Are relationships only skin-deep?

We are as a species, so unsatisfied with whatever is current in our lives.  We pretend that all is well with our world, while we are seething with restless feelings of neglect, insecurity, or even resentment at why life is not the just as we want it.

I guess to a certain extent, all of us are human enough to undergo these feelings, but it really gets one thinking about how much is really true of a person who you thought you really knew well.

I am generally known to be a person who has a lot of friends, and though i do not really have an equally deep relationship with each one of them, all of them are dear to me, and fulfill different needs in my life.  One cannot be replaced by another, and i know some of them cannot even resonate with each other. But that is fine by me, and I would not want anyone of them to be any different than they are. I may crib about them, snap at their idiosyncrasies, but at the end of the day, they are all an integral part of my life, and they all know it.

Or so I thought. Till today, after a phone call from one of those very dear friends, with whom I have really shared a lot, and who I had thought knew me so very well.  During our conversation, when I mentioned that we had earlier spoken about something that we were discussing, she denied it, saying, you must have done so with someone else, you have so many friends, and are so busy anyway.

The statement sounded innocuous; yet it did not feel so. Behind the words, I sensed a feeling of hurt. Was I not talking to her as often as I used to? Was I neglecting some relationships for others?  Did I at any point in time make her feel less important to me than she was?

These and so many other questions flitted in my mind like cotton flakes.  I want to know, is it really so difficult to maintain relationships? They are so fragile; I am even scared to ask whether she meant anything else when she made that remark. Could I have been responsible for her feeling we are not meeting or talking often?

We all make choices, and we need to understand that in a relationship there needs to be space, otherwise it becomes claustrophobic.  I have had friends who have dropped out of my life, like autumn leaves, simply because they have not been able to digest the fact that I had a thickly populated social circle!  I felt caved in there, and was only glad to let them go.  

But in this case, it hurt, not the comment per se, but the fact that it came from a person, who I thought accepted this as an integral part of me... And yet I discovered that it was not really so. At least that’s what I understood...   I hope I am wrong.