‘Friendship’ is highly overrated
Can you afford friends? Considering how we enshrine the concept and write poems about it and set it to music and use it so loosely that even passing ships with hostile flags are given harbor under its canopy. My best friend in ten days, my close friend in five and that is the expat truth.
If it was so and there was all this happy bonding going about it seems odd that so many of us get let down by those throngs we see as our friends.
Hello I hear you say, you silly man, you are mixing false friends with true ones, those of us blessed with genuine friends can never think so sourly about this great gift. Perhaps you are right, perhaps the cynicism is inappropriate and out there are heroic friendships that stud themselves with sacrifice and other noble nuggets of virtue but for the most part, friendship in this instant world is highly overrated.
We have interests. Common interests often masquerade as friendships because it suits us to cloak them with such labels.
Little children have “best friends” that last a week and “bestest, bestest” friends that endure the month. Grown up children like you and I are not much different and in today’s priorities, where survival is the name of the game, aren’t friends the easiest rungs to step on and climb whatever ladder you are grasping.
We have all felt the sharp nip of the serpent’s tongue, that stinging ingratitude, the let down, the complete miscarriage of faith in a friend.
These days it is fair odds that friends will take you to the cleaners if it so suits them. Look who walks away when you’re on thin ice and hot water at the same time. Look who gets busy and can’t visit you when your official chair has broken a leg.
You want a longer litany, okay, look who filters back the fragments of shattered confidences about you that leave you gasping like a hammour out of water. How could they do such a thing to you? You used to spend every weekend together, sharing everything. And who do you think is the first to shift allegiance in the wake of your departure from the scene, even dropping you from the next guest list.
Must be an oversight. Rubbish. More a deliberate scratch of the name, who needs you now? Which is, in a funny way, far more honest. It is we who bal-loon relationships into what they are not, creating imagery that flatters our concept of ourselves see how nice we are, we have such a large circle of friends. So did Caesar. And see how he ended up.
The dimensions given this relationship were probably legit-mate in times when there was leisure and people had time to stand, stare and like each other. You could peel humans like onions and get to the core. Now, it is all layered in expediency and immediacy and the old values don’t hold water. But we are loath to learn and we continue to polish and gloss friendship, seeking it in all the wrong places, and pummelling the weak facsimile we occasionally find into our framework. Naturally, it cannot take either the pressure nor rise to expectations because it doesn’t have the integral elements. So, what if we simply came to terms with the fact that the world moves too fast for depth to ever establish itself.
Friendliness is a far more relevant offshoot of the real thing. Momentary relationships that are pleasant, undemanding in the span of mutual acceptability, dying away when they are invalidated by distance and different strokes.
Most people are horrified by such a settlement and dredge immediately into their past to produce evidence to the contrary. See, we are not like you, we have true friends. Try them out. Impose on them, ask of their time, their help, tell them to rally round. See what you come up with. And for how long? In honesty, the way you see friendships fracture better to be ready to go with warm and happy relationships for the moment, and if they fade away, so be it, there are a million more where they came from. Less stress, less hurt and a lot less aggravation not having to strive for perfection.
