DOAMS - And now, the taster sessions are done with
Two years on, it's probably time to talk about Edward.
By the end of my association with Edward, he was difficult to deal with in the extreme, massively self-centred and only slightly less so in egotistical terms, utterly stubborn and - and I don't say this word lightly - a user.
A user in the sense that I was his enabler, in various ways. I enabled him by giving him someone, at first, to count on, then to rely on, then to depend upon, then, apparently, to be unable to live without. At the same time, I received someone I could go to for advice, and someone who could give the appearance of caring.
The final straw - two years ago, as stated - was when I came to the realisation that I was handling the entirety of the legwork and the travelling time and costs. Edward, you see, had moved to the south coast to be with someone he deeply loved, and I thought that was a good sign.
Then the demands started. When Edward lived in London, it was no big shakes to travel to him - an hour and a half, conservatively, by train and underground. the south coast, by contrast, was a four hundred mile round trip by expensive train or tiring car journey, all so that, when I got there, we could do what he wanted. Finally, I decided that since I was the one doing the travelling, I should have some say in the matter, and decided not to go.
This did not go down well.
Up until that point, I had not had the opportunity to watch a friendship disintegrate via the medium of increasingly passive-aggressive facebook updates, so this was a nice education.
Let's rewind back through time to approximately nine years ago. I met Edward at university, where through the student newspaper we became friends. Back then, I was living in London, so it was no big shakes to go and see him for a weekend's drinking, dancing, etc. Back then, Edward was handily a lot of things I wasn't - a large drinker, a drug taker, a jack-the-lad with a cool car, whatnot, whereas I was a fairly antisocial, isolated individual working on my final year during the first time on the university merry-go-round.
There was chemistry - I won't deny it - and in the curiously male way, we were close friends with the kind of friendship that revolves around a constancy of low-level insults and veiled homophobia on his part that allows for Men - more accurately, Men! - to have a close friendship without expressing anything like 'love' or 'feelings' or all these concepts that just don't apply during periods of heightened masculinity.
After I left university, it was still nice to have an extremely close friend, whom I could go to for advice, but the travel was almost always from my here to his there. There was a rationale behind this, in that where I am now has nothing really resembling a spare room, and not many drinking opportunities nearby. And the travelling was an adventure, a chance to get away from the job and the fairly humdrum but nice life. But still, it was always here to there, and on the occasions he would drive out here it would only be for me to go back there to do the clubbing and drinking thing.
Because it was always clubbing and drinking, or at the very least watching a film and drinking. There was always the drinking. Which, for a man in his mid-twenties, isn't a bad thing.
So Edward got on with his life, and got married - a wedding at which I was invited to be part of the wedding party, which was nice, although I later came to think it was because I was one of the only ones gullible enough to volunteer for the travel (oh yes, the travel), the suit hire, and all the unpaid labour that goes with it. And the marriage lasted just under two years, the latter six months of which I ended up providing marriage counselling of various kinds despite not being, as they say, a relationship kind of person.
When the marriage - as these things will do, for whatever reason - broke apart, Edward quickly found another lady with whom to make a life, which was - and still, as far as I know is, wonderful. They genuinely complemented each other, and I was happy for them, but the suspicion was growing in my mind that this was less of a friendship than Edward utilising me as a witness so that he could drink, maybe take the occasional drug, and have someone to act as a combination shepherd / minder / etcetera. This was not necessarily parasitic, because it basically seemed that Edward could only be the brash, cocky, confident public person he wanted to be while I was around to... not.
I am not brash, or arrogant, or cocky - at least, I try extremely hard not to be, because I cringe when I look back on the first jaunt on the merry-go-round and was... well... brash, arrogant, cocky, self-centred, annoying, the descriptives go on, and on. Until one day the fickle fist of destiny - personified by someone now very close to me - ran up one day, and hit me on the shoulder, and made me think about how I acted affected other people, and to be aware of my place in the world and in relation to the people who mattered to me.
Edward, I fear, did not have such luck as to receive such a thwack on the shoulder.
I do have a distinct personal fault, however, in that I pathologically give people the benefit of the doubt, and equally pathologically like to help people where, sometimes, they would be better off figuring out how to help themselves. Unless I'm careful, I generate brilliant and beautiful but reliant people. It's the administrator's curse, apparently - the better you do your job so that people can do their job, the more people rely on you. As curses go, it's not that bad.
