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1.04.2010

Find Out Who Your Friends Are

And we're BACK (with a new layout)!! I hope everyone's holiday was beautiful and filled with a lot of good food.

Some of ya'll might throw up in your mouths, but I can't help it if this country song sets my post off right.



I spent my holiday season (birthday included) at home, with family and close friends. These friends are people I've known for almost (if not more than) a decade. I grew up with them, went to hell and back with a lot of them and it's always funny to sit around and look at where we are now, thinking about where we were then.

I've met a lot of people since I graduated high school and moved to another city for college. Some of these people I keep in close contact with and consider to be friends. I realized, this weekend though, that with the exception of one person, not since my freshman year in college when I met my BFF have I made good through and through friends like the lot I spent my time with over the holidays.

This was illuminated for me when I needed a favor upon my arrival back to DC. Nothing really major, but being the type of person I am, I hate asking for favors that might imposition someone (fatal flaw, I know). The long and short of the story is that one person left me hanging and I ended up calling a good friend (from high school) who was happy to do it, last-minute be damned. To thank her for helping me, I took her to dinner where we talked about the situation. It was ironic, I told her, because a friend at home and I had a similar conversation about not having friends as good or close as the "ones since high school..."

On the one hand, I like having people in my life who have seen me through almost everything major that has happened. On the other, though, I wonder at what point does a person lose their ability to "make friends." Or is that we lose the ability to be a good friend to anyone we've known less than half our lives? As much as I love these 10+-year friends, it'd be nice to have people who are here with me now and see me everyday and know what's going on with me now who are as reliable and close as the old ones.

Ultimately, though, I'd rather have old friends who are far away but still watch out for me than new friends who are close but can't be trusted.

2 comments:

Reecie said...

I do think it gets harder to make friends when you get older when you don't have anything really connecting you. Most of my closest friends are from college because I grew out of touch with a lot of people from HS. Most of those college friends are my sorors and others that have just held me down. The few I was close to in HS-I grew up and they didn't-or we just no longer had the same things in common.

I had a situation when I had to call on a college friend out of town to scoop me from a situation with a girl I met since living in FL. it was good to know she had my back.

A.Smith said...

"The few I was close to in HS-I grew up and they didn't-or we just no longer had the same things in common."

I feel that. Ironically, though, I'm closer now with people I didn't really kick it with like that in high school, and others I was super tight with, I've grown apart from.

I'm still close with my friends from college; however, I saw who was really "in it to win it" with me just a few weeks post-graduation. That was funny.

And you're right about that connection thing, too. High school made us sit in classes and play on teams with these people; college made us interact in even more adult was with folks. All we have now are jobs and how "uncool" is it to only have friends at work (but I hear more and more people say that's the case for them). It's just not easy to meet people and trust that they're real. Takes some work.

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