Putting a deadline on friendship

My recent post on ungrateful people, as well as a comment from the excellent Dawn, reminded me of something that happened to me a few years ago.

Any of you who have been following this blog (and most of you know anyway, since most of my readers already know me in some way) know that I graduated from Iowa State University. In the last two years of my time there, I became good friends with a couple of great guys. We hung out together, and we even lived together for our final year. Three bedroom apartment for $600/month, split three ways? Sweeeeeet!

After I graduated, I stayed in touch with Mike. He stayed in Ames while I moved to Chicago, but we'd talk often. I'd come to Ames and visit at least once a year, and he would come to Chicago too. I remember one visit we gorged ourselves on Mexican food at Carlos Sweeney's, and then listened to the Star Wars soundtrack triple-CD boxed set that I had bought before dinner while our food digested. We had a great time together overall, and I considered him one of my best friends.

Something happened when I moved out to Vancouver, though.

He got married, I got married and moved totally away, and we fell away from each other.

My friends back home know that I am not the best Internet pen-pal out there, and I am sorry for that. I have no idea why that is, but sometimes things just get away from me. But even though we don't talk that much, those bonds of friendship are still there, and they know (I hope they know, anyway), that if they ever need me for anything, I will do my damnedest to be there for them. If they email me with something they need an answer too, I'll be as quick as I can be about it.

Just general "How are you doing?" emails, though? I do my best. I really do. But sometimes I'm just really lame.

How does that apply to this situation?

After about a year or two out here, where we hadn't had much contact, I received another email from Mike. It wasn't anything urgent, more of touch base type of email. I took a while to respond to it. I don't have an explanation, it just happened.

A week later (or something like that; it wasn't too long, though), I get another email from him basically saying that if I can't be bothered to respond to him, then he could no longer be my friend. I was stunned when I got this email, and my first thought was "What the fuck?" But my second thought was that we had been friends a long time, so it would be worth it to try and save the friendship.

So I responded to him, apologizing profusely, stating that unfortunately, I'm not great at doing this kind of thing. I asked him how things were going, etc, etc. He responded positively to it and we had a good dialogue going for a couple of emails.

But then something happened that made me lose track of things again. I don't remember what it was, but I know I took a while to answer his last email. He sent me another email basically ending the friendship.

Seriously? Friends move away all the time, and sometimes you only talk to them a couple of times a year! Sometimes you get Christmas cards and that's about it. But those bonds of friendship are still there, and again, if you're needed, you're there. They are just a phone call away, or an email, or whatever. But to end the friendship over two weeks? Maybe it was a month, but I do know it wasn't *that* long.

Needless to say, I didn't try again.

The incident did teach me something, though. While I'm still not very good at *initiating* contact regularly, I do a good job of responding to it. At least I think I do.

Of course, this all happened before things like Facebook came around. Nowadays, it's easy to stay a part of somebody's life with periodic contact that doesn't require that you sit down and write a long missive (I know some people are saddened that this is no longer the case). If Facebook were around back then, we'd probably still be friends. Who knows?

Is it right to put a deadline on friendship? I know friendships can fade away when neither party is making much of an effort to keep it alive, but can you put an execution deadline on a friendship? Where if that line is passed, you put it out of its misery?

Or is it possible to stay friends even though the contact is periodic? I know it's possible, because I have a few like that (or, at least, I like to think I do). I guess I know of at least one person who doesn't feel that way.

Edit #1: Added a couple of commas and words to that third paragraph. No, we didn't buy the CDs while we digested our food. :)