KH COMMENTARY: The Friend Ship

When we're younger, our friendships hold all the possibility of lasting forever. We exchange 'best friend forever' necklaces like there some sort of tangible promise and believe they're going to hold strong the bonds that will last us in to the future.

Then we get to highschool, our Peter Pan ideals get shot to hell and those cheap necklaces we once treasured becomes knots in the bottom of a jewellery box. We grow up and change. We make new friends and with these new friends, we make new promises.

Then highschool ends and we all dispurse and start living the lives we were born to lead. We walk down different paths and make difference choices and meet different people and soon those best friends we so truthfully promised to stay in contact with forever, are nothing but names on a Facebook friends request.

When I think about how many friendships and best friendships I've made over the last 22 years and how much work has gone into keeping those friendships alive in the face of, well, life, it makes me worry about the fate of my current friends. Will they too suffer from this seasonal change which seems to take place every few years? And if so, when is it that we meet the friends who are going to be our 'best friends forever?'

I hate wondering if the people that I'm sharing my life with now, what can be argued as the 'best years of my life', are going to be there in a few years when my life, once again, changes. When a boyfriend becomes a husband, when I become a mother, when my babies become children, when those children become adults. Will the people that I'm living my life alongside be there for when all that happens? Or will they too, only go on to be referred to in past tense?

We all want the Sex in the City-style relationships that last beyond youth, beyond marriage and beyond motherhood. I want to believe that this is it - that the people that I consider my friends and my best friends are the people who are going to be the guests at my wedding and the family friends to my family and on my bridge team in the retirement home.

I guess I just don't want any more friendships to end up knotted in the bottom of a jewellery box.

Ciao for now. xo

(Image Credit: Audrey Hepburn Complex)