M and I had date night last night. We went to hear a friend of mine who is a blues singer. I was one of the two friends who showed up to support her. It wasn’t like they didn’t know she was performing. I had personally called and sent text messages to all of our mutual friends to remind them. Some said they were coming and didn’t..others didn’t respond. I could tell she was disappointed with the low turnout. As I looked around the club, it made me think about friendship and how as humans, we take our relationships with others for granted.
My friendships are precious to me. I surround myself with very few people that I can actually call friends. I have many acquaintances but in my opinion, the word friend is so overused. I learned a long time ago that not everyone can wear the friendship label because like any relationship it requires work and not everyone is prepared to do the work of friendship. It means remembering birthdays or important dates, losing sleep occasionally while a friend talks through their issues and it means pitching in when needed.
I sometimes think that technology is a curse. With emails, text messages and the like, most people in society no longer take the time to handwrite thank you notes, or visit with friends the way it was done 30 or 40 years ago. We’re all just too busy. However, life is short and we all need to remember to appreciate those around us that stand tall and strong with us through any storm.
I’ve had friends who have traveled around the world with me to witness the traditional Kerala ceremony between M and I. That’s some love. I’ve had friends who have stayed up all night with me while I cried over a broken relationship. That’s even more love. LOL.
M and I differ on the friendship thing. He’s a loner and from what I’ve been told by him and his family, he always has been for the most part. He can take people or leave them and will quickly call me an agony aunt when I’m nurturing a friend through hard times. It’s important for me to have friendships and if I hadn’t seen it over the last few years I wouldn’t believe that M could live without having friends. My dear sweet nerdy M simply reads, plays with the dogs, does Sudoku or watches television in his spare time. My ideology is that if he’s happy with his friendless life, it’s fine with me. My job is to be friend, wife, nurse and psychologist whenever he needs it.
How do you nurture your friendships? Do you feel the art of friendship is changing? Until the next blog..
A Journey In Black and Indian Love 
I’m a lot like M, I think. I enjoy having friends, but I’m something of a loner. One thing I love about running a blog is the opportunity to meet new people with similar interests and stories…
I agree that the word friend is overused. We’re too quick to call people friends these days and just as soon as we make friends, the friendship is over. 2 days ago I found out a friend I’d been trying to get in contact with stopped speaking to me over something that happened 6 months ago that I had no idea about. Then she made it seem like our friendship was no big deal even though I’d helped her get through some hard times. I thought she was a real friend but if she was, she wouldn’t have treated me the way she did. Real friendships are those that develop over time and distance. I’ve met new people in my M.A. program and we’re colleagues too which is great so this is just one of those things where you learn from the experience and move on.
A good family friend once told my mom ” I know many people, but I do not have very many friends”. It’s not that he’s antisocial or anything like that. He says that true friends are very hard to find, but we can always find a lot of people that we personally know.
For a while, I admit to be antisocial. I don’t know if family dynamics had anything to do with it. My mother was the person who would get out and speak with the neighbors, while my father wasn’t into the friends department. According to my mom, my dad only trusted one man on the street. I guess I took more of his genetics because I struggled with this issue. It was worsened by people jeering me for being ” stuck-up” or” weird”. Oddly, I hated it when people inquired me about my quiet nature. I didn’t want to be that way. I just couldn’t help it at the time.
It’s said that the dead know nothing, but I have wondered that of my dad passed today, with the exception of family, how empty/full the funeral home home/church may look because of his antisocialness. Though I respect his choice of being insular, I just can’t see how he can say he wants no friends. In my time of need and even in my times of prosperity, it was and still is great to know that there are people who still have you back.
Now my folks are telling me that I talk too much( i’m not always aware of it). Still, I have never been big on talking on phones and I’m to some degree is still quiet. I more likely to do more talking with people in person, especially if it’s a spontaneous conversation. My nephew once told me that I seem to have a lot of friends. It’s not that I have these big hoard of them As I repeat the words of my family friend, I know a lot of people, but I have only very few true friends.