About friendship…

My eternal struggle has been one with friendship. I think it comes from being a loner, being misunderstood. I think it comes from desiring my acceptance from people rather than from God. There are a lot of things that contribute to this battle. A while back I wrote a journal entry (personal journal) that talked about how I finally figured out friendship… and I actually have. It’s funny, after all these years I finally figured it out. Friendship is hanging around people in full love and acceptance and enjoying their company as much as they enjoy you. It’s not necessarily meant to be a forever thing but if you’re lucky, some of them will be around forever.
My entire life I have tried to get friends, keep them, test them and not trust them and eventually end up have them walk away. Well, I figured that after realizing what friendship was I would do better in it… This blog is about trying not to fail.
In the past few years I met a couple of people that I often called friends. Rightfully so they were. Well I sort of ran a little experiment with the two of them (accidentally! It just turned out this way due to the time in which we hung out.) So let’s set this up right! Lol
Observation: current method of friendship is failing… must be a better way of becoming friends.
Hypothesis: If I simply enjoy my friends and don’t hold them to any standards while allowing them to get to know me then there will be a no pressure type of friendship and we will become good friends.
Experimentation: based on a period of about two years I became friends with each of them, using separate methods for the two. The girl (I will call her Li) I was super close with for a while and I held her to my previous standards of friendship. I told her about how I didn’t trust people and challenged her to be a real friend unlike others. I tested her and simply held her to a higher standard than others. The guy (I will call him lu) well I took a different approach in my friendship with him. I applied my new found understanding of friendship towards him and watched as we became close even though I kept a distance. We hung out; we loved e/o, prayed for e/o, etc. without holding him to any standard or testing him in anyway.
Results: complete and utter failure! Although the two friends were exposed to different types of friendship, they still ended up separating from me to the point that we don’t really talk a lot anymore. It doesn’t matter what type of friendship I use, they still end up leaving at some point.
Conclusion: It’s okay, and I’m okay! Friends are there for a season and during that season you must enjoy them. Sooner or later we get sick of e/o. at which point we move on to new friends. Surrounding ourselves with a new group ensures that we continue to grow as people. Even though you don’t love a person as a friend anymore that doesn’t mean you can’t care for them as a one time friend.
Although I understand this conclusion the innermost part of me says that friendship is forever. Friends are those that stay by your side no matter what. But I realize that those are only the true friends and those friends are hard to come by. In our lifetime we might only have a handful of true friends. The rest are just passing by. So upon realizing this and trying not to revert back to the type of friend that I was; I move forward in this knowledge learning to just love and appreciate people while they are with me. If they end up sticking around forever then great, but I should never assume that they will just stick around. I’m trying my best, folks!