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F·R·I·E·N·D·S
Will be back on Channel 5 for it’s last season. It’s like watching them flog a work horse till it dies – and this is the bit just before it collapses. And the finale was so well covered by the media, that you couldn’t surf 2 pages without some news article telling you what the ending was.

But anyway, this leads me to my thing of the week. What makes friends?

Type “define friend” in the Y! Search box and you’ll get:
friend: NOUN: 1. A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
OTHER FORMS: friendless, friendlessness

If you don’t like someone most of the time, but you still know and trust that someone, is that person still your friend? Sounds more like a relative, but that’s much easier since you can’t do anything about it. The thing about friends is that there is always the option to do/not do something with the friendship.

I used to let them lapse. For example, when you leave school, or a workplace – naturally your life at the present consumes most of your time, and more often than not, you meet them less, talk to them less, after a while, not at all. There are some friends where I can pick up with where I left off, 3 years later, sometimes more. Sometimes it’s hard not to even talk to them, so you make the effort to meet and catch up just so things feel like old times. And there are those which lapse, and the next time I meet that person – it’s like meeting someone new.

What’s bizarre is that it gets more complex sometimes. Like sometimes someone starts off great, and grows on you the wrong way. Sometimes, it’s not even really a friend, it’s like a friend by association (someone else’s friend, someone’s girlfriend/spouse/sibling), and you try not to shun that associate friend because of your relationship with your friend. And then sometimes it’s a proximity thing. You’re kind of friends because you’re in the same project group, class, workplace. And sometimes, it’s because you were friends way before you wisened up to the element of choice in friendship (like in primary school) and now you can’t get out of it elegantly. Sometimes there’s the whole guilt element involved, too. Like what changed? Why did warning signs not appear earlier?

Sometimes it’s a combination of so many things. Sometimes you think you’re the one choosing, but the party in question feels the same way of you and you’re both trying to be polite.

So then there should really be just 2 categories of friends. The truest are the ones most people have, in primary school you’d call them your best friends, I’d consider them the only category of Real Friends. They’re the ones you can pick up with years later as if time hadn’t passed, the ones you’d not have to think hard to talk to, the ones who make conversations fun.

And then there are the circumstantial friends – we all have those. And sometimes if you’re lucky, a circumstantial friend makes the leap into Real Friend territory, and that is a good day.

A friend in need is a friend indeed
I always thought that it meant a certain category of people will ingratiate themselves and draw on whatever little friendship they hold with you when they are in need.

I only truly understood recently that it was actually a measure of friendship.

Am I missing something? I guess this is why it irks me, it shouldn’t have to be so complicated.