Friendship

I have this friend who is worried about her friendships lately. Actually I’m very fortunate to have a lot of people I consider friends; for very different reasons. I have quite a few others I consider acquaintances or remnants or fringe-friends. Then, there are those that you have to be civil to under certain circumstances but you wouldn’t really expect them to toss you the life ring if you were drowning; the anchor, yes, the life ring, no.

When I was a girl (younger, that is), I had a few friends that I thought were my “best friends”. They were the ones you told your secrets to, had slumber parties or play dates with, dreamed about the current ‘crush’ with, and so on. Some of these “best” friends didn’t turn out to stay best friends, in fact they moved on to other friends and left me behind. Okay, it hurt at the moment (probably for awhile), but I moved on. I found other friends, made some, lost some and kept moving on.

As a teenager, I was shy, kind of naïve and pretty innocent. We moved to another state, my father had died and it was a very small town. I made new friends, some that were kind and some that were not. My friends from Jr. High carried into High School, until I changed schools and then those friendships kind of died. It’s hard to be friends when you don’t see each other and hang with a totally different crowd. I made other friends in my last two years of High School.

The one friend from the first place I lived is still my ‘best’ friend; we’ve even lived in the same state for awhile and then she moved with her family to Kentucky. We wrote letters through college, sent each other Christmas cards, birth announcements and emailed when we could. I still call her on her birthday every year; she laughs at the fact I still remember her birthday. I still have some of the letters she sent me (I copied them a few months ago and mailed copies to her).

I moved again, this time to college and made yet another new set of friends. Friends I had fun with, cried with, and whined about men (boys?) with. We played UNO by the hour and made mad late-night (and during chapel skip-) trips to McDonalds when we needed an emergency shake or fries. One friend we bailed out of jail. One friend drove me absolutely nutso-crazy and sometimes today when I think of her I still have a bit of a twitch. Only two of those friends ‘survived’ the end-of-college-getting-a-job-and getting-married change in lifestyle. I am fortunate that both of them live within an hour of me, and that even though we may only see each other once a year or communicate through email or Christmas letters, we know that whatever the other one needed, we would crawl through hot coffee beans to get to the other and help out.

That brings me to now. I’m *past* my mid-forties (I’ll be 47 this birthday) and I have a “new” set of friends. Friends from baseball, scouts, church, bible study, and family (yes, it IS possible to be friends with family members, although I wouldn’t recommend with all family members). If you count the number of *friends* on Facebook, I have 324 of them. They are from all over the map; every facet of my life including elementary, Jr. High, High School and college. I even have THREE friends that are actually friends of friends – two of whom I’ve never actually met in real life. These friends represent all of my “past lives” from childhood to present. Some of them I will never see again in real life; others I see almost every day. Many of them are friends I’ve connected with again even though we may not have ended our previous connections in happy or friendly ways.

So, this friend (the one at the beginning of the post) is a friend of a friend. Yes, we’ve met IRL. And she’s been having friend issues. Friends that don’t agree politically, religiously, or even psychologically. We’ve connected because we think alike in many ways – we also have many differences. Because she’s frequently mentioning that her *friends* have ‘unfriended’, disowned or otherwise abandoned her for one or more reasons, I got to thinking about what a friend really is, should be and should expect…

In my opinion, a friend does not necessarily always agree with you. In fact, I can guarantee that at least two of my local ‘best’ friends don’t agree with me about 35% (if not more) of the time. At one point, one of these friends was the political polar-opposite of me. We disagreed on social justice points, politics and belief systems. We even differed with regards to relationships, men, and families. Sometimes she would make me SO MAD I would want to shout at her (and usually did). Sometimes I would say things that completely ticked her off. She made choices I would have never made about opportunities I never had. But we remained friends through all of that and realized that our friendship wasn’t just about similarities, it was about the connection we shared through our differences. We like (d) the same music, movie stars, movies and could quote movie lines verbatim (warning, that talent will frighten people.) We also balanced each other out with our dislikes and our opinions.

The other one of my local ‘best’ friends is frequently distressed in my choice of music and movies. She doesn’t like the fact that I drink alcohol. Or sometimes how I school my children or the books I read. But she’s one of the first friends I call when I need to vent about my husband or my children or the phone call/email from school regarding said children. It doesn’t matter that we don’t agree or even like the same entertainment choices, she’s a friend when she’s needed (and I hope she feels I return the favor). And, we have lots of fun on our monthly shopping trip, giggling and whining about whatever is bothering us. Our children play together and have been equally disciplined by each of us in turn.

I have friends that we have over for dinner, friends that I have girls night(s) with, friends that I am in youth organizations with and friends that live all over the country and don’t see physically anymore.

I expect my friends to be honest with me. I don’t have to agree with them or like it, but its part of the package of friendship. Don’t like my haircut, okay. Would you prefer I not use that word around your children? (I hate the word “stupid”, by the way. It’s only applicable to squirrels at our house and I don’t like it when anyone uses it.) Are you tired of hearing me rant about politics? Fine, say so. I can’t guarantee I’ll change to suit you, but you need to know I thought about what you said, and determined whether or not I would take it to heart.

