What's In A Name?

Just the other day as I was with a friend, we started talking about a common friend we had, and we laughed as we jokingly wondered why we bother still remaining friends with someone like him.

I guess that thought festered in me.

I started thinking about the institution of friendship, and just how haphazard it is. What exactly prompts/drives us to take up someone as a friend, and what exactly would it take to cause the opposite reaction?

I mean, the label itself can be so ambiguous. Afterall, ANYONE can be a “friend”. Some use it as a greeting “Hello, friend”, the same way someone else might go “Hello, stranger”. On the flipside, there are those others who go to great lengths to differentiate their friends. They have “acquaintances”, “casual friends”, “church friends”, “school friends”, “colleague friends”, “best friends”, and some whackos even have a category they coined as “top of the world friend”. (No, I’m serious!!)

Where do we learn all these stuff from? Take a look at the namelist in your handphone. Would you consider those inside your friends? How do you draw the line?

And what about those people you would describe as “we were once friends”? It could imply everything from a fallout to merely losing touch. Or, in most cases, it was a deliberate choice to drop the friendship, hence the losing touch. We would admit that in these cases, there is such a strong contingency of biasness at work. The things we readily forgive in someone are absolutely unforgivable in another.

I say all these not to raise rhetorical questions in the hope of sounding smart. In fact, I know how silly this all sounds. But they say that before 20, you collect friends, at 30 you sort out those you wanna keep, and after 40, you work at keeping those friends. So even though I’ve dropped the ball quite a bit in recent years with regards to friends, I’m at the point in time where I am wondering how I should be sorting out my friends.

And this whole “friends” business is just so slippery! I mean, everyone knows what a friend is (duh), but try defining what it means to you. The minute you come up with a definition, I PROMISE you, that there will surely be a friend in your list that contradicts your definition. Unless, of course, you only have, say, 5 people on that list. OR that you have a super-duper generic definition, like “a friend is someone I know.” (In which case, Lee Kuan Yew would qualify as a friend, even though technically it is an extremely one-sided friendship.)

I’m beginning to think that the best place to start with friendship is with “Permission”. If I choose to permit it, the worst kind of friend that only exploits you, stands you up on appointments, and never calls you first, will continue to remain a friend. And I have also in my rare moments rejected a friendship that was offered, since I don’t really like the person in question.

And of course, this is a deliberation that swings both ways. I also have had friends who seem to have deliberately chosen to drop me from their life. Friends whom I have asked out for catch up, who rain-checks me for 30 times in a row, and never calls again. Friends who have gotten married and then sends out the impression that he’s too busy with kids, family and work. Friends who have gone overseas then gone missing. Most of the time, it is easily accepted and becomes a mutual agreement to call time on that friendship. But there are times when it does hurt, when I thought we had something that was stronger. It left me wondering where did I misread the signals, and embarked on a one-sided friendship, or what had happened that I had missed which changed things?

Still, I guess I’m glad for those that have still stuck around. I have talked, in this blog, about friends that I have missed, and those that I have chosen to. And so naturally, the sentiment was either one of nostalgia, or disappointment and even anger. Yet this would be more of a time to celebrate and give thanks for the friends that are still sticking around in my life. Many of whom I only meet up with one or twice a year, but for whom I still bear a certain amount of affection for our shared experiences in the past.

With any luck, when I turn 40, and if this blog is still around, I would have something new to say, and would appear less confused about this thing called friendship.