I am disillusioned with the concept of friendship.
I’m disillusioned with many things in life like traditional healthcare, modern medicine’s treatment of women, the NFL’s treatment of their players, the entertainment business, physical therapy, car mechanics, authenticity, derivatives, financial advisors, and the CDC, but none more than friendship.
Friendship is a very simple thing that we are all very good at complicating. We complicate most of our friendships with false binaries. I’m especially guilty of this. It has taken both time and experience for me to see as well as to accept this fact. A friend is supposed to be a positive concept that represents camaraderie as well as shared interests. Where it gets unnecessarily complex is applying expectations to friends that should never be there in the first place. I am also especially guilty of this.
Friends expect you to read their minds and understand their dislikes and preferences without them having to develop the skill to articulate their likes as well as points of contention. To be transparent, my consistency erases any potential hypocrisy on this subject matter. No friend, family member, or acquaintance can ever say when reading these articles that I am any different behind closed doors than I am to the public with my uncomfortable transparency, confidence in who I am, lack of self-awareness when needed most, and consistency to make sure all is done with absolute humility and — most importantly — integrity. In my view, this qualifies me as a notable source of information when it comes to the person on the receiving end of a lack of self-belief, inner conflict, inner confusion, and — most significantly — unfounded confidence that is never in direct proportion to capability. Being on the receiving end of this from friends, one could easily stake a claim as a victim of illusion, delusions of grandeur, and the highest form of posturing there is. But I have never and will never choose to see myself this way. This choice is empirically displayed in the results of my life both as a whole as well as in conjunction with my daily self-improvement outside of the nearly impossible challenge it’s been at times to keep going.
It’s very important for a child growing up to set the proper expectations and contexts around friendship. Individual paths diverge in most cases and one goes their own way. It’s a challenge for most friends to accept individuality on a whole. Even though they genuinely feel like they do and will tell you that they do, they really don’t. It’s not that anyone is lying when this occurs. Friends genuinely believe that’s how they feel until you observe their actions which often don’t match with their words. Because of what we all traditionally feel friends are “supposed” to be, this may be naturally disappointing in the beginning. But one can allow friendships to thrive if one accepts what friendship actually is: good company that is diverse, interesting, and not responsible for you and/or your growth as an individual in any way.
Friends are not meant to be there through thick and thin, for good as well as bad, but rather conditionally. Conditional love, as well as its subset of conditional friendship, isn’t a bad thing if one accepts what it is. It only becomes negative when one projects their expectations (even with good intentions) onto a friend whose purpose is company, not loyalty. Of course, there are rare friendships that can handle the tallest order of loyalty, transparent communication, and honesty, but they are the exception, not the rule. When one expects the rule to be the expectation, unnecessary tension is unfairly put onto a friendship that isn’t fair to either side. I’m content with my dissolutions and their direct correlation to my expectation.
Are you disillusioned with anything? Or is the illusion more comforting to manage internally?
