I'll be there for yooooooooooooooooooooooo
What constitutes friendship changes, like the state of your teeth, throughout your life. This is not to say that friendship is wobbly and full of rusk early on, marinated in beer later before finally ending up stained beyond recovery with marmite and, probably, rusk, at the last.
Friendships forged in childhood are often held up as the most important and, indeed, seem the most innocent (largely because they are uncomplicated by the threat of your best mate shagging your girlfriend/boyfriend/dog or goldfish) and are founded either upon camping trips to find dead bodies (literature), sharing a coat peg at school (real life) or tying for first place in a ‘who can pee the highest’ competition (hopefully at primary school (usually ending up with a urine based ‘sword-fight’ and drenched socks) but for men can extend into mid-thirties).
As we get older it becomes harder to make friends. This is because our social group shrinks from the ocean of the playground to the puddle of the pub and because we spend less time sober (unless you went to school at an inner city comp. where hangovers and homework went hand in hand) and hence able to remember names.
Another contributing factor is that friends of convenience (be your best mate if you lend me your Top Trumps for the day) become easier to reject (be your best mate if I can hop on your wireless bandwith for the day to download porn that’s not even legal in any of the countries ending in ‘stan’).
So as a grown up, it becomes increasingly difficult to make friends and certainly attempting to enter a school playground to lend kids your Top Trumps is frowned upon, usually ending in a new friendship with somebody called ‘gripper’ on D Wing.
Adult friendships are usually forged by Rites of Passage. This involves alcohol, cubed by embarrassment and raised to the power of nudity.
As your circle of friends decreases, so your circle of acquaintances increases. These are usually friends of a loved one. If you’re very, very lucky your loved one will realise that just because you like them, you don’t have to like the people they like. Remember, you haven’t had the bonding experience with these people, you weren’t there during the great coat peg crisis of ’79 and with luck you won’t have been drenched in their pee. Without this context it can be hard to tolerate somebody who can talk for that long about their love of Top Gar. Warning: using the word ‘tosser’ about any of these people will result in a frost warning for the week ahead in your domestic circumstances. Worse, it may also lead to criticism of your friends. Worse still, most of that criticism is probably valid, but best left unconfronted.
But even if you think yourself friendless, or if your friends are known only to you through their chat room handles or as elves in a MMPG, you have to be better off than the ‘adults’ who enter reality television, have manufactured bonding experiences and confess everlasting friendship to camera. While these people usually have the emotional maturity of a whelk, it does seem that a lot of their bonding is based on lying around chatting and drinking. This is not how you make friends. What these people really need is a good who-can pee-the-highest competition, televised, followed by a pooing on each other’s heads competition. Okay, that’s not what they need to make friends but by Christ it’s what they deserve.
That’s the way you can tell they are not real friends, they don’t have nicknames. Real friendship is when you start grinning with anticipation because your partner has handed you the ‘phone with a quizzical expression and said ‘it’s somebody called ‘Zorro’ for you’.
Friendships forged in childhood are often held up as the most important and, indeed, seem the most innocent (largely because they are uncomplicated by the threat of your best mate shagging your girlfriend/boyfriend/dog or goldfish) and are founded either upon camping trips to find dead bodies (literature), sharing a coat peg at school (real life) or tying for first place in a ‘who can pee the highest’ competition (hopefully at primary school (usually ending up with a urine based ‘sword-fight’ and drenched socks) but for men can extend into mid-thirties).
As we get older it becomes harder to make friends. This is because our social group shrinks from the ocean of the playground to the puddle of the pub and because we spend less time sober (unless you went to school at an inner city comp. where hangovers and homework went hand in hand) and hence able to remember names.
Another contributing factor is that friends of convenience (be your best mate if you lend me your Top Trumps for the day) become easier to reject (be your best mate if I can hop on your wireless bandwith for the day to download porn that’s not even legal in any of the countries ending in ‘stan’).
So as a grown up, it becomes increasingly difficult to make friends and certainly attempting to enter a school playground to lend kids your Top Trumps is frowned upon, usually ending in a new friendship with somebody called ‘gripper’ on D Wing.
Adult friendships are usually forged by Rites of Passage. This involves alcohol, cubed by embarrassment and raised to the power of nudity.
As your circle of friends decreases, so your circle of acquaintances increases. These are usually friends of a loved one. If you’re very, very lucky your loved one will realise that just because you like them, you don’t have to like the people they like. Remember, you haven’t had the bonding experience with these people, you weren’t there during the great coat peg crisis of ’79 and with luck you won’t have been drenched in their pee. Without this context it can be hard to tolerate somebody who can talk for that long about their love of Top Gar. Warning: using the word ‘tosser’ about any of these people will result in a frost warning for the week ahead in your domestic circumstances. Worse, it may also lead to criticism of your friends. Worse still, most of that criticism is probably valid, but best left unconfronted.
But even if you think yourself friendless, or if your friends are known only to you through their chat room handles or as elves in a MMPG, you have to be better off than the ‘adults’ who enter reality television, have manufactured bonding experiences and confess everlasting friendship to camera. While these people usually have the emotional maturity of a whelk, it does seem that a lot of their bonding is based on lying around chatting and drinking. This is not how you make friends. What these people really need is a good who-can pee-the-highest competition, televised, followed by a pooing on each other’s heads competition. Okay, that’s not what they need to make friends but by Christ it’s what they deserve.
That’s the way you can tell they are not real friends, they don’t have nicknames. Real friendship is when you start grinning with anticipation because your partner has handed you the ‘phone with a quizzical expression and said ‘it’s somebody called ‘Zorro’ for you’.
1 Comments:
Have you been reading my emails? I have recently been experiencing the difficulty of adult "friendships".
Since I moved to Atlanta knowing virtuallly no one except for the bf, at first I only had the option of hanging out by myself or with his friends. Quite frankly, his friends suck, and the girls he’s friends with suck the worst (and not in a good way).
For some reason, guys don’t seem to care as much about hanging around total freaking idiots. I, however, have an extremely stringent requirement of an IQ of at least 100….actually, for me it’s more like 130. All of my close girlfriends are intelligent, opinionated women who are able to and prefer to talk about something other than the latest Tom Cruise debacle.
I’ve since made some friends of my own here in Atlanta, but nothing compares to my old friends. Although there have never been any peeing contests (although they love to bring up the time when I wet my pants on the playground in the 2nd grade), they are the ones I am crying to on the phone with(for example, this past Saturday when the football-watching cookout was being held at the bf’s house) and asking for advice. Of course, their advice varies depending upon who I call, and therefore, I selectively call those who I know will give me the answer I want to hear. Fortunately, they all know me well and can predict my actions and tell me what I “shouldn’t” do as a result of this or that potential occurrence.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but in the end, I’m very excited to say that I’ll be heading to Texas in a few weeks to watch a Longhorns game and hang with old friends and the bf will have to be around MY friends for once (except that won’t be an issue for him as they aren’t freaking obnoxious).
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