Post - Jenna Clare Photo

Still from *The Banshees of Inisherin* (2022)

I’ve always wondered why adults so rarely explore friendship in their art. It’s so much more popular to write about marriage or family drama or the internal struggle of an individual rather than the relationship between two platonic people. This isn’t to say people don’t make art about friendship, in fact I have a very long list of media that does just that, but it happens much more infrequently that I’d prefer.

Friendship is so important to me, personally, because of my lack of romantic attraction. As someone who does not plan to get married or fall in love, the only relationships I actively choose are friendships. While I love my family dearly, they cannot support me the way I know my friends can. Thus, I’m fascinated to explore friendship and all its many forms. Because there are an infinite amount of friendships, and each one has a different place in my life.

Recently I watched the film The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) which is a story about two friends in 1920s Ireland. One of these friends, Colm, decides out of the blue that he no longer likes his friend Padraic, and thus the two spend the entirety of the film dealing with the consequences. As a whole, the film is rather bleak. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t have a happy ending, and overall it’s not an enjoyable depiction of adult friendship because the two spend the entire film not being friends. However. I do think it’s an excellent exploration of adult friendship because often I find that adult friendships are bleak and full of endings. (Sorry, I wish it wasn’t true.) I found both Padraic and Colm to be relatable characters. I have lived both of their stories. I’ve been the friend who’s had to deal with someone deciding that they don’t like me very much anymore. I’ve also been the friend who decided that I’d rather have peace and quiet than to continue being friends with someone else. It’s difficult to sit with those realizations. We’ve all hurt and been hurt. That’s adulthood. That’s life.

To me, I find friendship all the more fascinating than romantic love because friendship is never a guarantee in the same way a marriage might be. Sure, you can make promises and vows and claims that you’ll be friends forever, you both hope that that will be the case, but there’s nothing tying you to another person in friendship. You don’t get a friendship license, you can’t get a bank account together, you can’t even see that other person when they’re sick or injured in the hospital. Friends only continue in friendship by an unspoken mutual agreement to continue talking to each other. But as is clear in Banshees, anyone can rescind that agreement at any given time without explanation, without good reason, without kindness. While romantic break-ups tend to be more dramatic than friendship break-ups, many people are much more accepting when you don’t want to be in a romantic relationship anymore. You don’t need a reason beyond, “I’m just not in love with you.” And yet, when we hear a friend say this to us (literally or via lack of communication)…it doesn’t make sense.

What drew me in to Banshees (besides the great Irish humor) is that I understand Colm’s position. While I do think he went about it in the worst way possible, and I am more than a little disturbed by his methods, I know his motives. Sometimes, when you finally take a step back and look at yourself in the mirror, you realize that the reason you’re so unhappy is because of the people you’re surrounding yourself with. Usually when this happens, you give your friend(s) the benefit of the doubt, and you make an effort to fix the problem. Maybe you share your feelings, maybe you give passive aggressive hints, maybe you’re brutally honest about how unhappy you really are. In the beginning you think, “How could I possibly give up on this person?”

That’s when the feelings seem irrational. You try to reason with yourself: “Oh, but he’s been kind to me in the past. We used to have so much fun. I love his family.” You start talking yourself in circles trying to understand where the disconnect is now. Didn’t you like him just a few days ago? Didn’t he make you laugh just yesterday? Don’t you want him to be happy? The answer is yes, of course. I think often when people end friendships, it doesn’t mean that they want to hurt the other person. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite. I think people who end friendships in a straight-forward fashion are often just trying to make things better for everyone involved.

However, when we’re the person being left behind, it can feel selfish and rude and unimaginably hurtful. How dare you stop liking my company! How dare you forget all the good times we spent together! How dare you make me feel unloved!

The hardest part about Banshees is that Padraic has almost no context for why he’s being left behind. Colm’s reasoning is that he wants to work on his music, that Padraic’s dull, that Colm can’t find any peace when Padraic is rambling on about his donkey for hours on end. And sure, those are reasons. But from Padraic’s perspective, they aren’t good ones. And since we never get to witness what their friendship was like before this schism, it’s difficult to understand if Colm’s reasoning is sound. How do you side with the guy who says, “I just don’t like you anymore…”?

How can you justify the end of a friendship if you don’t like your friend that you definitely liked yesterday?

I’ve been in relationships with people who no longer want to be my friend. I can tell. Either they pretend that they still care about me, or they do the absolutely bare minimum to prove it. Or, and this is the worst, they themselves are convinced they do still want to be my friend because I am their only good friend…but overall they do not treat me like the friend they think I am. When I’m around these people, I feel not only a quiet hope that someday soon things will go back to the way they were, but also a growing resentment that they continue to want to see me when I know they aren’t giving me the friendship I deserve. Why can’t you just let me go? Why am I shackled to you when you don’t even want me? Why do you think this is how friends should be treated?

Humans will often hold on to things far longer than necessary. We cling to things that are bad for us if only because it’s hard to let go. We’re so bad at handling grief that we don’t even know when to properly cut people out of our lives.

I’ve lost a lot of friends in my life, sometimes because they left me, but often because I’ve had to leave them. I rarely stop being friends with someone because I hate them or wish them ill or want to punish them for hurting me. Usually I have to cut people out of my life (or at the very least, distance myself) because I know it’s better for both of us. We’ve fallen out of love. We’re no longer treating each other kindly. We don’t have the spark we once had. There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a relationship that’s making both of you unhappy. You hold on, hoping things will get better, you think you owe each other something because at one moment in time you were all each other had. But it’s possible to honor that past while not infringing on the future.

