples friends. This thing was broadly hell. It was kids singing poorly and some kid tried to do stand-up, which as you can imagine wasn’t that funny. Basically all the shit we went to, minus Friday night at some bars, was a bunch of happy couples with kids and all that. I’m sitting here at 36, newly-divorced, knowing my wife (ex-wife now) is moving out at that moment, and I’m just a mess, slugging IPAs and whatever.
Somewhere in that night, I think one of their friends (a woman) was talking about ending her relationship/marriage, even though they had kids … the dude was drinking too much, etc, etc. That’s kinda how my marriage ended in many ways, so I’m thinking this is my Esther Perel savior moment, and I started talking to her, which I think was an over-step of boundaries, and that became an issue. In later months and years, it would be referred to on text as “you know what went down in Tucson.”
So I over-stepped, and then maybe a year later I think I posted something on Facebook about that weekend. I anonymized all the people but if you knew, you knew. So that was an asshole move as well.
0-for-2 there, but if I can take one point back, this was not really a good time of my life. I think maybe I can get 0.5 back there. I’m still in the hole, but a little bit less. It’s hard to hold someone to rationality standards when their life is crashing apart all around them, ya know?
So over time …
… because of that weekend and that post and general time and distance and different focal points, I fell out of touch with Mike to the point that we don’t really communicate at all anymore. Guys have this whole thing about “Well, he was the best man in my wedding,” like that’s some badge of male friendship, and it probably is. The loss of my best man, through some elements I could have controlled better, is another loss in a weird half-decade for me, where I’m trying to do better but often feel like I am 1 step forward, 2.5 steps back.
Would I say I am heartbroken over stuff like this? Absolutely not. It hurts, and I need to reconcile my own bullshit on some fronts, but I’m a freelance copywriter in DFW with no kids and a 125-pound dog on my second marriage. How much am I going to intersect with a lawyer in Tucson with two school-aged kids who I haven’t lived in the same city as since 2003? I mean, we could be friends, but is he going to day-to-day drive my sense of all being right with the world, when he’s chasing fatherhood and his own goals? Probably not.
Friendships are weird and evolve differently, and sometimes really small things become really big things. At the moment I was semi-“counseling” that woman considering divorce, I just drunkenly thought “Oh, I’ve recently been through this, this is a nice thing to do!” I had no clue it would eventually be called “what went down in Tucson” in a text message. So, I can learn from that … but again, life and relationships are weird.
Maybe it’s largely about tempering expectations.
In the meantime, I’ll keep chasing … life improvements.
