Friends

There has been a fair bit of buzz in my world lately about friends. Meno had a post about friends, I’ve got a Girlfriend who’s been doing some tough work with some friends, my sister has been thinking about her relationship to her friends and how the people we spend time with influence who we are, and there were a couple of other places where I read or heard about people musing about the nature of friendship. As a result, I’ve been doing some thinking.

I’m blessed with quite a range of friends, and they all settle into different categories in my life. Some are more family that anything else: WeedWoman and Bowyer stand out as examples of that. These are people whom I trust with literally everything – my secrets and fears, my house and my possessions, my children – if there’s such a thing as soulmates, these two would be mine*. I’ve made a new friend who feels suspiciously like an old friend, so I think I may be adding someone to that exclusive list sometime soon.

There are people I love profoundly, but who don’t bring with them the same kind of feeling of ease and belonging that WeedWoman and Bowyer do. That doesn’t mean that they hold a lesser place in my life, it just means that they aren’t the first people I think of when I think of people who belong to me.

There are friends who serve specific purposes in my life – people with whom I share common interests and goals, but who aren’t as tight a fit in my world.

There are people I know from the health club or the college whom I like very much but, for whatever reason, I tend to not see much outside of those venues. I consider them friends and would never turn up an opportunity to spend time with them, but the circumstances of our lives prevent our getting much closer than casual buddies. There are also blog friends, whom I’ve never met in real life and may never have a chance to actually lay eyes on, but I would call them friends, too.

I had a conversation with a Girlfriend of mine not too long ago in which we discussed how friends tend to settle out into these kinds of categories, and about how when one person perceives the friendship to be different than the other person sees it, big trouble can ensue. My friend – let’s call her Sue – was having trouble because of this. Sue liked a person in her neighborhood, but didn’t consider her a “top-drawer” friend – something which came back to bite Sue in the ass when this person accused her of being a lousy friend because Sue didn’t hold up this woman’s expectations for their relationship. I can tell you for sure that Sue is a fantastic friend, and the whole thing sounded a little Fatal Attraction to me – Sue was being held to standards of behavior that she didn’t feel inspired to reach, and that was used against her as evidence of her character flaws. My impression was that Sue would have been happy to continue the friendship on the level that it had reached, but she wasn’t interested in becoming “BFFs” with this person – the casual, occasional get-together was sufficient for her.

I know a lot of people who are uncomfortable “rating” friendships and who would accuse me of being childish and “high school” for even writing this. The fact of the matter is, though, that people naturally settle into orders of importance in our lives for a lot of different reasons. I don’t sit around thinking, “gee, So-and-So pissed me off the other day, so she’s not a “top drawer” friend anymore.” My friends each have different roles in my life – and I in theirs – and that’s just the way it is.

I like to think that all of my friends and I perceive our friendships about the same, but the truth of the matter is that I know, in at least a couple of cases, that’s not really how it’s working out: there are some people whose friendship I value more than they value mine, and vice-versa. When I stop to think about it, I find that it’s practically impossible for two people to perceive anything exactly the same way, and I recognize that some adjustments need to be made for the unique perspectives that each person brings to any relationship.

The bottom line is that I take my friending very seriously. I do my best to be the kind of friend I want to have in return, and I try to be aware of what kind of friend my friends need me to be. I recognize, though, that not every friendship is the same, and I try to nurture each in the way I think will best serve it. As with everything else in my life, I do the very best I can and hope that it’s enough.

*of course, there’s Mr. Chili – but he’s in an entirely different category all his own – neither “friend” nor “family” even begins to cover what he is to me and I know, despite my practice with language, that I’ll never really be able to adequately describe that, so I’m not even going to try…