Cold War

I'm in the middle of writing a rather arduous post about "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up". I had to decide between that topic and the equally compelling "What I Did Over my Summer Vacation" and since my summer mainly consisted of refolding towels with embroidered elk on them and drinking many, many bottles of six dollar wine, I decided the former would be a bit more appropriate in terms of me having something to say. Plus, you know, it's just better for the children.

But today the Productive Blogger part of my brain has been kind of roadblocked by a discussion I had with a friend today. Not a discussion so much as an argument actually, and made worse by the fact that I hardly ever fight with this friend. We usually have the kind of effortless friendship where you feel so good after spending time with that person, it effects your entire day in really fantastic way. In the few instances in which we did have conflict, it was resolved so quickly and with such good humor between us we both commented that our ability to get along should qualify us to write a New York Times Bestseller on relationship advice. We defended our respective genders to one another, we delved into music and politics and dating and marriage and why I shouldn't be driving a car with such a big engine, and we basically just had a superb time getting to know one another over the course of a year or so. He is one of those people in my life I count as truly valuable to me, and I feel extremely lucky for knowing him.

But, the fight: The particulars aren't important of who said what and how and with what motivation, but the bottom line was my feelings were hurt and he didn't understand why and didn't see the need for apologizing for something that was the truth to him, and so our friendship became strained which bothered me and the fact that it bothered me bothered him and it just got worse from there [horrific run-on sentence ends here]. So, clearly we're not quite ready to save the world, but at least the fact that it irritates me so much that this is even happening lets me know how much I value my friendship with him. At least there's that.

So my question is, how do you get past a mess like this and de-awkwardize the situation? I'm inclined at this point to just divorce myself of the relationship, not to teach him a lesson or to be spiteful or anything like that, but to get away from the anger. The fact that I can't get him to understand why I was hurt and how it still eats away at me, and the frustration of waiting for him to just say "I'm sorry"--even if he doesn't really mean it--it all just festers and grows and makes everything awful. I know we're both such stubborn idiots that if I declared a moratorium he would too and then the wall would just go higher and higher with each passing day.

Is it possible to effect a cooling down period for a month, three months, a year, and then just pop back into each other's life with a "Hey, friend" and a smile? Can one's pride ever be that pliant? I honestly don't know. Maybe this is an indicator of how strong or weak our frienship really is. Maybe we'll both figure something out about ourselves and how we interact with the people in our lives. Maybe he hasn't given it a second thought because it's really just NOT important to him, and so I'm worrying about something that isn't worth repairing anyway. Maybe it'll take an entire year for one of us to just sigh and break down and say "hey" and then we'll be off and running again and talking about music and who we're dating and who we're breaking up with and everything will be just fine.

And if we don't, I think I'll really miss it.