Long Lost Friendship

(Sorry for the absence, won't bore you with the whys...)

When I was 16 I briefly went out with a boy. Let's call him Dougal. Prior to our little interlude of dating, Dougal and I had been very good friends. We hadn't always been. For a long while, I tolerated him. But ultimately we were very good, possibly even best, friends. Then we dated. Oops.

It ended extraordinarily badly. I'm still, in some ways, not over it. I don't mean I'm not over him, that went very quickly, but what he said and what came out in the break up was the most hurtful stuff that has ever been said to me. It wasn't what he thought of me, it was what other members of his family thought of me. Unfortunately, they continued to be relevant to my life being people from my parents' church. Scrap that, if i'm going to get anything off my chest, I might as well do it properly. His dad was the vicar. He said (allegedly) awful things about me. He also said that they were common opinion in the church meaning that all kinds of people that I trusted (youth group leaders and the like) also thought these things of me. (I've since come to realise that that part at least was not true.) The night when all this came out was actually a couple of weeks before we split up and I still remember that night so clearly. I was staying at a friend's house. I didn't sleep all night I was so upset. Just waiting for it to be a decent enough time to phone my mum and tell her. It was horrible. Anyway, a few weeks down the line, Dougal split up with me saying that he'd never been really sure anyway but he thought that it would make his dad happy if he had a girlfriend. Having found out what his dad thought of me, that logic crumbled rather.

We continued to be "friends" because...well, I'm too polite sometimes. And we had friends in common. And he was at boarding school most of the time so I didn't have to see him much. We kept in touch most of the way through uni but then, thankfully, we didn't. His dad had left my parent's church by then and although I spent years being terrified of bumping into him (the dad) somewhere, it all slowly died away. I did see the dad once, about seven years ago now I would guess. It was therapeutic. He was out right rude to me. I felt that was a whole heap more honest than all the years he'd spent saying "how nice it was to see me" whenever I went to my parents church (you'll be surprised to hear I left and found my own "home".) This isn't meant to be about the dad though. (I'm still working on forgiving him actually, I keep thinking I've managed it and then I realise the huge upset that builds up whenever I think about it all...and relax...) This is about Dougal.

So, we lost touch. But then, of course, Facebook happened, didn't it? And perhaps about three years ago, Dougal befriended me on Facebook. I ummed. I ahhed. It was weird timing, he did it within days of my only other significant ex also befriending me on Facebook. I don't like refusing people on Facebook. (I've done it twice - once with a guy I really truly can't stand and once with a girl we knew in NZ who made Husbink's life very difficult by trying to blur his professional and private lives too much (she spent a lot of time in A&E with psychiatric issues...).) So after a bit of ignoring, I accepted Dougal as a friend.

We didn't "catch up", we just started to appear on each other's news feeds. After a while he "liked" a few things and then started to comment. A while longer and I "liked" things back and made the odd comment. That's all the communication there has been but it has made me really rather sad for friendships lost. Because the kind of bitesize bits you get about people's lives on Facebook, well, I still "get" pretty much all of his. We still like the same things, we still make the same references to films that we loved as teenagers. There are certain status updates that I know he'll be the first to comment on because I know he'll understand. If only we'd never dated we might still be friends. Yes, there is still the potential that the "stuff" would've happened but it might not have been such a big deal given a different context. Sometimes I wonder about emailing him about it, asking whether it was really all true and so on. But I think it better to let sleeping dogs lie. And I think it better to just remember the friendship. It's never coming back now. But perhaps a good thing from Facebook is that I at least don't think badly of Dougal anymore.