Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Forever is Over



I have been thinking about friendships lately. It's a very complicated concept that shouldn't be. My lifestyle takes me different places more often that I wish it did so it is that much harder for me to make friends and worse yet to maintain those friendships. In the past few years I've met a myriad of people, some quite the characters. I've made some amazing connections and some that started out with the intensity of a Harlequin novel but fizzled almost immediately after the distance factor moved in. Those sometimes hurt the most. Those that you invest all your time on and open your heart to only to realize later on that they rather invest their time in the ones that don't require "as much work" as the one who moved away.

Maybe it's me, maybe that is another one of the aspects of my life in which I need to take it down a notch... I'm so intense and passionate in everything I do that I reckon I tend to overdo it. I work too hard on things even when there is, clearly, nothing left.



The way I see it you should treat a friendship with the same commitment and solidarity as you would treat a marriage. A true friendship has the power of pulling you through the darkest times, praise you during you days of triumph and ground you when you forget where you came from. It has the ability to build you up or to destroy you. We don't really give it the respect we should, we take it lightly and take it for granted. This is probably why it seems like so much work to maintain them. More than ever now that people can easily answer 528 when asked how many friends they have, thanks Facebook.

Actual human contact has been reduced to a chore, to special occasions, to a rare occurrence. It is quite sad and almost pathetic the way we treat each other. I understand the impersonal and much easier communication vehicle of social networking or texting but it seems we have forgotten how great it feels to hear that voice on the other end or feel the warm embrace of an old friend every once in a while not only on birthdays or holidays. Life almost always gets in the way and we don't even look back, we just move on and move forward not even caring what we leave behind.

Don't get me wrong, this is not some idealistic, cry fest, i want to matter to you bullshit but it is something that bothers me. It bothers me how we toss each other out like bad milk. It bothers me how we use each other while the getting is good and move on to the next party without even blinking. That's all. I am a guilty of this as much as the next person, I've done it too, plenty of times. People's lives change over time and sometimes the threads that connect us becomes frayed and weak. Usually why many relationships we thought "would last forever" turn out to be transient and friends, even very close ones, slip in and out of our lives for a variety of reasons. I understand all this, but something inside of me wishes we could hold on so forever wouldn't have to be over.