A Magical Meet-Cute from a Friendship that Failed
An anecdote about my first best friend that wasn't the lifelong bestie I hoped he'd be...
Sometimes you have the best meet cutes with people.
Originally, I was writing this as part of a series relating to why I was wrong about men when I was growing up, and how their friendships were just as hurtful as my friendships with women had been, just in a different way. Check out part 1 and part 2 of Why I Used to Hate Woman for more on that.
But the first story that came to mind was such a story on its own that I felt like it should probably be its own article.
So, once again on the recommendation of my therapist, here’s the story of how I met my best friend circa 2005-2023, and why I can’t consider him my best friend anymore.
Meeting a myth…
I met my first male best friend — let’s call him Eddie (1) — when I lived in Fort St. John, British Columbia. I had moved up north in 2004 because I had been seeing my first love, Kelsy, for a few years at that point and I wanted to know if things would work out if we lived in the same town, since it had thus far been long distance.
Eddie was the kind of guy that was a local legend. Everyone knew him or knew of him, and everyone described him the exact same way — long wavy red-brown hair and a big beard, a real heavy metal guy. But nobody ever knew where he was or where they could find him or if he was around or in town or what. As I said, he felt like a small town myth.
So when I was working at Zellers in the electronics department (a now-defunct Canadian department store), and heard someone say “Oh hey, Eddie!” it caught my attention. I looked over to see exactly the person who had been repeatedly described to me: long wavy red-brown hair down to his waist, and a rusty beard. Probably wearing a metal band shirt.
“Sorry to interrupt, but did you say your name was Eddie?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s me, why?” he replied.
“Oh, I’ve heard a lot about you from James and Joseph,” I responded. James and Joseph had been his roommates at some point and had some… colorful stories about living with Eddie. I recall him cringing slightly at the mention.(2)
I think this song was playing on the store sound system…
At that point, there were like thirteen people in my checkout queue, so I could not continue. However, I flew through them because I felt like I had just met Bigfoot and wanted to talk more. However, sadly, when I was done, he was gone.
So, I went to go tidy up the video game aisle, and lo and behold! There was Eddie, standing next to the video games, pondering a copy of Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time.
We got chatting again and we instantly clicked. He told me that he worked at the local Boston Pizza and I should come by sometime.
On a whim, I decided to use my staff discount (which was significant) to buy a copy of Star Ocean and left it for him at the Boston Pizza, along with my number.
From there on out, Eddie got integrated into our friend group. He and Kelsy used to play Magic the Gathering together sometimes, and we were all geeky metalheads, so we all had things in common. Everything was lovely…
The moment that initiated the end of my relationship…
…Until one night when the three of us were hanging out together. Kelsy had to go to sleep because he had work the next day. Eddie and I were still having fun, and Kelsy told us to continue to do so, thus we stayed up all night talking. Kelsy was in the next room.
Literally, nothing untoward happened, but somehow, the fact that we never did end up calling it a night changed everything.
The next morning, Kelsy’s parents told me they weren’t comfortable with me having Eddie around anymore. Didn’t really explain why (I rented a room in their basement, Kelsy lived elsewhere), but mumbled something about his history of drug abuse (smoking weed, so not quite the end of the world) and not wanting someone like that around their kids. Even though I feel like I have a memory of hearing that Kelsy’s dad bought weed from him in the past.
Equally baffling to me at the time was the fact that Kelsy turned on Eddie after that. I swear it felt like I had stepped into the Twilight Zone, where everyone believed that I had been fucking Eddie loudly on top of Kelsy’s sleeping body that night, and the whole house heard it.
That night when literally nothing happened except we laughed a lot. I guess that counted as cheating, but nobody informed me that part of my relationship deal involved me not not having male friends that I could talk to all night.
At that point, my relationship with Kelsy got so strained that I couldn’t take it anymore. I started to hate his parents and their snide, smug side-eyes. I moved back to my hometown and Kelsy and I went back to long distance. But, wouldn’t you know it, Eddie would call me regularly, but Kelsy stopped putting in effort.
Back in Alberta…
Funnily enough, it was, indeed, Eddie that broke Kelsy and I up. Inadvertently.
It wasn’t that Eddie stole me from Kelsy, per se. It was that Kelsy had no idea who he was or what he wanted, and he had been a terrible boyfriend for the better part of a year already, picking fights with me and never resolving them, getting all hot and cold over nothing, telling me he loved me and then in the same breath saying he didn’t know if he loved me because he didn’t know what love was.
At some point, I mentioned that Eddie was calling me more than he was. I’d be lucky if I heard from Kelsy once a week, while Eddie was calling me nearly every day. So Kelsy went into a massive possessive jealous spiral and in our next call, he told me that he wasn’t comfortable with my friendship with Eddie, and that I had to stop talking to Eddie or we couldn’t be together anymore.
