Because sometimes it's personal

I read something in Reader's Digest today that really hit me hard:

Q: When it is it time to end a friendship?
A: When you realize there was never a friendship to begin with.

I am doing my best to keep this journal focused on my journey as a Catholic, so I will do my best to make sure that this post stays relevant to my journey. But if it kind of drifts a bit, please forgive me.

My husband and I have been married for almost four years, and have been together as a couple for about five. In this time, we have made attempts to find friends, but for some reason, people tend to drift in and out of our lives in regular intervals instead of staying around for a while. Sometimes that choice is theirs, sometimes it is ours, and often, it is mutual. There are even a few that we hope come back into our lifes someday, as we care about them greatly and have great times with them. But in the end, we have each other, and we are each other's best friend, and we're both very fine with that.

Before I had Dan in my life, I had a friend who we used to do things together, mostly go to concerts and have parties. After a while, my friend developed a rather large group of friends and we all used to go to parties together and hang out.

After a couple of years of this, Dan and I quickly grew tired of this. Neither one of us is a big drinker, and we weren't getting much out of these parties.

On top of this, there was a couple in this circle that really rubbed us the wrong way. Without getting into the details, we never really clicked, and all attempts to bond with this couple just flat out didn't work.

We began to read the online blogs of this couple and realized we had no desire to have them in our lives. There were parts of their lives that we found offensive, such as the husband's photography hobby that boiled down to him taking mostly pictures of nude and semi-nude "hot chicks" and calling it Art. Also, his personality is incredibly needy, and since I'm not a hot chick, he "needed" nothing from me [read: he didn't want to take nude photography of me] and treated both me and my husband very rudely at more than one gathering.

We discovered we had no need for these parties or any of these people. We had changed, and these frequent parties were no longer experiences that we desired to have.

This conversion process has been quite interesting for me in terms of friends. I find myself cloistered from much of my old life. I rarely see many of my old friends, and that includes this Party Group. I miss some of my friends on occassion, but I am finding a satisfaction in parts of my life that I had not previously had, so the tradeoff has been worth it in every way.

I am also discovering that, for the most part, my "situational friends" are more than enough for me. For example, our loft complex has dinner parties and breakfast gatherings 2-3 times a month. They provide food and sometimes movies. We really enjoy the people that come to these parties. We also go to Downtown Resident's Association meetings, and we enjoy talking to the people there as well. I have gotten to know many people in my RCIA class, and enjoy spending time with them. My husband does a podcast once a week, and he's gotten to be good friends with the other station DJ's and the station owner. He enjoys his online friends, and creating the podcast.

I don't need Party Friends anymore. I don't need a whole group of people I can call on a moment's notice. I certainly don't need the aggrivation that I have when I read that one guy's blog. I have the people I need in my life, and I have my best friend as my husband, and I'm content with that.

I'm finding it hard, however, to make the final break from this past life, and this old group of friends. It basically boils down to me deleting a LiveJournal account that has all of these people's aggregated blogs listed. It's hard to do. I'm still friends with some of them. But on the other hand, it's not helping my spirituality at all allowing them to affect me with a simple word or phrase.

Ok, whining session over. Thanks for listening. We now return you to your regularly schedule Catholic blog.