On Friendships
One of my friends like to play the tit-for-tat card pretty often. I’ve been around her long enough to accurately predict when she is likely to try and ‘return the favor’. On most occasions, she has no real reason to believe she was misled, or cheated or maybe just made to feel as if life was unfair. She still chooses to strike back, perhaps because in her twisted head, she feels she was wronged. So for instance, if I cancel our gym trip on any particular day (irrespective of how valid my reason might be), it is almost inevitable that she would do the same the very next day. And the excuse is almost always work related. To me it just seems a bit odd as to how it is uniquely timed to coincide with the day I opt to drop out. As a result, we don’t go to the gym on two consecutive days, which in turn, completely screws with our work out routine and goals. By now its reached a state where I can accurately predict what’s coming. She seems to have this constant need to have the last word in almost everything, and even during the most mundane of conversations, when the issue has long been dead, it keeps playing on her mind till she is able to establish that she was right all along.
I have, several times, thought of bringing this up with her, of discussing this habit she seems to have. I am, at a certain level, quite convinced that we probably wouldn’t stay in touch once we move on with our lives. And I know the exact reason why I wouldn’t want to. This habit that she has, can be very annoying especially because I see her almost everyday!
Back when I was young, it was so much easier to talk to friends and tell them just exactly how you felt and then everything would magically get resolved and we’d all go back to being BFFs. With age, that essence of true friendship seems to get lost somewhere. People tend to internalise too much without feeling the need to come out in the open with how they really feel about something. They draw their own conclusions and keep disagreements and points of conflicts bottled up inside. Most of us, by the time we hit 25, acquire a certain rigidity of thought which only gets more fixed with time. Our experiences with other people, always advise us to be careful of what we say. Societal set ups dictate we maintain a certain level of decency in the manner we behave. There remains little room for introspection. Most friendships become a matter of convenience, because, well, lets face it, how many of us have the time to meet friends when all they want to do is ‘complain’ and point out our ‘drawbacks’? We keep ‘friends’ on the basis of their ability to accept us as we truly are. Which is also probably why, most of our friendships, the last bastion of purity in human emotions, seem fleeting and rather superficial, if I may.