I expect my friends to want me to be honest with them. Do I think you’ve lost your mind for spending money or time or supplies on a specific project? I’m going to tell you. Will I support your (soon-to-be-ex) husband if I think you were wrong? Uh-Huh. If we disagree on spanking vs. restriction or abuse vs. criticism, you’ll know exactly where you stand with me. But make no mistake; I won’t leave you unless you tell me to go, far, far, away. Forever. And never come back. Ever. Never. Ever.

I have a friend who will always be my friend in my heart, even though we’re separated and I have no idea where she is. We haven’t talked since I left for college. Her marriage went sour and she moved to an undisclosed location for her safety and the safety of her child. I think of her often and pray for her too. She was a part of my life I will never forget. We did things together that I never did with anyone else and no one would have let me or encouraged me to do them other than her.

I have friends that I really didn’t like much in school, and unfortunately they haven’t changed that much to make me really like them now. But, I can be civil and communicate and share things, memories and laughs with them. And, sometimes I agree with what they say and sometimes they disagree with my views.

I have friends who under no uncertain terms will ever, ever share my political and/or religious views. And I, in turn, disagree with them on those same points. Don’t expect me to send them hate mail or pray for them to get warts or die. I respect their opinions, provided they will respect mine and not criticize or name-call to prove a point.

I think the Kindergarten ideal of best friends doesn’t serve a purpose in adult life. You wouldn’t drive a Ferrari in the desert, anymore than you’d drive a John Deere in a NASCAR race. You can love Monster Trucks and motorcycles and BMW’s and Vanagans. As I said I have friends I see movies with, drink with, eat with, talk with, debate with and laugh and cry with. It is not necessary that they all have the same points of connection with me or my other friends.

My duty to my friends is to be me. If they didn’t like ME (or some part of me), then they wouldn’t be my friend. They could be my employer, my banker, my mechanic or my pharmacist (who are all, oddly enough my friends too) but they wouldn’t need to be my friend or even LIKE me to be any of those things.

This whole “unfriending” thing is more like Jr. High than real life. IRL if you don’t like someone you have to still send your child to school with them, work out at the same gym; visit the same bar/restaurant, shop at the same stores. You don’t expect them to alert you when they’re going to be at any of those places so you can avoid them – and you don’t go out of your way to run them over in the parking lot or key their car or break their eggs.

So why the BIG deal about unfriending, counting friends, deleting posts or slamming people for their opinions or beliefs? And why make it a federal offense for posting or revealing your opinions on the internet? You could Google (apologies to all my Microsoft friends who mistakenly read that as “BING”) any matter of offensive, political, religious or historical information on the internet. Some of it truth, some of it lies and most of it just some person’s perception of the facts. If you don’t want to read someone’s post, then don’t. If it ticks you off, say so. If it ticks you off so badly you don’t want to be their “friend”, I’d seriously reflect on what you’re looking for in a friend and what attracted you to that friendship in the first place. And is the number of friends directly related to whether you’re a great person, or not?

Do you really expect that all your friends have to look like you, act like you, think like you, be like you? What a boring life THAT would be! It would be like the “Stepford Friends”. You would only say the polite things, the PC things, and the most dishonest things you could say because you wouldn’t be you. You’d all dress the same, act the same, eat the same and marry the same type of man. Frankly, this wouldn’t work for me as, although I love my friends’ husbands, I would be in prison for killing many of them if they were married to me.

Part of friendship, as with part of any relationship, should be the ability and the grace to let yourself and your friend grow and change. Sometimes you have all these plans and hopes and dreams when you’re young that just weren’t realistic or in the overall plan to work out that way. If you promised your childhood friend that you’d name your child after them and then, instead named your child after your husband’s mother, how could you possibly hold that against a friend? Or say you got married in Hawaii and your friend had no financial means to make it to the wedding and you’d pinky-promised-swore that you’d be each other’s maid of honor. Would that really be that end of the friendship?

I think we all need to reflect on what kind of friends we need and have in our lives. You need to have at least one friend that you know you could call to bail you out of jail; hopefully you’ll never need to. You should have one friend that will absolutely, positively, at any time be able to watch your favorite movie for the millionth time and cry at all the same spots as the first viewing. One friend you buy shoes with; one friend you tell that you’re pregnant (even possibly before your husband). And at least one friend that knows all of your secrets and would never ever tell them to a sole, even if they were tortured with caffeine withdrawal or screaming children or lack of chocolate for a week. But they should not have to be the same friend. And you should not have to justify your opinions or beliefs to any person regardless of their standing in your life; especially a friend. Because a friend should understand that that’s what makes you, you and shouldn’t want to change that because that’s what makes you a great friend.

Have as many different, whacko, weird, loving, destructive, wild, funny, talented, boring, educated friends as you like. There’s no measurement that will tell you how many is going to make you a better person. Only you can determine that.