A reader writes: My wife and I have been very close friends with another couple for more than 30 years. We are all in our late 50s. We have shared and supported each other through the births of our children, the deaths of our parents, health crises and career changes. But over the past three years they started spending weekends away in a small trailer.
Being curious, and based on cumulative facts gleaned over time, we Googled some of their camping locations. It seemed our friends had become naturists ... nudists. Then we saw their picture in a naturist magazine. Now, we are not prudes - skinny-dipping is not foreign to us. Our problem is that it seems our friends have decided to move on to a new chapter of their lives without including us. Do we tell them we know or do we simply ignore the whole thing and hope they will eventually take us into their confidence?
The answer
Regular readers of this column will know I'm all about hanging on to old friends. Recently I quoted Polonius from Hamlet: "Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried/Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel."
But on the other hand, there's such a thing as taking a hint. And it does appear, at first blush, your friends are kicking you to the hamper like yesterday's boxers.
Sometimes we need to peel off old friends, like a pair of too-tight jeans, in order to grow and evolve.
I discovered the truth of this when I went away to college.
My high-school friends knew me as "crazy Dave." Class clown, streaker, stoner, shoplifter, bookworm, the long-haired hippie freak in ratty jeans, wire-rimmed glasses, and my dad's army jacket. I was also "no-date Dave" - in all of high school I had one date and the whole thing was a lecture on why I never got dates.
But to the downy limbed beauties of Middlebury College in Vermont, I wanted to reinvent myself and be known as Dave the haunted, slightly troubled troubadour; Dave the romantic poet; Dave the playwright, dropping aphorisms and bon mots like President Johnson dropped bombs on Vietnam. Above all, Dave "the lover."
To my amazement and everlasting joy, they bought it. I'm not one to kiss and tell, but suffice to say for the next four years the new Dave was perhaps among the happiest young men on the eastern seaboard.
But my high-school friends would never have allowed this metamorphosis to occur. They would have mocked my scarf and pretensions. They wouldn't have allowed me to "fake it until I make it."
Maybe your friends are thinking along similar lines. Maybe they're worried that (warning: tortured metaphor approaching) unless they untether the belt of your friendship, they'll never be able to drop their old selves to the floor and step forward into the sunshine of a brave nude world.
To get a sense of whether this could possibly be the case, I spoke to Stéphane Deschênes, owner of the Bear Oaks Family Naturist Park in Ontario, and member of the Federation of Canadian Naturists.
He said you shouldn't take your friends' secretiveness personally. They're probably just nervous about your judgment.
Naturism is about many things, he says, including equality: "When you're naked you can't express your feelings of social superiority over others through your clothing."
But when most people think of nudist clubs or societies (don't say "colonies," they don't like that any more: it sounds too much like a cult), they tend to think (or maybe this is mostly me) of alfresco sex; unbidden, total giveaway erections; and not knowing where to look when you're talking to someone.
