the friend cycle
I talked to one of my close friends today about how one of our mutual friends (call her E) seems to have fallen off the face of this earth and forgotten the both of us in the process. She seemed distraught and slightly irked because that friend hasn’t made an effort to contact us or hang out with us even though we were always on good terms (she graduated this past June).
And then it occurred to me.
This happens to me a lot. It’s a cycle pretty much. I meet someone, something clicks, and bam we become good friends. We hang out, eat, play ball, watch movies, everything that normal friends do, but then something happens and the friendship fades. It becomes the opposite of how our friendship formed - slow and kind of awkward. I think neither side is willing to admit that the friendship is fading. But it happens, and then we are strangers and acquaintances to each other again. So yes, this happened to me a lot; it happened in middle school, high school, and college.
For the longest time I hated this. I felt like there was something wrong with me. In a way I felt socially inept. The inability to maintain a friendship over a longer period of time made me really sad. But then I guess I kind of got used to it. I had a hard time letting go of friends, but then I realized I made new ones to replace them. If I made the effort and they didn’t, I would just let go, and vice versa. I think that’s a sad way for things to end, but that’s just how it is. Friends come in and out of our lives, so it shouldn’t be something to dwell on. All we can do is be happy that they were a part of our life and cherish the memories.
Not all friends are like this, I hope. In the back of my head, I’ve already committed a list of people that I really want to keep, and I hope I never lose them. But I can’t control that. All I can do is just keep in contact, be a good friend, and let everything work itself out.
This isn’t meant to be depressing but I just felt like writing about it because it seemed infinitely easier than writing my engineering paper (an oxymoron).
