It Takes Me A Long While to Call Someone A Friend
To me, friend is a strange word.
It is not so easily defined as parent, or sibling, or partner. Yet it is also a common relational term, and it is perhaps the most unique one we have.
We choose our friends. We do not choose our family.
We stay with our friends. We leave most of our partners.
In view of this, a friend must hold (or, at least, should hold) a particular status in our lives. By extent, the word should have a certain significance in our language. It should mean something special and specific.
To me, though, it has long been a very difficult word to place.
With romantic relationships, there are boundaries. You tend to know once you have entered one, whether you have a partner or not. Both or all of the parties view one another as their significant other.
But while your relationship starts and ends with one single person (in monogamous terms), friendships are not limited by number. You can have one friend or a hundred friends — or maybe even twenty-two of them.
Only your own understandings and boundaries of what makes someone a friend, keeps you from having an infinite number of such connections.
Some people use the word loosely. (Their cousins, classmates, and neighbors are all friends.) Others reserve the label for a select few. (They might have several close or intimate acquaintances, but feel that only a small subset are deserving of the title.)
This lack of proper distinction criteria makes it difficult for me to separate a friend from a mere acquaintance. In my eyes, a light in the darkness is still a light until the moment it clicks to me that it is a star.
There are even times when the stars become lights again, only to die out or return to their glorious selves once more. These are the moments when my labeling someone “my friend” seems so exaggerated and unfounded and wrong somehow, until it suddenly, sometimes, seems right again.
At the very least, I know that when it feels right, and it feels right for a while, I have found a friend.
When the connection is honest, intimate, and secure, I know I have found a friend. When I know I can count on them, and they can count on me, and both of us have similar intentions and aims with each other, I know that I have found a true friend.
But until I am safe in that assumption about another person, I am lost. After all, I struggle to know what exactly makes a particular relationship tip the scales. What makes someone go from being a mere acquaintance to being an actual friend.
It is not a matter of duration or proximity. That enough is evident. No one would name just any acquaintance a friend without there being some bond between them that made the connection personally special.
Thus, the “friend-ishess” of a person must be founded on some deep, unique, emotional connection that only the two people involved share.
It makes sense, then, why I find it so difficult to call someone my friend.
In a time of emotional turmoil, I remember struggling to see anyone at all as a friend. Because I could not connect emotionally to myself, I could not connect emotionally to others. Because I did not allow myself to truly feel the negative emotions that my various mental states washed upon me, I did not trust myself enough to create similar secure emotional ties to others.
Even in times of relative calm, I have found it difficult to connect to other people too. Due to my highly sensitive nature, I have always been skilled at reading and understanding others. But it has left me feeling fairly unseen by most other people.
Therefore, it takes time.
It takes time for me to find people that are willing to dig deeper to truly understand me. To create that special bond. And if they are, it might take weeks, months, even years, for that final puzzle piece to click into place, and for me to feel that they can see me too.
This is made even worse by how blurred the lines are between acquaintance and friend. They are so compatible, but they communicate opposing ideas.
One is a person I like, the other a person I would like to know more.
One is a person I spend time with, the other a person I hang out with.
One is a person I know, the other a person I know.
And that is the difficult thing about platonic relationships. When do you truly know? When do you know that you have crossed the line and entered a friendship?
If you are asking me, only time can tell.
