People who know me personally know that I'm rarely serious. In person, I tend to crack jokes and be jovial. I'm rarely serious about things -- at least on the surface. But one thing I do take seriously is friendship.
There is little I won't do for my friends. And my capacity to forgive slights (real or imagined) is pretty big. It takes a lot for a friend to get me upset because all actions performed by my friends tend to be filtered through my rose-colored glasses.
The downside to this is when that friendship is not returned. One-way friendships are hard. If a friend gets mad at me, I'm inclined to assume that I did something wrong and must make good on whatever I did. As I've gotten older I've gotten better at recognizing when someone has a legitimate reason to be unhappy with me and when they're just being a bit narcissistic.
The biggest source of harm to my friendships has been my job. I am the principle owner of a small business. And when I was less experienced I thought it was a great idea to try to bring friends into the company. Bad idea. It can end badly.
One example of this that stings on a regular basis is when a good friend of mine joined the company. He was a great software developer and just a great guy to have around. This was in 1996 when the company was riding high in the OS/2 market. Unknown to us, the OS/2 market was on the verge of collapse. By the summer of 1997, our revenue had dropped from millions per year to a few hundred thousand. We were dying. The distributors and resellers who sold our software went bankrupt one by one owing us hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.
Because my friend was so good at what he did, he was also well paid. By mid-summer 1997 I told him, "Barring a miracle, we're going to have to lay you off by end of November." We just couldn't afford him anymore financially. He seemed to understand at the time. And November came and no miracle occurred. So I had to lay him off. It was the lowest point in my career and one of my lowest points in my life. The company I had spent years building up was falling apart around me. It was the only time in my life I can say I've experienced real depression.
I thought I'd made the right business moves. We had made award-winning software but people weren't buying it anymore. The market had gone away almost overnight. Windows NT 4 had come out and our OS/2 market had swiftly moved to it leaving us with a set of products nobody wanted anymore.
And so we had to lay people off. My friend, because his outstanding skills correlated to an equivalent salary, was one of the first to go.
Realistically, I should have started laying people off much sooner as the company was in desperate shape by summer 1997. I felt very guilty in having to lay off my friend and put my primary concern into trying to ensure that he had as much time to find new work (which he did fairly quickly since, like I said, he is an exceptional software developer).
Since he was my friend, I wanted to make sure he was taken care of. So I made sure he had months of advance warning. And afterwards, I made sure he had a good severance package (that I had to borrow money to provide). I made sure everyone we subsequently laid off had warning and severance packages (just not to the same degree). Ultimately, nearly everyone else was laid off too pretty much in order of their salary.
The company ended up surviving on life support and by early 1999 we were starting to recover. Ironically, loyalty did save the day -- loyalty from our former OS/2 customers who were anxious for Windows versions of our software. Their pre-purchase of Object Desktop for Windows (sight unseen) provided the capital to keep going and turn it into a real product. But that was a ways in the future and we had no idea that day would ever come.
Meanwhile, my friend never forgave me. He and his wife subsequently made it clear that they would generally avoid anything me and my wife attended. We have the same shared group of friends so this tended to make things awkward. And as my instincts tended to do, my view was that I deserved this. After all, I had laid him off and he had every right to be sore. But it took a long time to realize just how sore he was.
As the years passed and he had quite evidently moved on job-wise and done well, the first tinglings of realization started setting in. We would invite him to birthday parties and LAN parties. We'd send them Christmas letters. Invite them to get togethers. And in return, nothing. No response. And he was clearly boycotting any event that I was going to be at with our shared friends.
I think that last part, more than anything, brought me around to realizing that he was being unreasonable. I say that because if one of my good friends was having a get together and invited me and I was able to come, I would come regardless of whether someone else was there that I had a problem with (real or imagined). Because friendship should trump any sort of grudge or whatever.
It's not fair to put your friends into awkward positions of having to choose between friends. At least if it can be avoided. The threshold of pain should be high before you start putting your friends in the position of having to make choices.
Having given this situation a lot of thought over the years, I'm confident that no reasonable (or even remotely reasonable) person would conclude that my friend's experience was anywhere near the point to justify his reaction. This wasn't a divorce or something, he got laid off with a near half-year notice and found another high paying job within weeks. Not exactly a trauma there. He wasn't wronged or misled.
It also started to bug me that this was a black mark against my wife and I. Because no matter how you slice it, when person A is angry with person B, people are going to think that person B must have done something bad to person A to have earned their ire. And having looked at things with the benefit of hindsight, my wife and I have concluded that we hadn't done anything to deserve this. And it wasn't until this year (7 years later) when they blew off our invitation for our 10 year wedding anniversary that my wife and I finally got really annoyed. Until that moment, we could easily have considered everything as "water under the bridge" and gone out to the movies together no harm done.
We didn't wrong him. We were good friends to them. The idea of arbitrarily throwing friendships away over unintentional slights is beyond me. Particularly without talking about it. Friendship is important. My wife and I enjoy being around our friends and hearing about their good fortunates and being there for them when they need us.
That's what friendship is all about, sharing your life and your hopes and your joy with other people who are doing the same thing. Love and friendship are the closest things on this earth to real magic. Each friend makes us better, richer, fuller.
And like I said, even with the benefit of hindsight, I can't think of anything I reasonably should have done differently that would have somehow appeased him. I was a good friend. I did the best I could. And there was nothing else I could do. His reaction and subsequent actions show that maybe he was never a true friend. I just don't see how a true friend would do this.
I suspect many people reading this have had friendships that were one-sided. Friendships where you were the one who had to always reach out to them. Or friendships where the "friend" sees things only from their own perspective without concern to how their actions may cause distress or harm to others. I feel bad for those people because good friends, truly good friends, are the stuff that helps makes life great.
True Friendship is powerful. You feel excitement for their triumphs. Happiness for their good fortune. Sadness for their set backs. And whether you have only a few friends or many friends, each friend is invaluable and precious. And the loss of even a single friend is sorrowful.