Friends indeed
In the second episode of my 40 favorite lessons learned as I turn 40 this year, here are some thoughts about the meaning of friendship
Happy Sunday!
You probably have heard those lines a million times: Real friends are the ones you can count on no matter what. A friend in need is a friend indeed. True friends are always there for you.
I vividly remember how in my high school days, I was often struggling with the pressure to define which friends are real and which aren’t. Sometimes that pressure came from the friends themselves, but a lot of the time it just seeped in from conversations with adults, the books we were reading, or from popular culture. I even remember a conversation with our German teacher, who asked me whether I have any friends at school, and when I said I have many, she kept pressing me to define which friends are real, i.e. the ones I can rely on if I need help. I remember how I just stared at her, and said that I don’t know. Either all, or none, or something in between.
Twenty-five years later, I still have no better answer than that. Are friends not in need not friends indeed? Is someone only a real friend if you can count on them? Do I have to think less of friends that I simply never needed anything from?
I got reminded of this earlier this week, when our friend Lane visited us in Sofia. Based in Austin, Texas, he had to be in Vienna for work, and hopped over to Sofia for a few days to hang out with Ellie and me and see Bulgaria for the first time.
Lane is one of the people I consider a close friend. We’ve known each other for about a decade, travelled together and with our families, had great conversations from which I learned a lot, and I’ve met many other fantastic people through him, some of whom have become friends as well. We rarely see each other more than once a year, and sometimes even less often, but when we do, it’s really good times.
Would someone like Lane pass my German teacher’s friendship test? I don’t know, maybe not. I actually hope I’ll never have to find out.
I realize now that I don’t relate to the whole idea of qualifying friends into real friends and casual friends. To me, friends are people I have feelings for, and whose company I immensely enjoy. Looking back at the 30+ years of my conscious life, there are several dozen people who have become close friends, usually as a result of mutually and intensely sharing a specific experience. It was either school, or university, or working together, or a trip. And some of the friends I spend the most time with are people I once randomly met in a bar. When the experience passes, to me the friendship doesn’t get less strong. It has happened that I’d see someone again after 10 or more years, and it would feel as if we continued where we left off all those years ago.
Of course, there are challenges to friendship. Falling out is one of them. It happened to me a few times. Someone I thought highly of turned out to be a jerk. Some of the times it wasn’t even towards me, but towards someone else. Unpleasant as it is in the moment, the next day you move on. And maybe one day you’ll even forgive them. Another, more common challenge, is distance. I’ve noticed how I used to dislike when people wouldn’t stay in touch. That’s not what friends do, I’d think to myself.
But in the past decade, I’ve had so many beautiful and heart-warming encounters with people I’d been close with once, and then hadn’t seen for ten years or more. Childhood friends, fellow exchange students from my times in Madison and Bologna, people I got close with during my first several jobs. Some of these friendships return to regular contact, some don’t and will probably be updated again after another decade or more. Everybody is busy, has a family or business to attend to 24/7. I’ve learned that it’s up to me to check in with someone, and I shouldn’t expect it from the other person. And, most of the time, it turns out you don’t actually lose the intensity and emotion of the friendship if you haven’t seen each other for years.
Finally, as I’m heading towards forty, I’ve realized that relying on friends in times of need just isn’t my thing. It’s pretty cool if a friend can help with something, but it has to be their initiative. Maybe I’m too idealistic, but the whole point of living in civilized and meritocratic societies is that when you need real help, there will be professionals whose job it is to help you. Friends are indispensable for mental and emotional support in tough times, but real support is what’s given rather than asked for. Otherwise it becomes a dependent relationship that I wouldn’t qualify as friendship.
Of course, maybe I’m just lucky, both with the friends I have, as well as for never having been in the situation where I needed a friend to save me from trouble. If that’s the case, I’d gladly wish that my next forty years won’t be any different.