Every Friendship Has a Season
In some cases, a reason.
Have you ever wondered why some friendships are short and intense, while others linger; some are strong from the start and last forever while others begin when you least expect them to and become extremely important? I have thought about this a lot, and have realised that you can’t push a relationship.
If you’re trying too hard, there is something wrong.
I first encountered this right after I finished school.
I was studying at a boarding school, and we were a group of 11 girls in the same year who were friends. To be fair, we each had individual relationships with the other ten girls. Some good, some great, some inseparable, and some barely tolerable. This group was a culmination of nine years and multiple group changes.
Right after school, I was heartbroken when we drifted apart. Friends that I could spend hours talking to, I no longer spoke with, while others I rarely spoke to were a critical part of my friends circle after college. It disturbed me, and I couldn’t deal with it. I needed to know how things would be, and they were not what I expected.
Over the years, my relationship with these ten individuals has changed in many ways while staying intact in some. We drift in and out of each other’s lives without an intended purpose. We’re always delighted to meet each other at gatherings and manage to find a thread or two of connection. Reminiscing about our shared past seems a likely topic that encounters maximum participation. Reliving memories is what we do best when we don’t know what to talk about.
Why does this happen?
Does this mean we choose to stay away from some people and maintain more intimate bonds with others? I’m unsure. But I think it could be that we progress our separate ways to achieve the things we desire and become the people we anxiously hoped to be, and somewhere along the way, we find other people more aligned with our purpose. These people occupy the space formerly occupied by those who maintained a shared goal.
However, when we get together there is still an acute sense of belonging, and thus we are still friends. Maybe not as close as we’d like or hoped to be, but they’re all in my life so I choose to be grateful.
There are other people with whom the bond seemed to have snapped at the exact moment I left school or college. These incidents saddened me, and I held on to the pain for a long time.
Choosing happiness isn’t always easy.
I enrolled in a personal development program on Making Happiness for oneself and wrote letters to those people (I didn’t send them). I recorded how their absolute disregard for our friendship wounded me and also justified their reasons for doing so in the letter. It humanised them and established them as ordinary people instead of the villains they had become in my head. These letters encouraged me to deal with unresolved anger and emotional pain that I didn’t need to carry with me anymore.
Today, as a mature and more sensible person, I have stopped trying to conduct personal relationships. I do and give as much as possible without expecting anything in return. Expectations ruin relationships, and that is a story for another time.
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