The Friendship That Drained Me and Why I Called It Love

Ines and I met during our first year of university in Seville and the friendship established itself quickly in a particular shape: she was intense and dramatic and bright, and I was the stable one, the one who listened, the one who talked her back from the edge of whatever she was currently standing on.

In the beginning I found this meaningful. Being needed by someone felt like being important to them, and being important felt like being loved. I was 21 and had not yet learned to distinguish between the two. The pattern over the following six years was consistent.

Ines moved from crisis to crisis with a regularity that I slowly came to understand was not misfortune but a feature of how she moved through the world - she generated intensity the way some people generate calm, and she needed an audience and a support structure for it.

I was both, reliably and almost unconditionally, for most of our twenties. The cost was not obvious because it was distributed across hundreds of interactions rather than concentrated in any single dramatic moment. It was the late-night calls that arrived regardless of what I was doing.

It was the holidays that were reshaped around her needs. It was the years of my own struggles that I managed quietly because her struggles were always more immediate.

It was the realisation, at 27, that I could describe her emotional landscape in intricate detail and that she could not reliably tell you what city I worked in. I tried, once, to have an honest conversation about the imbalance.

She was briefly remorseful and then, within two weeks, back to the established pattern with the ease of someone who had never really been required to change it.

I reduced the friendship over the following year - not with a declaration but by being less available, less responsive in the small hours, less willing to reorganise around her rhythms. The friendship contracted and eventually became what it honestly had always been: an acquaintance I had been servicing for years.

What I grieved was not her specifically but the version of the story I had told myself - that we were close because I had given so much of myself to her. Closeness built entirely on one person's need and the other person's availability is not closeness.

It is a service relationship that has been mislabelled.