With a little help from my friends

I had a good Sunday. I went over to my friends’ house and had lunch, drank some wine, chatted, laughed, played some computer games. There were five of us to start with, then one of my friends and his girlfriend left and for the rest of the time it was me and another couple, both of whom I knew as individual friends before they got together.

They’re really good friends in all senses: they are people I enjoy spending time with and I know I can rely on them. Earlier this year I was quite ill and they visited daily and helped me in all sorts of ways. They’re probably the friends I spend the most time with currently and when I’m with them there’s no sense of me being a third wheel. On those days when I am feeling most down about my lack of relationship, (not to mention my job and where I live) when I’m feeling like a failure because I am no further on in life than 15 years ago, I remind myself that I am lucky enough to have friends like them.

There have been times in the past when I have not had many friends in my life. For a while I only really had one friend, albeit a very good one who is still my best friend. She was the only person I socialised with and opened up to and I came to rely on her a little too much.

At the time I was feeling particularly depressed about still being single and there were many times when I found myself crying on her doorstep as I tried to say goodbye and leave for home. Sometimes it had been building during the evening, others it seemed to come from nowhere, but always it was the same: sobbing rather than simply crying, noisy, messy sobbing, gasping for breath and finding it difficult to get the words out, which were always some variation of what’s wrong with me, am I ever going to have a boyfriend. I was also having problems with jealousy and I think a little paranoia.

My friend eventually told me I had to get help. I plucked up the courage to visit my GP. He asked a lot of questions (including “Do you have a boyfriend?” and “Have you ever had a boyfriend? How I longed, and long, to be able to say yes to at least one of those) but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him the whole story. I didn’t mention the uncontrollable sobbing and the paranoia; I just said I sometimes got upset when talking to a friend. I asked if I could be referred to a counsellor but he said he didn’t think I was depressed and told me to go back if things got worse. I never did.

Luckily I didn’t get any worse. I started spending time outside work with a colleague and managed to develop that into a friendship. I made efforts to keep myself busy. I stopped myself from reaching rock bottom. I know that if I didn’t have good friends now and if I didn’t have my classes and swimming, if I had nothing in my life apart from work, I would be back in the same bad place I was then.

It’s not that friends and keeping busy stop me wanting a relationship. They don’t stop the loneliness, they don’t stop the worry that I will never find someone, they don’t stop the hurt that comes from knowing that nobody has been in love with you, that nobody has liked you enough to even want to try being in love with you.

But my friends do make me feel loved and cared for. Spending time with them means I have evenings and days which I enjoy, when I have fun and when I laugh. It means that I don’t spend every waking hour thinking about my situation; it doesn’t completely dominate my life. I won’t, and can’t, let it dominate my life. If I did I fear it would completely overwhelm me.