That was more painful than I knew how to manage. I spent a day roaring and wailing and trying to call Eddie to talk to him about it, but he wasn’t answering the phone.
There was a decade or so in my life, where I fully declared that if you offer me an ultimatum, I will not choose in your favor, regardless of what you ask or why, because doing that to someone is so fucking controlling and possessive. That was a result of being forced to make this choice.
I know Kelsy only gave me that ultimatum because he truly believed, with 100% certainty beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would choose him. I had, every moment up until that point, after all. Even if he was so deeply insecure, he had to trust that he could control me by using my insecurities.
Sadly for him, in the time that we had broken up before, I learned a few things and became less insecure. So by the time we got back together, I wasn’t so desperate for attention that I was willing to put up with efforts to control me. And I will definitely not let my life be dictated by someone else’s insecurities.
Ultimately, I called Kelsy and told him that, if he really felt that way, then sorry, but I guess that’s it for us.
Suddenly, the Elton John song that was playing when Eddie and I met felt extremely profound…
“Someone saved my life tonight, sugarbear
Almost had your hooks in me
Didn’t you dear?
You nearly had me roped and tied
Altar-bound, hypnotized, sweet freedom whispered in my ear
You’re a butterfly
And butterflies are free to fly
Fly away
Bye bye…”
They say to date your best friend…
So yeah, I did end up dating Eddie, but it only lasted for all of 5 months.
First he moved down to Red Deer to be closer to me, but my parents chased us off to the mountains. I got a job in housekeeping and I forget what his job title was, but he did evening work setting up fires in people’s cabins and chopping wood, and other odd jobs. The evening/night handyman, or something to that effect.
We thought we were soulmates at first.(3) He saved me from my toxic first love, after all. So romantic! Even the song playing when we met was telling us how fated we were. I was young and naïve enough to believe in that sort of thing back then.
At first, dating him was nice. He knew what had been messing me up and I knew his scars and his traumas and his troubles. Eddie didn’t have a remotely easy life. His family was a trash fire at best. But I knew all of that and I could navigate it because he was very open. I thought, at the time, that he was really honest and self-aware.
Given time, however, I started to notice that Eddie was… an invasive presence. He had to insert himself into every aspect of my life, regardless of whether I wanted him there. For example, when we were still in Red Deer, he once rearranged the kitchen in my parents’ house while they were away. Not hugely, but in a bunch of small ways to make it more convenient for him. Dude, not your home, what the fuck? I fixed it all before my parents got back from their trip, lest my mom have a conniption. He was overwhelming. Smothering, even.
I can’t remember anymore what it was that made me so crazy. Probably a lot of the imbalances caused by patriarchal conditioning. It was a lot of small things, as opposed to anything big. But I do remember that he just felt invasive and smothering, a lot of the time. It was like I needed to be supplemented and he needed someone to complete him, and codependent love isn’t my style.
Eventually, one of my buddies had a cousin who wanted to come work out in the mountains with him. Eddie had undiagnosed IBD at the time and had to take a leave to figure out what was up with his gut (took another 5+ years to figure it out, IIRC), and so we “took a break” while he was gone, and when I had the chance, I offered to let the new girl move in with me, kicked Eddie out, and broke up with him officially by phone.(4)
He showed me what I meant to him by going down on one of my friends the first week he got back.
Furthermore, the guy I was interested in, who liked me too, wouldn’t make a move on me because he didn’t want to step on Eddie’s toes. Eddie accepted this gesture of loyalty willingly… grateful, it seemed, to still claim some ownership over me, even though he went on to date one of my friends for the rest of the time we worked there and a little beyond.
Truly, at that point in my life, loyalty felt like a thing for men, not me.
I also remember a work dinner where I was more embarrassed than I ever remember being, because he got drunk and started making a scene. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I recall there being a speech that made me massively uncomfortable. He didn’t even remember anything the next day, or if he did, he lied about it.
Ultimately, dating your best friend can be a good idea, but just because you’re besties doesn’t mean you’re remotely compatible. I’m fairly sure that relationship would have ended very badly if it had gone on for any significant length of time.
After the work season ended, we parted ways…
We did a trip up to Edmonton with our workmates after the season ended in October, but we didn’t see each other much after that, going back to our long distance friendship. We moved on, dated other people, but stayed close. He felt like the one person who could see me and call me out on my shit, and I could do the same for him. That, to me, was true friendship — we could help each other grow.
By 2009, I was out of college, had been through a few relationships, and decided to move to Finland for a year. I came home for Christmas though, and Eddie came down to visit for the holidays. It was nice to have him there, because he felt like family.
Then I decided to make the trip to Finland permanent. For the first few years of living here, we were good, fine, same old, though he talked to me a bit less and less. But after a couple years, his personal life got really intense — he lost his job because he had to take so much sick leave (remember that undiagnosed IBD?), he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to keep his place, and he fell back into manic depression and suicidal ideation.
