Time and tide...

[2thepoint]

So I opened the friends email and was relieved to see the following comments:

"We miss you guys though. Summer is fast approaching. I wanted to check in and see if you had any plans...

You guys are always welcome up here if you want to come by sometime or we could come down if you guys were up to it. We are game for anything. Just really miss all of you. Let us know if you feel like getting together sometime. If not, we respect that. Just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that we are still thinking about you all."

Reading that, I felt encouraged and responded as follows:

"It is great to hear from you! I am sorry for being so silent for such a long period of time....

I am sad to report though that W and I have been having marital problems and have been separated for quite awhile now. It has been a painful time for both of us and frankly, the stigma attached to such an event really makes it difficult to reach out. I don't know where we will end up, divorced or reconciled, but it has been a long and painful process and thus we seem to have fallen off the map.

I have been thinking about you guys a lot and have really been torn about not seeing you since a year ago January. It has just been such a difficult time and I didn't know what to say or how to say it. I am very glad that you reached out though because I was afraid our friendship would have died and that would have been a sad day."

I was relieved to have finally gotten that out and was not sure what kind of response I would receive. Then I got this:

"Dude!!! So glad you replied. I was kind of thinking our friendship may have already died and I was struggling to figure out why. Sorry to hear about you and W. To tell you the truth I kind of suspected there might be issues between the two of you. Not the kind of thing I wanted to come out and ask about. I could understand W's silence but couldn't figure out why I hadn't heard anything from you. At any rate, I'm glad you were forthcoming about it...

Hopefully you two can work things out. We are friends of both of you regardless if you are together or not. No choosing sides here. So feel free to reach out to us anytime...."

Well, as you can see, that turned out pretty well. I'm glad he reached out and happy that I responded. One less monkey on my back!!!