Well, I thought it was about time I wrote another of these, so I find myself tackling love and friendship. I put them together because in my mind friendship, real friendship that is, is a type of love. It seems strangely appropriate that this is the next in my ‘series’ since I was recently deeply hurt by someone I considered to be a very close friend, and it hammered into me the importance that we place on those we trust for our happiness, be they friends, family or partners. Perhaps I take things more personally than others, perhaps I overreact to the feeling of losing someone, or perhaps I’m just a bit more honest with myself, and evidently others, about how much it hurts when you lose someone you thought you could count on, someone you thought was there for you, someone who made you smile. However it happens, whoever’s to blame, the feeling of loneliness, the questioning of yourself, is the same, and, frankly, it’s dreadful.
To me the feeling of being truly cared about by another human being is vital, and it’s easiest to understand how important love is when you think of an occasion where you feel like you’ve lost it. As I mentioned, I was recently hurt by a friend, and the feeling that they just didn’t care was devastating. It’s a long story that I won’t elaborate on here, but they were so very important to me, and I had believed I was important to them, only to realise that really, I couldn’t have been. (Perhaps it was arrogance on my part believing they valued my friendship more highly than they did, but that is a discussion for another time…) Despite trying to move past it, there’s now this irreparable rift that wasn’t there before, I feel like I’ve lost one of my best friends, and it hurt so much, indeed it still does if I dwell on it for too long. Their friendship mattered, it made me happy, and the feeling left behind when it fell apart was awful. It’s a mixture of sadness, emptiness, self-doubt and profound loneliness, and it’s a black mixture which if left unchallenged will eat you up from the inside. Not so very long before that I had my heart broken by someone who I believed, at the time, I was in love with. I look back on it now and feel a sense of relief, because those people who truly love me, not necessarily in a romantic way, have made me see why I am better off now than I ever could have been in the relationship, and that is part of what makes love and friendship so very important.
The reason these tales of woe are relevant in proving my point is how destitute things seemed when it all went wrong, particularly the first time… I was a mess, I fell apart and it felt like things would never get any better. That feeling of having been abandoned, of having someone who had told you they loved you turn their back on you was like someone had ripped out my insides, and it took me a long time to show any signs of recovering from it; and it was the love of other people that helped me through. People showed they cared, little things, gestures really – picking me up a coffee when they went out to get their lunch (those of you that know me will know how much a decent coffee means to me 
), taking me out to random places in the evenings just so I wasn’t sat at home alone feeling miserable, offering distractions, turning up at the door with a pizza and a bottle of wine claiming they were the ones who needed company, taking time out, even when they were crazily busy, to make sure that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t unhappy. They were little things, but they worked like a charm. Knowing that I had all these people around me, who would go out of their way to make sure I was ok, is what made me ok. And then there was the unfaltering support and encouragement of my friends at home too, staying up ridiculously late to talk to me if I phoned upset, arranging visits over here, things for us to do when I was home, not judging me for something which they had warned me would happen months and months previously. Having the love of my friends got me through, and without them I don’t know where I’d be. Perhaps the loss of someone’s love is necessary to truly make you value the love you have, and to make you cautious of whom you trust with your heart (even if it takes some of us twice to get the message!).
As for satisfaction with what we have, this one is more open for discussion I suppose. I don’t think anyone ever really is satisfied, hence why we are willing to keep putting ourselves out there, to make new friends, try new relationships. We constantly pick ourselves up and try again, and perhaps we are a little more cautious the second, third, fourth time, but we still want to believe that there’s more love out there for us to receive, more love that we have to give. We may not actively seek it in the same way as other things, but we certainly don’t slam the door in its face when it shows up.
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This entry was posted on November 6, 2009 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Random, Social Commentary with tags friendship, happiness, hurt, love, quest, trust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed
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The Unending Quest for Happiness: Love and Friendship
Well, I thought it was about time I wrote another of these, so I find myself tackling love and friendship. I put them together because in my mind friendship, real friendship that is, is a type of love. It seems strangely appropriate that this is the next in my ‘series’ since I was recently deeply hurt by someone I considered to be a very close friend, and it hammered into me the importance that we place on those we trust for our happiness, be they friends, family or partners. Perhaps I take things more personally than others, perhaps I overreact to the feeling of losing someone, or perhaps I’m just a bit more honest with myself, and evidently others, about how much it hurts when you lose someone you thought you could count on, someone you thought was there for you, someone who made you smile. However it happens, whoever’s to blame, the feeling of loneliness, the questioning of yourself, is the same, and, frankly, it’s dreadful.
To me the feeling of being truly cared about by another human being is vital, and it’s easiest to understand how important love is when you think of an occasion where you feel like you’ve lost it. As I mentioned, I was recently hurt by a friend, and the feeling that they just didn’t care was devastating. It’s a long story that I won’t elaborate on here, but they were so very important to me, and I had believed I was important to them, only to realise that really, I couldn’t have been. (Perhaps it was arrogance on my part believing they valued my friendship more highly than they did, but that is a discussion for another time…) Despite trying to move past it, there’s now this irreparable rift that wasn’t there before, I feel like I’ve lost one of my best friends, and it hurt so much, indeed it still does if I dwell on it for too long. Their friendship mattered, it made me happy, and the feeling left behind when it fell apart was awful. It’s a mixture of sadness, emptiness, self-doubt and profound loneliness, and it’s a black mixture which if left unchallenged will eat you up from the inside. Not so very long before that I had my heart broken by someone who I believed, at the time, I was in love with. I look back on it now and feel a sense of relief, because those people who truly love me, not necessarily in a romantic way, have made me see why I am better off now than I ever could have been in the relationship, and that is part of what makes love and friendship so very important.
The reason these tales of woe are relevant in proving my point is how destitute things seemed when it all went wrong, particularly the first time… I was a mess, I fell apart and it felt like things would never get any better. That feeling of having been abandoned, of having someone who had told you they loved you turn their back on you was like someone had ripped out my insides, and it took me a long time to show any signs of recovering from it; and it was the love of other people that helped me through. People showed they cared, little things, gestures really – picking me up a coffee when they went out to get their lunch (those of you that know me will know how much a decent coffee means to me
), taking me out to random places in the evenings just so I wasn’t sat at home alone feeling miserable, offering distractions, turning up at the door with a pizza and a bottle of wine claiming they were the ones who needed company, taking time out, even when they were crazily busy, to make sure that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t unhappy. They were little things, but they worked like a charm. Knowing that I had all these people around me, who would go out of their way to make sure I was ok, is what made me ok. And then there was the unfaltering support and encouragement of my friends at home too, staying up ridiculously late to talk to me if I phoned upset, arranging visits over here, things for us to do when I was home, not judging me for something which they had warned me would happen months and months previously. Having the love of my friends got me through, and without them I don’t know where I’d be. Perhaps the loss of someone’s love is necessary to truly make you value the love you have, and to make you cautious of whom you trust with your heart (even if it takes some of us twice to get the message!).
As for satisfaction with what we have, this one is more open for discussion I suppose. I don’t think anyone ever really is satisfied, hence why we are willing to keep putting ourselves out there, to make new friends, try new relationships. We constantly pick ourselves up and try again, and perhaps we are a little more cautious the second, third, fourth time, but we still want to believe that there’s more love out there for us to receive, more love that we have to give. We may not actively seek it in the same way as other things, but we certainly don’t slam the door in its face when it shows up.
Like this:
This entry was posted on November 6, 2009 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Random, Social Commentary with tags friendship, happiness, hurt, love, quest, trust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.