What's worth ending a friendship over?
My instinctive answer to that is: you can't. If someone was ever really your friend, the two of you will always be. Something might happen that make you not speak to each other for five years, or he or she might turn into someone you don't really like anymore, but if your friendship was at any point true, friendship will always remain there in the bottom. Ten years later when you need something, that friendship will be like a flat +5 bonus no matter what happened in between - even if your friend murdered your parents or somesuch.
But is that true? Or are friends, like any other kind of relationship or alliance, something that comes and goes like the tide as you and the people around you grow and change? Like, today a blue shirt, tomorrow a red? And you never really know anyone, so can you ever really have a true friendship?
And so if friendships can end, then what is worth ending them for? Love? Principle? Self-preservation? Faith? Or is it that you can end friendships - but there is nothing worth that price?
Maybe the question I ought to answer rather is this one: What makes a friendship worth keeping?
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3 comments:
I'd say that there is a very distinct difference between ending a friendship, and a friendship ending.
Ending a friendship requires something very significant, I imagine "murder of parents" would qualify, along with a great number of other things.
A friendship ending, however, doesn't require anything of the sort, just time and the people involved developing and turning into different people. That part happens a lot more, I'd say. At least in my experience.
Friends are really hard to come by, which to me means that you should hold on to the ones you find.
What a friend is to me, is someone that will like me for everything that I am, not just the fun or "good" aspects of me, but also the boring or lazy or "bad" aspects. When I meet up with, say, people from school I usually tone down some aspects of me personality, since I know that some things about me are stuck-up or rude or "bad". I have to do this if I want - most - people to like me. A friend however, I can show the version of me that includes obnoxious or nerdy or "bad" behavior. In a sense, the real me.
I feel happy, relaxed, appreciated and loved when I know that I can be precisely who I am around other people. I can only do this with my friends. In any other company I risk being ridiculed, disrespected or simply disliked if I don't control my "bad" aspects.
If I would ever truly consider ending a friendship, that friend would not be, and might not ever have been, my friend. Or more to the fact, I would not have been that persons friend.
In response to NF's comment; I feel the same way that if I would end a friendship then I was presumably never that person's friend. However, to dare be everything that you are without restrictions, I'm not like that with anyone or anything except cats - friendship in my case means daring to be closer to who I really am and letting go of some limitations, but not all of them.
And so then, considering Nalle's comment, it would mean that someone who previously accepted you as you are, or who you accepted as who they are, have changed so much that you or they or both no longer do that. But if friendship can end that way, that acceptance is not without conditions, and cannot be trusted. Right?
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