There’s one guy in particular I think of when I read this question. Essentially, my father’s sister who lives 2 hours west of my parents, married a guy whose best friend from high school lives 1 hour west of us and 1 hour east of them, and over the years all 3 families became friends. We would often go to my aunt and uncle’s house when I was a child and they would visit quite frequently on weekends when we were there. The families went camping and fishing together in the summer, had card parties in the winter, we were all pretty close. My aunt and uncle had a couple sons, one 3 years younger than me…the other much younger, and right in between my older cousin and myself was the son of this other couple…he was a year and a half younger than I am. The first time I met him at my aunt and uncle’s house we HATED each other, but as we grew older, we became very good friends.
When we were teenagers we would get together all the time, I often stayed over at his place or he at mine. We’d make road trips together to the closest big city (about 80–90 miles away). We had a lot of common interests that teens often share, particularly music, movies, etc. We always had a great time, even though we lived about an hour apart, and we saw each other a lot. I ended up going to college up by my aunt and uncle’s place, and I got several chances to hang with my friend as he was on the way home for me on the weekends I went home. He ended up not excelling at college, but he always worked hard, and right around the time I graduated college, he moved down to the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. A few months later, I too moved down, and at that point we were mere minutes from each other. We hung out a lot while we were finding ourselves…I was getting established in a career in Accounting, and he eventually took a management job at a printing house.
Well, as we both met women, we had slightly less time for each other, but once he found that job, he kind of became a big shot there…which meant he was working a lot of hours. He eventually met his wife, a co-worker at his job and they were married not long before I married my wife. He opted to elope, so there was no wedding, but there was a ceremony after the fact in his hometown. She came along with an older daughter, and now he had the role of busy executive, married man and stepdad. Each thing either of us piled on our lives did two things…one, it made us more busy and two, it made us less obsessed with the passions we had as teenagers (see movies, music, etc.).
For one period of time, he even rented a duplex about 1/2 a mile from my house, and I didn’t even know we were neighbors until just before he moved out. We still had phone conversations, but it began to feel like we had less “real” to talk about. We had never really engaged each other in any deep discussions. And I found out whereas I’m extremely liberal, he is pretty conservative…we never discussed politics. We never discussed our relationships. We never discussed our feelings. The things we discussed were superficial at best. And, he was always too busy to get together, even if I could make the time.
So, when my wife and I got married, I asked him to be in the wedding…had we gotten married 5 years earlier, he might have been my best man. But as it turned out, I was becoming closer to my college roommate after we left college, and even though he lived back where I grew up (about 3 1/2 hours north of where I am now), he was just more reliable, had more time on his hands, and was better best man material. So, my first friend was sort of second in command as it were.
The big day came, we had our rehearsal, and our subsequent dinner. His parents came down, and though we would have invited them had we known, he sprung that on us at the rehearsal and bailed on the rehearsal dinner. The next day at the wedding, he was there, but even though he was in the wedding party, his step daughter got an upset stomach, so he left 4 hours before the thing was over. I also heard later on that while running some errands, he blew a fuse and went psycho on some of the others in the wedding party. We also had a bbq/gift opening the next day, to which he also did not show up. On returning from our honeymoon, my wife informed me that in filling out the thank yous, they didn’t even bring a gift. I had given them a nice gift for their wedding a couple months before and they if anything had more money than we did, so I’m not sure what all that was about.
After that, I’d hear about his comings and goings from family, and if we had just moved a big piece off furniture or something he might say to my parents “they should have called me”. But they stopped sending us Christmas cards (sent them to everyone else), he never called me…I called a couple times, but eventually let it go. For 7 years we didn’t speak, and it wasn’t like I was angry with him.
I called him out of the blue a couple years ago, because I was up for a job at his company, and he was a bigwig there. Things had been going very well there and I thought I was a shoe-in. After I talked to him for over an hour on the phone in a conversation that was 100% pleasant, the next communication I got from the company was that they were going a different direction. Could be a coincidence.
So I don’t know what I did to tick this guy off, or if it’s really that he just doesn’t have time for relationships he deems to be superficial…maybe this is because he wasn’t the best man, but I discussed that with him going into it and told him it was only because he was always so busy, and he said he understood. So yeah, you just never know….
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