Certain things are for certain people. Privileges are for rich people, difficulties are for poor people, love is for blind people (metaphorically in the case of teenagers with raging hormones), politics are for influential people, and the list goes on, covering other worldly things. This, however, covers none of those things, not at least directly. Here I talk about who is for whom to be friends of, a question I don’t necessarily want the answer to, but it is that feeling of avoidance that has allowed it to haunt me for so long, the question of how exclusive is friendship?
So what are the factors that determine whether or not a person can be your friend? There are, of course, the basic things like having common interests, not talking shit behind your back and giving constructive feedback (that one’s a bit rare). These three traits, eventually, develop into admiration among people who call each other friends. But is that it?
Once a great man told me, “The ones you admire are not necessarily your friends”. Thankfully enough, he didn’t stop there, “Your friend is a person you walk together with, experiencing and learning from the highs and lows, teaching each other to be the better version of oneself, and adding values of self esteem and high morale into each other’s lives”. Finding someone like that is not easy, and as a matter of observation, many of us do not find such people. That is when the cloud of loneliness starts to hover over our heads, and most of us don’t like this. Not one bit.
So what do we do? We accept everyone we do not hate or feel uncomfortable around as friends, generating hollow popularity in order to hide the insecurity of loneliness. Most of us have, at some point of our life, considered all of our classmates as our friends, which is ironically justifiable, as it is difficult knowing enough about each one of the forty people in order to determine who will be able to do all of the things mentioned above, the things that the great man told me. Some of us, who cannot accept everyone, get no one, as we know who we don’t want, but we don’t know who we do want, to be our friend.
That’s when other variables come into place, because you no longer need to be your original self with a nice hobby, you just need to be not mean and not critical to other people, to secure your friendship with them. That’s when friendship becomes more of a psychological necessity rather than a sociological choice. More of a necessity because having no friends results in loneliness for most people, and loneliness is one of the worst feelings one can go through, the feeling of you not having any self-worth (Instagram likes and follows have already taken care of that). Less of a choice because people tend to suspect others who don’t have friends as inadequate and uninteresting. Ever heard the phrases in your life, “Isse kaun dosti karega? Ise kuch nahi aata!”?
That, ladies and gentlemen, is when friendship loses its exclusivity, when you just need to pass a very low bar in order to be eligible for someone’s friendship. Anyone can be anyone’s friend in such a world as long as one of them hasn’t as much as stabbed the other.
One day your bestie may find another bestie, with you not being ready to let them go. And it came to this because you never considered why he or she was your bestie (cringy word overused) in the first place, but only considered the fact that they weren’t bad to you, and you never got enough time or curiosity to try other people. Or maybe most of your friends lived in Naini while you were in Allahabad, so you never really got to meet up outside of school.
Now, yes, there are some genuine people among the horde that we call friends. But they are too few in comparison to our proposed number of friends, and we don’t know when and why they may leave us some day, and when they do, we are, again, stuck with the horde we call friends. This gets us to:
- People we admire can’t necessarily be our friends.
- People who are bad to us can’t be our friends.
- People who are neutral to us can’t necessarily be our friends.
- What about the people who are good to us? Sorting this out is usually easy, because they just might be admiring you. Admiring your mental abilities, or your physical appearance, or anything that they find, well, admirable. Falls back right to the first condition.
At this point, I might have established the fact that everyone cannot be our friend, the fact that most of our friends have passed a very low moral bar in order to be our friends. We do not know who our friends are. We could know, of course, by asking ourselves the questions from the definition that the great man gave me. We might even be satisfied, until we reach the last question, “Does he or she add any value to my life?”, the answer to which is what stops us from asking in the first place, because the answer can be too complex and too overwhelming, and might lead one to a path of no return. Not all of us, of course, are forever blinded by the dilemma of friendship. Some need as much as a talk to identify their real friends, while some may need a life changing incident. My dad understood who his real friends were when he lost his father at the age of 17.
Over the years, I have developed the public identity of a nerd, making it considerably difficult, and ironically confusing, for me to make friends. Some people think that I am too arrogant to deserve their friendship (ever thought of the etymology of the word arrogant?), some think my certain quirkiness may affect their public image, and some think I am a hypocrite for writing such things about loneliness and acceptance, but by the end of the day bag the popularity at school just because I am the son of two popular teachers (Not my fault, folks. Life is beyond school, if you have one). In reality, though, I am just confused about who my real friends are. I like a few people, I hate a lot of people, but out of the few I still can’t find the one person who I can include as a friend of mine, without hesitation. When someone asks me about the number of friends I have, I usually give the answer as ‘four’, but in my mind, the answer is ‘I don’t know, man’. I lie to myself everytime I say the former, so that I can continue avoiding the feeling of loneliness.
This document, of course, is public, and can be read by anyone, but it doesn’t have to be read by everyone. So if you were able to find it within the dense woods of the internet, these are just the words I live by. You can do me a favour and some justice to these words. The next time you message, call, snap, or hell, even Telegraph someone you consider a friend, ask yourself, is it worth it for me though?
