What is friendship? Who really knows anymore? Do friends stab you in the back? They’re not supposed to. Do friends ghost you without explaining why? That’s not what I thought friendship was, but hey, maybe I missed the memo.
In my mind, friends are supposed to be there through the good times and the bad ones. They understand you, or at least try to. They know your weaknesses, your faults and the things that make you difficult sometimes, because none of us are exactly a walk in the park. Real friends don’t have to agree with everything you do, but they should be able to talk to you about it. They shouldn’t bad-mouth you behind your back or quietly disappear when things get uncomfortable. Friendship should mean standing beside someone, even when standing beside them isn’t always easy.
Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like friends today are a dime a dozen because that may be about what some friendships are worth. I used to hold tightly to the people I considered friends. Maybe too tightly. I believed that even though I have plenty of flaws, the people who truly knew me would still be there. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe year after year my flaws became too much for some people to accept.
But should that leave me believing there is simply something wrong with me? I don’t think so. Maybe my former friends could explain it to me—ohhh, wait. That’s part of the problem. Instead of saying, “Here’s what bothers me,” or giving someone a chance to understand what changed, people sometimes just push you away. Then you are left standing there trying to solve a puzzle without knowing half the pieces are missing.
I sometimes tell myself I have learned not to care about people anymore. Then I have to add the obvious question: Have I really? Probably not. If I truly didn’t care, I wouldn’t be writing this. What bothers me isn’t simply losing a friendship or discovering someone doesn’t like me. People come and go. What bothers me is the lack of honesty that so often comes with it. People lie, disappear, talk behind each other’s backs and leave the other person wondering what happened.
Whatever happened to simply knowing where you stood with somebody? I could respect an honest “I don’t like you” far more than a smile to my face followed by something completely different when I walk away. At least honesty gives you something real to work with. You may not like the answer, but you understand it.
That brings me to something I struggle with even more: respect. I was raised to respect people, and I still want to believe everyone deserves a certain level of basic human respect. But sometimes that gets difficult when the respect only seems to travel in one direction. People feel perfectly comfortable judging someone else while believing they themselves should somehow be protected from the same judgment.
I see smaller examples of this all the time. One day at work, a conversation turned to snow in Japan. A coworker insisted that it doesn’t snow there because he had never seen it. I explained that Japan absolutely gets snow—enormous amounts in some places—and that it would take about thirty seconds to verify it.
You would think that would have ended the discussion. Nope. Apparently facts can be inconvenient when somebody has already decided they are right.
Instead of checking, I became the guy who supposedly didn’t know what he was talking about. That doesn’t bother me because I need everyone to think I’m right. What interests me is why admitting we are wrong has become so difficult. Somewhere along the way, being corrected started feeling like an attack instead of an opportunity to learn something.
That may be part of the larger problem. We have become very comfortable judging people while becoming increasingly uncomfortable with being questioned ourselves. We want understanding for our own mistakes, personalities and beliefs, but we don’t always extend that same understanding to the person standing beside us.
This isn’t meant to be a story about me whining because somebody hurt my feelings. I’m trying to understand something much bigger. How did we reach a point where people can be surrounded by others and still feel completely alone? How did we become so quick to dismiss people who are different, difficult or simply imperfect?
Maybe friendship is only one piece of that puzzle. Maybe what I’m really looking for is something much simpler: honesty, compassion and a little understanding.
We don’t have to agree with everybody. We don’t even have to like everybody. But we can speak honestly. We can listen before judging. We can tell someone when something is wrong instead of leaving them to figure it out alone. And we can remember that every person we meet is carrying flaws, fears, experiences and struggles that we probably know nothing about.
Everyone is different. Everyone is imperfect.
And everyone deserves to be treated like a human being.
By J Jones