But when I asked Edward to help out with a project local to me, at first he would only come up on the condition that we went drinking the night before. At first I acquiesced to this, but then I realised that showing up to something important with a hangover was - get this, I know - a bad idea, so I asked if this time, it could, you know, not happen?
Repeated rebuffings, followed by tantrums, arguments, a constancy of complaints and a litany of bullshit. In the end, I held my ground...
... At which point Edward decided to help, but drove up on the day, did his part (and, credit where credit is due, did it well) and drove back down to where he was living at the time. All seemingly because he couldn't get what he wanted.
Hmm, I thought.
And then I began to think about the 400+ mile round trips I was expected to make in order to attend to his need to go out and drink. The train was annoying - hour upon hour and change after change, especially at weekends - but the drive was worse, especially coming back.
So one day, when I was expected to make the journey that weekend - in the middle of the second week of study at my current academic pied-a-alma - I decided not to go. I had no reason other than I desperately didn't want to, because it was expensive on a student budget not only in travel but also in alcohol costs, and it just seemed... pointless. A 400+ mile trip to spend two nights drinking, two days with a hangover, then drive back?
Why?, to be honest, was my main thought.
In retrospect, I could have been more tactful, and worked on a proper reason or at least a generous lie. But I had become frankly sick of the attitute towards my willingness to bear the burden of being the traveller.
(And I know that this - divorced of feeling by two years and coming across as it is - probably sounds like a candidate for white whine - "Oh, I had to travel so long and so far just to see my friend and go out drinking!" - but, frankly, try being treated like a mixture of friend and social slave for seven years and see how you feel frankly.)
In some ways, this was an embodiment of another thing I do which I could do with not doing - testing things and people. I wanted to see what the reaction would be - although I was hoping for oh well, too bad I guess, maybe another time.
But no. A lot of shit followed, along with the aforementioned passive-aggressive facebook status updates, which - to my shame - I actually found kind of funny at the time. A few more calls followed, but I instituted a new practice I'd decided might work, which meant waiting a week and thinking about what I was feeling and doing before emailing him a comprehensive list of why I had decided not to be the one to travel anymore and that, having been used as an excuse for drinking and bad behaviour for so long, I was not, as they say, up for it anymore.
A reply from Edward established that I was apparently in the wrong, and always would be, and if I'd just put up with it that little bit longer - the little bit that is always jam tomorrow - then things would have been ah-may-zing, etcetera.
I decided at that point that cutting ties was for the best, because otherwise, I knew, I would be in Edward's thrall for, quite likely, the rest of my life.
A few more calls followed, then there was a gap, then, in January, there was a phone call where I had to provide counselling because, with a major event imminent in his life, Edward was concerned about apocalyptic theories. I wish I was joking on this point, but with something amazing about to happen for him, Edward was concentrating on the world ending, not his new life beginning. I shouldn't have even engaged with him on the topic, but see above re: pathological helping of people when I should know better.
After the amazing, life-changing event, there were a couple of emails from him and his partner (seperately), and I replied in general terms, wishing them well.
After that, things went blessedly quiet.
A few months ago, I had a call from Edward, saying that he was in the town where I attend university, and did I want to meet, and catch up.
I said no, and hung up the phone. A ratty text message followed, and since then, I have tried not to let the people I think of as important to me turn into people who need my help. Instead, I try to make sure that these people will be able to help themselves, and not worry about needing anybody else. I do this with little acts of kindness rather than being there for everything, and, more or less - there have been one or two failures - it seems to work.
I still help people who would do better to help themselves, and I still solve problems that don't need solving, and organise people who don't need organising, but as long as I don't let it get out of hand, I hope I won't end up with another Edward on my hands. Ironically, I almost created one - almost in the manner of a golem - which has led to a situation wherein a person I like, work with, and get on with, I cannot trust even slightly.
But it beats the alternative.
I wish nothing but the best for Edward and his family, and to say that there are no happy memories from our friendship would be wrong. At the same time, it was unhealthy that he formed the closest thing that I've had to a personal relationship with someone since the firebombing of the house of love that was my previous relationship - the one that seems to have totally removed any impulse to meet, greet, and date from my worldview - and it only got more unhealthy as time went on, until I felt I had to do as I did.
It's been several months since I heard from him, and two years since I made the move to cut all ties with him, and this is the first time I've felt comfortable in talking about Edward, because the things that matter to you aren't always the things that are best for you.
Stick that on a greeting card, if you like.
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