Grief and friendship are intermingled creatures. Often when friendships end they lead to grief, but there is also the grief of growing old with another person. This happens in marriages and families too, I believe. Hell, it even happens within our own bodies. Time is the harbinger of grief eternal. You cannot age without mourning everything that is. And as you age among your friends, you will see them enter different phases of their lives the longer you know them.

My oldest friend is someone I’ve known since I was born. She and I spent an obscene amount of time together while we were growing up, and continued to be close friends in high school. After graduation we moved to different cities, and while our relationship has taken a number of turns over the years, I still consider her one of my best friends. But because I’ve known her so long, because she has seen so many variations of me, I see her more like a sister than anything else. We’re still friends, we still talk on the phone and see each other every few months, but it isn’t the same. She’s married now. I’m a different person than I was growing up. We both have seen things and changed pieces of ourselves and evolved into someone the other doesn’t know. And I miss her. I miss who we were together when we were kids. I miss the version of me that she knew best. But that doesn’t mean I don’t continue to love her. We have learned how to make room in our relationship for every new iteration of ourselves. We do this through grace and commitment and the knowledge that no matter who we are, we care about the other person. And, by some miracle, each new version of ourselves continues to fit in the life of the other. Because commitment is important, but so is liking the other person.

It’s okay to stop being friends with someone because you no longer enjoy their company, their personality, their lifestyle.

And while this used to seem sacrilegious to me, I realize now that losing a friendship doesn’t have to be a terrible thing. Sometimes it is, sometimes it hurts like hell and it takes months to deal with the grief of losing someone, but grief and freedom can intermingle. You can be happy to move on while still wishing it didn’t have to end. You can remember the good memories while understanding that you can’t relive the past. And you can be selfish without being Selfish.

As I get older, I am learning how to be a better friend to both the people around me and myself. I learned recently that even though I’ve spent years of my life believing that I’m an inherently selfish person, that doesn’t mean that I’m not a people pleaser. In fact, it doesn’t even mean I’m selfish.

So many of us are conditioned by our parents and our church and our society to believe that anytime we dare to care about our own mind, body, and spirit, we are being Selfish. We’re evil and malicious and how dare we not care about the people around us? But the truth is, I think a lot of us aren’t selfish enough. We stick with the status quo and surround ourselves with subpar friends because we feel like we owe them something for things they helped us with a long time ago. We’ve fallen out of love but society has convinced us that it’s better to stay in a loveless friendship than to seek out something (or someone) better. We don’t allow ourselves to actually understand our own individual needs because we’re so worried about saving everybody else.

Another film I watched recently that revolves around adult friendship is Our Friend (2019). Based on a true story, this film follows three friends — two of which are a married couple — as they age. When one of them gets cancer, the third friend steps up to help the family and act as a care-taker for people he isn’t related to by blood. Obviously, it’s a sad film, and it made me weep just as you’d expect. But it’s special to me because it highlights that regardless of the societal norms around marriage and family, your adult friends can actually play a huge role in your life as you age. What’s more, it demonstrates that even as you go through different phases of your life, even as you and your friend(s) change, you can still choose each other. Even when it gets hard. Even when it doesn’t make sense.

Sometimes choosing to be selfish will show you who actually cares about you. If your friends genuinely want the best for you, they will support the boundaries that you set. They will encourage you to take time for yourself. They’ll try to understand why certain things bring you joy. They won’t criticize you or be mad at you or try to get you to change. The friends that matter will be there for every version of yourself, not just the one they fell in love with in the first place. And this holds true for you when you’re supporting your friends. You know the people you would die for. There’s nothing they could do, no one they could be that would stop you from caring for them. It’s scary when you realize just how much you care for another person, but it’s comforting too.

The three friends have other friends, of course, and when Nicole’s cancer starts getting worse, we see those other friends slowly stop coming around. It’s a sad realization, that when Nicole and her husband are going through one of the hardest things you can go through as a human being, it isn’t enough. It’s too much. It’s a canyon that some people will never be able to bridge.

While I obviously have never had cancer, I have been through enough change in my life to recognize when there’s a chasm forming between me and another person. Surely you’ve felt it too, the shift that happens when you realize, Oh, it’s all different now. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes you don’t realize until it’s too late, but either way you still find yourself at a crossroads. Do you continue down this road knowing that you’ve both changed and that nothing will be as it was? Or do you take another path on your own?

Unfortunately, there isn’t always an easy answer. Sometimes when you think you want to part ways with someone, you’ll find yourself at yet another fork in the road where things change again and you find your way back and everything is fine. But often I find that when I walk down the same path hoping that we can find our way back to the start, I just end up more and more lost and wishing I’d taken my own path for a while. Sometimes you wander off on your own and you find a better life with someone else. Sometimes you end up lost on your own for a long time. Again, there isn’t an easy answer.

But more often than not, I find that it’s actually quite simple. It may not be an easy choice, you may drag your feet or wish it was some other way, but once you know how you feel, it’s hard to ignore. Sometimes you have to say good-bye even when it doesn’t make sense. And it’s okay. I promise you’ll both be happier in the end. It might just lead you both to people who are better for you.

on friendship, losing people, and being selfish.