You're not my friend anymore!

A situation a friend of mine found herself in today reminded me of the time one of my friends basically decided to literally "break-up" with another friend of ours. Just like how a romantic relationship comes to an end, this friend decided that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with this other friend, and so she sat her down and well...dumped her!
I know this might sound dramatic but it kind of really was, it was a serious thing because this was a friend that she spent most of her time with on campus. They had the same classes everyday, hung out during free periods, loved each other and everything. People thought they were best friends even but one of them no longer liked the fact that the ones reputation was somehow being associated with her. Even when she wasn't at a certain place, people would assume she was because they saw the other girl. And she really began to hate this as for one, they actually had very different lifestyles and were very different people but had somehow stuck together since well when they started in first year they had known each other in high school. 

From what I've observed men and women make friends very differently. For one, I think guys can just become friends by drinking together and somehow a friendship gets formed out of that. But for women it's not always so easy. Generally we will be concerned about the type of person you are, whether we have similar interests etc. But at times it can happen that you become friends with someone out of sheer convenience. As in, in any other setting, you would not be friends, but since you're kind of stuck together in a particular environment, you become friends. And usually as soon that condition no longer prevails you find yourself wondering why you are friends and usually just drift apart. I guess this particular friend of mine really just couldn't wait for the eventual death of this friendship and she took matters into her own hands. There has only been one occasion for me personally where I had to tell someone I could no longer be their friend but I won't get into the complicatedness of that situation. So I really can't be a judge of what is one to do when they come to a point of having to break-up with a friend because their relationship just doesn't work for them anymore. I mean, is it even necessary? Or should you just wait it out and let them get the hint when you no longer invite them out or try to keep in contact with them? Would they even get the hint? Or is it fair to perhaps tell your friend how they are hurting you as in a grown-up relationship and see if they are interested in making amends or not?

The closest relationships I've had with women can honestly be paralleled with romantic relationships, minus the romance of course. When I was in high school I had this friend of mine and we called each other 'Friend mates' kind of as a substitute for 'Soul Mates' because we cared that much about each other & thought we were destined to be friends. Anyway,we drifted apart somewhere down the line & I can't remember the last time I spoke to her.  I have only ever been able to have one best friend at a time, I do have other close friends but I just need one person who I know will be there no matter what and I don't really care if the other friends in my life are unreliable, I will just make it a point to be unreliable in their lives as well. 
I've also not had an experience of being in a huge group of friends because I just like to keep my circle tight like that. There are disadvantages of this though because you can suddenly find yourself having to make new friends because none of the people in your circle are physically around you anymore. This happened to me when my best friend moved to another city and I suddenly realized how I hadn't bothered to make any other friends because she was always around & we did everything together. And I wasn't dating anyone at the time so it made it infinitely worse. Anyway, I can't say even now, 3 years later, that I've made a conscious effort to make friends in light of this situation I found myself in but I have made a good friend or two since then,not as a replacement, but additions to my circle of friends. But like being in a romantic relationship, there are just things you miss doing with your friends, like hanging out with them, knowing they are there to talk to and that they will understand your exact kind of neurosis. Just like you miss being in romantic relationship, for reasons similar to those. 

But friendships do end as with romantic relationships but at least with the romantic relationship you usually have a clear reason why unless there are really people out there who break up with people by just disappearing from their lives without a real explanation. I hope not. With a friendship you can generally just drift apart from someone & somehow find them not being around & you just accept it and move on. I recently reconnected with a friend of mine that I drifted apart from and we both can't remember why. We were really good friends in high school & my mom would ask me every now again where she is & how come I'm not friends with her anymore & I never had an answer. She's not the only friend that this has happened with. Mostly high school friends though. And I guess people will say that we changed and grew apart, you know reasons like that but I honestly can't remember there ever being a definitive reason for why those friendships ended. And if you do reconnect with those people, is it naive to think that those friendships could go back to the way they were? Anyway, I'm going to try with this one friend of mine because when I saw her recently, I realized how much I had missed her. 

