Garbage Collection in Friendships

By Saumya Dalal

Published on Nov 4, 2024

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Musings

I love when programming concepts perfectly capture the messiness of human relationships. Take garbage collection – that behind-the-scenes process that cleans up unused memory and keeps your program running smoothly. Turns out, friendships need their own version of garbage collection too.

Here's the thing about old friendships: they're like legacy code. Robust, reliable, built to last. These are the friends who've seen you through your most awkward phases and still chose to stick around. You know they're not going anywhere – they're too deeply integrated into your life's codebase.

But just like any long-running program, friendships accumulate their own kind of memory leaks. Those tiny moments of irritation you swallow because "it's not worth mentioning." The slight changes in their personality that catch you off guard – when did they start using a vape like a pacifier? The inside jokes that don't land quite right anymore because you've both grown in different directions.

When you meet someone once a year instead of every day, these small misunderstandings don't get cleared up naturally. They sit there, taking up emotional memory space – until suddenly, your friendship starts throwing unexpected errors.

That's what happened with one of my dear old friends last month. I was thrown an "out of memory" error when I realized I hadn't made his wedding guest list. When I finally caught up with him over drinks in New York, he spilled years worth of grievances – incident after incident where I had hurt him. What he saw as deliberate slights were usually just misunderstandings, and what remained just needed acknowledgment – a simple "I get why that bothered you."

This is what makes friendship garbage collection different from regular arguments: it's not about being right or wrong. It's about clearing the cache, releasing the built-up tension, and making space for new memories. It's saying, "Hey, this tiny thing you did makes me feel weird, and I'm telling you because I trust our friendship can handle this conversation."

The beautiful part? Just like in programming, good garbage collection makes everything run more smoothly. My friend? We're back to our normal runtime environment – just the clean execution of a friendship built on two decades of shared history.

After all, the best programs, like the best friendships, aren't just built – they're maintained.

• Saums