Seeing as I was never that close to my family, the friendships I made over the year have largely shaped who I am as an individual. That is why I rather picky when it comes to my friends and try my best to maintain close personal relationships with all the people I truly care about.
To say I have a “best friend” is a fallacy. To say that I have many close friends is slightly more accurate. Though I try to be friends with everybody I meet, I, like everybody else in the world, am prone to picking my “favorites”. All throughout the course of the week I have been working on “friendship packages” so to speak which I will hope to send out the following week. They look like below:
In terms of friendships I’ve made very obvious attempts to connect with friends both new and old over the course of the entire week. This included a variety of mechanisms which included phone calls, instant messaging, snapchats, meeting in person, skype, google hangouts, as well as the occasional text message. In maintaining my “frugal lifestyle” I think the best kind of activities just so happen to be free. If you are really close friends with somebody you can do just about anything with them: which includes watching classic movies like the Breakfast Club, and of course pillow talking.
I also went ahead and messaged virtually everybody on my Facebook chat one day just to see essentially what everybody was up to. This gave me a variety of the typical dry conversations but also some unlikely reunions that will happen next week :).
When making “hangout appointments” with people I try not to double-book because that would essentially mean I didn’t care enough about the friend and would just abandon them for something better. To do something like that on “friendship week” of all times would be both cruel and unusual. With that sense of “strategic planning” I somehow managed to end up getting flaked on five times this week. And though I’m somewhat disappointed and sad by the people that bailed out on me, I don’t really take it personally. Obviously for a friendship to survive both sides have to be willing to contribute a certain degree of effort. When I put more effort into the other side I’m the better friend.
At the end of the day there remains three things I value for in a friendship:
1. Trust. If you cannot trust your friend, then there is a degree of separation clouding your overall experience with them. Throughout my life I have slowly gotten more cynical in the things I tell people. Eventually though, the closer I am to somebody, the more likely I am to tell them something – unless I know of course they’re not likely to keep my experiences as expressed to them in secret.
2. Reciprocity. A huge pet peeve of mine comes out of the reality that some friends are just so unwilling to reciprocate in terms of effort and dedication. If you’re constantly the one initiating things or asking your friends to hang out, and the person on the other end does not, it’s simply not worth the effort. It’s along the same lines of putting 100% of your energy into maintaining a friendship, while the person on the other side only puts 20%. Flaking out is also a surefire sign of a bad friendship. If they’re willing to ditch you for somebody else or see something else as more important, they’re probably not worth it.
3. Longevity. There’s virtually no point (in my opinion) in making friendships with people who don’t intend on maintaining the relationship. The longer a friendship lasts, the more valuable it becomes in the long run. Subsequently, instead of having 100 friends, having 10 close friends probably signifies a greater emotional value than the shallowness of the latter.
The End Result: A+, for the friendship packages that will be sent out next week. I will continue to value all friendships, but old and new as I grow into adulthood.
Next Week: Loyalty