Anyway, what I was really getting at here was really more a question of when is it OK to officially give up on a friendship and be like hey man, I no longer want to know you, I no longer want to be your friend so get to steppin'...
Must there be a big confrontation where you have it all out or should you just quietly disappear from their lives and one day they'll wake up and you're gone and they will just have to deal with it? 
I don't know, for me it would depend on the person and the reasons why I felt we could no longer be friends...there are some people I would try to give an explanation to and there are some who I'd just walk away from. 

Either way, be good to your friends, don't treat them like crap but unlike family that you are stuck with, you choose them & so they generally are a reflection of you so choose them wisely. 

You are what you love, not what loves you!

The more I think about it, the more I realize how it's kind of a weird notion of how we are supposed to just stop loving someone. I mean, how do you? The more I think about it, the more I realize the only way we can do that is if we never loved them at all in the first place. You just liked them...a lot! 
But then sometimes I also struggle with the idea of being IN love and just loving someone? A few years ago I thought I understood this concept and I told my then boyfriend, how I still loved my ex boyfriend but I wasn't IN love with him anymore. This made perfect sense to me and I expected him to understand that I couldn't just switch it off, I didn't know how to and to pretend that I could was just a blatant lie. I doubt I would have taken it well if someone had said that to me back then but the grown up in me now gets it. In a perfect world the people we love and are in love with would never have loved anyone else but us. We would be their first everything. It's a very romantic idea isn't it?! And I'm sure there are some people in reality who have experienced this but I'm not entirely sure I would want to be one of them. In the relationships I've been in I've experienced varying degrees of love in its different forms even. There's been unconditional love, toxic love, messy love, I-want-to-be-with-you-forever kinda love and well...I-kinda-like-you-so-let's-hang-out kinda love. It all felt like great love though at the time it was happening and I probably thought it was never going to end until it did, for whatever reason. And getting to experience each of those different intensity's of love was fun for me in its own way because it was MY love, I owned it and nobody could take it away. Watching an episode of CSI a long time ago Gil Grissom once said a line about what/who you love is a reflection of yourself and I took that quite seriously, that's why I genuinely believe that I learnt something about myself in each of those situations that I otherwise would have never known. 

There's a movie I watched a few years ago with my friends called 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'. In this movie this couple undergo this procedure to erase each other from their memories after they break up. And I will forever love this movie because there have been so many times when I wished that device to erase someone from my memory was real Lol And particularly because I wish I could at least be the one who decides what memories my mind keeps because honestly I never understand why it decides to keep the ones it keeps. 
Anyway, breaking up is never fun, even when you were the one who wanted it. And it's always so crazy to imagine that at some point that person was all you ever wanted and now you're hoping that you never see them again and you have bad dreams about bumping into them, and you hate anything and everything that reminds you of them. Anyway, this only lasts for a little while I think, like some kind of post-break up TRAUMA that your mind experiences until you get over the whole ordeal and you're on to your next victim. 

And then there's that whole concept of soul mates! I know I used to believe in soul mates, I'm not entirely sure when I stopped. I'm not entirely sure even right now if I've stopped believing in soul mates or maybe I've settled on the idea of you just find someone and you make it work? I can't really say that I have an answer yet. My friend once told me about this theory though that in life we have three 'plugs'. These are three people in life that you have a genuine shot at being truly in love with and if you don't make it work with those 3 people then it's over for you. You would have to settle for mediocre love. But the problem I have with this is how really are you to know the 3 plugs without letting all of them go or something and then reflecting back to realize that they were the ONES? And maybe I'm also being naive in not mentioning that well love alone does not always sustain a relationship. But I won't dwell too much on that...not today anyway.