For 3 years, I had no idea if he was alive or dead. Three. Fucking. Years. The person who was supposed to love me most, whom I loved dearly, just vanished off the face of the earth without a word.
I consider this a betrayal for a few reasons. The first is that he denied me the opportunity to be there for him. If someone I love is depressed and suicidal, that’s dreadful and as their friend, I want to be there for them, and it hurts to be shut out and cut off. And I’ve already discussed why smokebombing out of your friends’ lives is both understandable and also an asshole move.
But to be selfish about it, he also denied me my best friend. My life hasn’t been easy since I moved to Finland. I, too, developed depression back in around 2017. Imagine how nice it might have been to have that friend who understood me and depression and could have been a sympathetic ear.
But nope, he was just… gone. As if I never mattered at all.
The return…
He came back online in the late 20-teens at some point and our friendship rekindled. I got SnapChat and he was my only contact, and we would send each other silly videos and chat a bit. He started posting poetry and other things on Facebook again. He had started working at the resort again, this time as the night audit, and shared stories about life out there again on Instagram.
Turned out the family he was living with went full no-internet in their home for a long while. I guess that’s a valid reason for not being online for 3 years, but he could have, I dunno, gone to the library or something to let me know he was still alive. But I guess that wasn’t on his mind. Maybe I wasn’t on his mind at all. Who knows. Either way, he didn’t feel compelled to tell me that he found friends to take him in (he did amazing work with their autistic daughter, too) and got a diagnosis and treatment for IBD, until way later.
In 2019, a full decade after I had last seen him, my partner and I visited Canada and we met again at last when we went out to the resort. It was as if no time had passed. Instant besties, as always.
Until…
History repeats itself…
Suddenly, no more Facebook posts. Suddenly, no more Instagram posts. Suddenly, no more SnapChat messages. And, once again, no explanation whatsoever.
Starts to feel like a bit of a familiar pattern, eh?
What does that mean for a friendship?
For me, it meant that the friendship was one-sided. If someone vanishes without word or explanation, reappears expecting emotional continuity, and accepts care and closeness without reciprocating reliability… ultimately, what was I getting out of the friendship?
It’s not that I don’t love him, or that I don’t care, but when I cannot trust the bond to exist when I need it, when I’m forced into a permanent state of emotional vigilance (wondering if he’s even alive), and when the friendship is structured around my capacity to be there for him, without regard for my needs… that’s no longer friendship to me.
So… now what?
In the end, as much as all of this was… disappointing, to say the least… I do get it. Eddie’s life was never kind or easy for him. He was always a bit of a tangled person. I’ve never taken it personally.
But I always wondered… did he ever really care about me after we broke up? Or was he just another guy who wanted to possess me and then threw me out when he realized he couldn’t?(5) He certainly went out of his way to try to hurt me after we broke up at least.
Ultimately, when my adoptive son passed away in 2023, I was in a state where nothing else mattered. Nothing had consequences that had any meaning to me. And in a weird way, it made me want to start confronting people that I’d never confronted before about things, because I had no capacity to care about the consequences or potential fallout.
I wrote Eddie a letter during that time. I mean, after all, I was grieving the death of my son and as far as I knew, Eddie didn’t even know I had a son.
I told him that I realized that I had been calling someone my best friend for over a decade, who had only been a friend to me for a handful of weeks in that time. I realized that I deserved a best friend who loved me with an equivalent dedication to how much I loved them.
Eddie… was not that person. Maybe he wanted to be at some point. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just wanted me to love him and when I didn’t love him romantically, it wasn’t good enough. Who knows. I sure don’t because he never told me.
I told him that I loved him, that he is my family and always would be, and I would always be here for him if he needs me, but I would not be the one to reach out anymore. It’s not hard to find me, he knows where I am, he has my email and phone number and everything. I wished him well.
But I’ve never heard from him. It sucks that this is what became of what seemed like a cosmic friendship, but when only one person puts in the work, eventually you need to let go, and I only have so much capacity to mourn what could have been, and most of that is still dedicated to my son.
In the end, his silence is his choice, and I must respect that. If nothing else, I feel better for having spoken my heart and finding the courage to move on.
1 Why Eddie? Because before we met, he was supposed to play Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and everyone described him by saying he was Eddie. He didn’t end up being in the play because he got laryngitis and also never learned the words to “Hot Patootie.” I remember being a cheeky fuck and learning the words in a day to tease him.
2 Those were not his finest days, he later told me with embarrassment.
3 We were, but not in the “The One” sense. Nowadays, I believe a lot of soulmates exist across time and space. He was one of mine. I like to think soulmates are people I’ve met in a few past lives — the soul’s recognition of an old friend. I have many of these.
4 Not my finest moment. I was still a pretty petty teenager at that point in time.
5 In the end, patriarchy fucks all of us up. No one is special on that front.
