My Friend Had So Many Rules
For a while, I thought I had to follow them
I met my friend Nora in the last year of school when I was 17 years old. She was 18 already because her parents had taken her out of school for a year when she was fifteen and traveled around the world.
Nora had lived in London before she moved to our countryside school and I found her knowledge of the world to be intimidating. She was shocked that I’d never tried sushi before, or risotto, or any other number of things that she’d done, like go to the theatre or travel outside of Europe.
It wasn’t that my upbringing was totally devoid of culture, but I was from a small country town and I hadn’t had the chance to have the same experiences as she had.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t think that I was going to like Nora at first due to the above. But then we discovered that we both shared a love of reading and managed to establish some common ground. We started to spend more and more time together as the year went on, and we even ended up going to the same university.
Nora was very extroverted and I was grateful to already have her as a friend when we started at uni. She made friends quickly and always introduced me to them, so my social circle began to grow with her at the center of it.
Both Nora and I were studying arts degrees where we didn’t have much contact time. She established a strict routine for us where we spent the days that we weren’t in lectures in the library. We made a packed lunch every day because it was healthier than the cafeteria crap, although she did allow us to get a chocolate bar from the vending machine some evenings.
She had other rules too: we couldn’t buy chicken unless it was free range; if we agreed to a plan, we couldn’t change it later (punctuality and dependableness were very important to her); we could watch TV at night, but no more than two episodes at a time of a series; on Saturdays we could lie in, but not past 10 am (we were living in halls right next to each other); when we cooked dinner, we had to wash up right away; if she texted me, she expected a reply almost immediately.
These things weren’t presented to me as rules, they were just what Nora did and what she expected me to do if I wanted to keep hanging out with her. And I did want to keep hanging out with her because, despite all of the rules, we did (mostly) have a good time together.
After university, we both moved abroad for a year to teach English, although to different countries. It was good to be around new people and as I couldn’t depend on her to make friends for me, I finally started to come out of my shell. I stayed on for a second year when Nora went back to London.
I did move back eventually, and by chance ended up not far away from where Nora was living. I think that she thought that things would go back to the way they were — with me following her rules, but in the two years that we’d been apart, I’d started to understand that I didn’t always want to follow her rules.
When she started suggesting that we did particular things at particular times (e.g a weekly dinner at each other’s houses, a weekly swimming trip to the lido etc), I said that I wasn’t sure. I was working full time and my job was incredibly demanding. There were some nights when I was just knackered and I wanted to crawl into bed and watch TV on my own. But I wasn’t allowed to cancel plans with her because that showed that I wasn’t reliable.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hang out with Nora, but I didn’t want to schedule a recurring weekly slot that suited her needs but that didn’t particularly suit mine. I wanted to be flexible. I wanted to ask her in the morning if she was free that evening, rather than have appointments mapped out ad infinitum.
Nora didn’t like my new attitude. She sulked and didn’t answer my texts, which I knew was intentional since her rule was always to reply as soon as she saw a text. We had a few arguments and patched things up — which meant that I went back to following her rules for a while.
Then we had a big falling out over a summer holiday — she wanted us to plan something together just the two of us, whereas I wanted to invite some of our other friends. In the end, she decided not to come and I went with our other friends.
Nowadays we don’t see each other so much. I don’t enjoy it when I do see her and the obligation to do certain things her way makes me anxious.
While I believe that it’s good to be kind to people and not to be unreliable, I think there has to be a certain amount of flexibility and compromise in a friendship that I feel Nora can’t give.
Part of my personal development has been about realising that I don’t always need to go along with what other people think and do. I need to find my own path, my own rules (if I want them) and my own voice.
