Fickle Friendships

Today I was noticing how I haven’t partied with my girl friends for so long. Then I got to thinking, maybe I didn’t have as many girl friends as I thought. I looked around and saw so many of my friends have been partying with their girl friends but not with me. It made me feel like I was missing out. Where have all my girl friends gone?
Chanda didn’t come for my first event cos she didn’t want to upset her other friends who she invited but couldn’t come so she decided not to either. Then she has a whole gang of friends in Delhi who she meets regularly.
Naina told me recently she did a girl vacation with two of her other friends/ colleagues and they went on a spa vacation. But her old best friend has been cut off her list forever.
Do friends come to us according to our needs? When we need them? Or do we cultivate them so that they can be there when we need them?
If we cultivate our friends and invest in them, then why do so many friendships break up even after years of being friends whereas new friends seem closer to you than family?
It’s a strange universe of fickle friendships. At one point I felt I had so many friends that I could barely keep up with them. People who I could have coffees with surrounded me every day. I could spend time with a new female for breakfast, lunch and dinner, chatting and catching up.
Then work stopped. Friends moved on. New people through twitter came into my life. They were tweeple. They weren’t friends. Old friends found new friends. Then I was alone. I wondered if I had “invested” enough? Hadn’t I done what was needed to rely on them? Or was it another expectation from life that was being tested for me to understand that one cannot have ANY expectation. That maybe “friends” are like the weather. You can’t predict when they’ll be sunny and when they’ll be moody.
My mother though seems to have several women friends from work, from the couple gang that she and my father have and even from 40 years ago. Is she doing something different that our generation hasn’t understood?
We have come into an era where friends are there according to what we need from them. So friends from work will be thick since they share common environments, moms with kids will bond since they have a common topic to speak about, and women in yoga classes will speak since they can philosophies together. And married women will crib over their husbands and this bonds them as friends. We are all aware that these relationships might not last forever. But we also know that we grow as individuals and it’s probably for the best to have some friendships dissolve.
There is no need nowadays to “invest” for the long term. We all don’t have time to give so much of ourselves. With extremely busy lives, we’re just happy to have a few hours with people who are free at that time. That constitutes friendship nowadays.
Can we count the number of friends who have known us for more than ten years and we still rely on? Probably on our left hand. Out of those, can we say we still have something in common with them? The number becomes less. But when you’re sure of that number, those are the people who will attend everything that’s important to you, those are the people who will love you even if you change and become completely different from them. That number will always stick. And that friendship will be far more important than any family you’ve ever had.
The world is opening up so many social platforms for us to make friends. Maybe it’s a new way of defining who we are close to. Or maybe we still need to just rely on ourselves.