Forever Friendships Require Forgiveness

This is your sign to apologize; this is your sign to forgive

images from Pinterest, collage by me

This weekend I celebrated my best friend’s thirtieth birthday. Tipsy, on the dance floor of some bar after a huge dinner, we hugged each other and swayed along to the music. “I love you,” I shouted over the thumping bass. She squeezed me back.

A few months earlier, I cried as I watched her walk down the aisle with her dad, the light white neck scarf of her wedding dress fluttering in the air off the mountains, sunlight beaming from a sky that just minutes before had been pouring rain.

A few months before that, we danced unsteadily on the deck of a boat, spray springing our hairs into curls and wetting our faces as we screamed the lyrics to “Pink Pony Club” at her bachelorette.

A few months before that, we lay curled on a hammock together, summer breeze blowing us back and forth, clouds scudding across the blue sky above us, as I thought, “Thank God she forgave me.”

Caroline and I have been friends since birth, our lives and families inextricably intertwined. Our moms were best friends. Our dads are best friends. Our younger sisters are friends. We spent six summers of our childhood going to summer camp together, and every other summer at the beach. We even share the same name.

Though we always went to different schools, ended up at different colleges, and sometimes would go long periods without seeing each other, I think we both knew that our friendship was forever. That fact was cemented when, after college, we moved in together in New York City.

But then our friendship faced a challenge, and I didn’t rise to the occasion. Caroline’s mom got sick, and after she passed, I wasn’t there for her. It’s hard to read it written out in black and white like that, because it makes me sound like such a bad person. And in this respect, frankly, I was. I have a litany of well-practiced excuses, excuses I would run through in my head whenever the specter of guilt creeped up on me. I had been there for her when her mom was sick, had stood by her side through the horrific funeral receiving line. I had moved to a new city one month after her mom passed, started a new, full-time job teaching at a title one school, and doing a full graduate school course load at night. I was busy! There was a pandemic!

But the real, unvarnished truth is that this was the most difficult time in my friend’s life, and I let her down. I could’ve found time to check in and call more frequently, but I didn’t. I could’ve sent texts more often, but I didn’t. I could’ve tried to find time to visit her, but I didn’t. I was selfish, and I was scared. I didn’t know what to say or do in the face of such tremendous loss, and so I said and did nothing.

Once I graduated grad school, about two years after her mom’s passing, we started to see each other more, call each other a bit more. Tenuously, things picked back up. But my failure was always there, like a shadow between us. I don’t know if she felt that way, but I certainly did. Every time I saw her, I wondered how she could still be friends with me, if she hated me. I thought she would be well within her right to.

Then, one night, I got really drunk, and broke down to my fiancé and told him all of this. His response was simple: “You need to apologize. And you need to see if she’ll forgive you.”

And so I did. At a brewery over Christmas break, I word-vomited an apology. My words tumbled over each other as I told her how sorry I was, that I knew I had messed up, and I asked if she could ever forgive me.

And for all the reasons I wanted her to be my forever friend—because she is kind and generous and good—she forgave me.

From that moment, I felt a shift in our friendship. We could move forward, if not with a clean slate, with an understanding that I wanted to be different, to be a better friend going forward. So, perhaps my title is a bit of a simplification…

Forever friendships don’t just require forgiveness. They require that the person who has erred frankly acknowledges their wrongdoing, apologizes sincerely, and changes their behavior going forward. They require that the person who has been wronged evaluates whether they are capable of honestly granting forgiveness, and gives it only if they feel they can truly move forward.

I have had similar moments with many of my oldest friends. Sometimes I am the one asking for forgiveness, sometimes I’m the one giving it. And through each interaction, I’ve learned that when forgiveness is genuinely and lovingly exchanged between two people, it brings them closer and strengthens their relationship.

There are times when this hasn’t worked out, when I have forgiven someone and they have repeated the offense. Or there might be times where you feel the friendship isn’t worth the labor of forgiveness. Or times when the offense feels too great to forgive. In those cases, the friendship may not be destined to last forever. But, in any friendship that stands the test of time, there will be mistakes made (big and small), apologies will be needed, and forgiveness will be required.

I’ve seen a lot of talk online about the three girlfriends in the latest season of White Lotus who clearly all despise each other despite maintaining the label of “friends.” Each episode seems to reveal some festering past offense that these women have held on to and never addressed. I wonder if these women could still be genuine friends if they just owned their mistakes, apologized, forgave each other, and changed their behavior? When I spoke with Caroline about this essay, she mentioned that having these hard conversations is a sign of care and love. It says, “I care enough about our friendship to have the difficult conversations needed to make it work.” The women in White Lotus clearly don’t care about each other enough to have hard conversations.

I know I felt a weight lift from Caroline and I’s friendship when I apologized. I’ll never be able to change what I did, never be able to take back the ways I let her down. But on the other side of forgiveness, there is love, all the memories we have built since, and all the memories we will continue to build for the rest of our lives.