"Relationships", Part I

Theodore Reik said, “Romance fails us and so do friendships.” Amanda and I went to The Anchor Grill yesterday to sit and talk, eating pie and drinking coffee, and our conversation turned, somehow or another, to the nature of relationships. We share different views on the subject, and in some areas we completely agree, and I find that I may be too skeptical. Perhaps this is due to being abandoned countless times, to watching friendships dissolve outside of my control, to seeing romantic relationships shatter and friendships break, refusing to withstand the tests of time and pressure. Someone said, “Time goes by so fast, and people go in and out of your life.” Sitting in the coffee shop several months ago, I told my boss Karen, “I like to sit here and watch people come and go. It’s just like friendships: they come and they go.” Another person said, “In your life, you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again. But you do.” A girl who had been a best friend of mine two years ago was married a week ago; I just found out. News regarding old friends—former partakers of friendships that we declared would last forever—comes to me through the grapevine. And then there are those people I used to be friends with whom I think about all the time, people I don’t talk to anymore, people I don’t want to think about anymore because it just brings hurt.

There are people whom I am friends with now, and I would like to think these friendships will last forever, but I do not believe it. Why? Because history repeats itself. History is cyclical. I have enjoyed much better and deeper friendships than ones that I am in now, and they flourished with greater vibrance and beauty, and they all withered and became nothing but dried-up stalks in a sand-swept desert. It is naïve to believe that friendships will last forever, and let me tell you why: 1) history declares a different reality; 2) life is not kind to such things; 3) all relationships will, eventually, end in death. It is ideal that friendships will grow and grow and grow and grow, but this is unnatural. Plants grow, reach their full potential, and then die. Humans do the same. Everything in the universe follows this same pattern. Why are we to expect that it is different with relationships? We can cling to this ideal and proclaim it as fact, but to do that is to blind ourselves to the way things really work. There are some friendships, I believe, that can last forever—and they take work—but these are the friendships within the family. Outside the family, I believe, there is a different kind of bond, a bond much weaker. I don’t believe that my “best friends” now will be my “best friends” in twenty years. But I know that Amanda and I will be best friends as long as we are both alive.