Breaking up with your gay best friend

When I found out I was pregnant the same week my friend E. We lived five stops apart on the same subway line in Brooklyn and had known each other for more than a decade. Over the years, our friendship had spanned moves across three continents minesurvived a broken engagement hersand endured a mutual ex-friend who was hellbent on destroying us both.

I imagined a future of park dates and playground mornings, our children forging a friendship as naturally as we had. We met up occasionally in the park, or for coffee in the rare windows when neither of us was working and both babies were awake.

Supporting a gay best friend

She had Mondays off, when I was buried in work. I was free on weekends, when she was often hosting openings or out of town. Fitting time together became a feat of logistical acrobatics. I visited E. I showed up to her gallery openings; she was by my side when the breaking up with your gay best friend I produced premiered.

She took me out for my birthday; I sat with her when her mother died. For years I wrestled internally with the contradiction: that E. Often, I blamed this state of affairs on her husband, whom I had never fully connected with. Other times, I wondered if in blaming him, I was letting E.

Surely, she had a say in who they hung out with on weekends, too. At times, I wondered if I was delusional about the state of our friendship, imagining a closeness between us that was no longer there. Other times still, I felt ashamed of my pettiness and greed: that what E.

All of these things were probably true, to some degree. But over time, I came to realize that there was something else at play, too - something that went far beyond the particulars of E. In my late teens and early twenties, my friendships had been intense and explosive, burning bright but often flaming out in a few years.

As I grew older and wiser, better at navigating the inevitable small conflicts that come with truly knowing another person - and better at choosing friends in the first place - this pattern gradually petered out, and the friendships that survived my twenties solidified as the most cherished relationships in my life.

I did not understand that friendships could die not only because of impassioned fights and mutually unforgivable trespasses, but because of shifts in circumstance, waning effort, and the cumulative weight of small hurts. The drift between E. In our 20s and early 30s, we were both scrappy artists trying to cobble together careers in competitive and poorly paid fields.

But by our mids, our lives had begun to diverge. Her world became members-only dining clubs, luxury hotels, weekends in the Hamptons. Mine was bookstore readings, political debates, and dinner parties in my apartment, surrounded by artists, writers, and activists. I found her new friends superficial; she thought mine were boring.

At first, I pushed against our growing distance. But when I tried to bring her into my world, things felt just as misaligned. It was only when we were alone that our friendship still made sense. In the presence of others - be they our friends, our spouses, or the new people who had begun to fill the spaces we had once filled for each other - we no longer quite clicked.