Anywho, what I really wanted to say was, you are what you love, not what loves you! Regardless of what that other person decides to do with your love, it's really not your business. Much like that saying "What you think about me is none of my business" or something to that effect. It's YOUR love, you own it!!

Invest in Love

When I was in high school my best friend shared an article with me that was in  O Magazine, it spoke about how as people we have different "currencies". The currency the article spoke about wasn't actually about money but essentially it was trying to illustrate that as people we value different things & because of this we will not always feel like someone cares about us when they are not using our own currency to show us that they care. For example, my major currency is time, if I like you or care about you I will go out of my way to make time for you. Actually, it happens automatically, I will tend to just WANT to spend time with you and do things with you. So if someone does not reciprocate this behaviour, it always feels like they don't care. Probably a lot of people have the same currency as me and this would become even more important to someone who does not actually have a lot of time to spare to see how it is they spend their time. Other people's currency is actual money! They equate you spending money on them as a way for you to show them that you care about them. But then, this sometimes makes me wonder if well someone has a lot of money anyway, does it actually mean anything if they spend money on you? Or perhaps they are merely "buying" your affection? I don't know...

In this article they spoke about the 5 languages of love, since then I've seen several books written on the topic. I can't actually recall all 5 of them but I remember: quality time, words of affection, buying gifts or something, and something about touching (meaning some people like being touched affectionately and kissed etc). I'm sure most of us have also heard the phrase quite a few times about how if someone doesn't love you the way you want it doesn't mean that they don't love you. Basically saying that because I don't use your currency or language of love, it doesn't mean that I don't love you. So essentially the key is to learn that person's method of showing love so you know when they are showing it and you don't feel slighted because they don't tell you that they love you everyday for you to feel loved.
Having said all that and knowing it, I still judge people on my  own currency. I can't help it. I make a lot of decisions about the people I have in my life based on this. Time. Do I have your attention? Do I have your time? And if I feel that I don't, I do assume that you don't care and that you have better things to do with your time, which I am not part of.
Obviously people can have more than one currency sometimes, it can be a combination of things. Words of affection are nice, I mean who doesn't like being told they are beautiful? Or that they are loved?
The difficulty in this lies in the constantly remembering what the other person's currency is. With some people in my life I need to constantly remind myself not to misinterpret their actions as them not caring, they just don't love that way or express their emotions how I do. So it becomes important not to judge people with YOUR ruler but to judge them with theirs. It is a hard thing to do, because your first instinct is always to whip out your ruler and say well if you cared about me you would tell me you love me everyday, or you would spend all your time with me, or you would buy me gifts and flowers and tell me you miss me all the time. Sometimes, you should consider that the person loves you the only way they KNOW how to love. And as individuals we learn how to love from different places: our parents, friends, family, romantic relationships...
I guess what I'm trying to say is similar to what I learned from a friend of mine, I don't know if she was right but it makes an awful lot of sense to me. She said to me that God can only judge you on what you know. It's one thing to do something wrong not knowing that it's wrong but once you find out it's wrong and you make a decision to keep doing it then that's something else. And actually this applies to relationships with people as well I think. If you do something that someone doesn't like and they don't make it a point to tell you that hey, I don't appreciate A,B and C and you keep doing it, it's not really your fault until they tell you. If you then decide to keep doing it anyway, then it becomes your problem.

Having said all that about learning other people's currencies, I think it's also important to show you care by showing them using THEIR currency. And, if they are decent human beings, they will really appreciate it. Me and my friend were recently speaking about this, and she shared with me how she trades cuddles with her boyfriend for things he wants done and I laughed because I trade kisses with mine because that's what I respond to. This came about when I was asking her if it's possible to change someone's currency for example to something that you understand and respond to. And she said she doesn't know but there are ways where you can try to teach someone what your currency is.  

Anyway, I wrote this because I had forgotten that as people we don't love the same. I had to remind myself again, because  I do forget, and I will get upset and feel unappreciated. So I'm reminding you as well, in case you forgot today like me.