Friends

London When an old friend says to you, “we must meet up for lunch sometime,” you can be sure of one thing: you will never meet for lunch. Why? Because your friendship is over. The clue is in the word “sometime.” It’s a rain check that never gets cashed. It’s what friends say to each other when they feel obliged to see a friend they don’t really want to see — but they don’t want to dump either. We all have friends like these: I call them the Undead friends, when the friendship is neither fully alive nor totally dead. You don’t delete them from your contact list — just your social life. This will lead to the odd spasm of guilt but don’t worry; we all do it. And it gets done to us too. There are people you think of as your great friends.

This Letter from London is coming from Kardamyli, a small town by the sea in the southeast of Greece. I’m on holiday. Readers who are now rolling their eyes at the thought of yet another account of someone’s “amazing” holiday experience have my sympathy. I feel your pain; there’s nothing worse than the “my amazing holiday” bore. In the 1970s people who subjected friends to long and tedious slideshows of their holiday snapshots appeared in British sitcoms as the bores next door. Now we don’t project our pics onto our living room walls; we post them on social media. And friends feel obliged to post comments like, “Wow! That looks amazing!” and, “I’m so envious!” But what they’re really thinking is: what a terrible show-off you are.

T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the cruelest month — January is. It’s cold and bleak and days end in premature darkness. And worst of all, it’s the month when friends start to dump you. OK, maybe not you, but definitely me. Here was my January dump tally: two ex-girlfriends, one lover, five friends (three I thought were close friends) and one person I never wanted to be friends with in the first place. And get this: I do what’s called “befriending” for a local charity. It involves calling people who feel lonely and isolated on the phone and talking with them. The woman I’d been befriending for over two years suddenly said to me, “Please don’t call me anymore. This relationship isn’t working for me,” and just hung up. There were no thanks. No goodbye.