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When Friendships Collapse
I used to try to pinpoint where it all went wrong, and while my instinct was always to go back to that night in March, I now know the friendship had been crumbling long before then.
During my writing classes, when teaching the cause-and-effect unit, I would share a news story about how the I -35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota fell into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people, and as a class, we would identify the remote, immediate, and main causes of the collapse.
The bridge was old, had been deemed structurally deficient, and had thousands of tons of construction equipment on it when it finally gave way in August of 2007. I explained to my classes that while there were several contributing causes to the collapse, identifying the main cause was most important. The main cause is the reason something happens, regardless of other circumstances. In this case, the main cause was a design flaw — the steel beams that held up the bridge were only half as thick as needed to support it. Eliminate all other contributing factors, and the bridge still would have collapsed eventually.
While I can label the night in March as the most immediate cause of the collapse of three of my friendships, I now know it’s far from the main cause. What happened in March simply acted as a catalyst, giving my former friends an excuse to ostracize me, though they had been…
