Have you ever found yourself being unable to meet your friends, and had this overwhelming wave of guilt hit you? I’m sure there comes a time when everyone goes through this, and it becomes impossible to give yourself that space to reach out to them.
As an early adult, resonating with this question might not be hard, and often maintaining friendships can become exhausting when we want to make plans and suddenly the thought of pending work passes by. Amidst assignments, internships, exams, and jobs, our lives become an endless cycle of deadlines. Even though the touch of a button can help us reconnect with those cherished memories, it presents itself as a mammoth task in our busy schedules. In most cases, friendships tend to remain strong with understanding being a core foundation of any relationship. However, it takes effort to form bonds and more so to maintain them.
From friendship bands to heartbreaks, I believe all of us have evolved as individuals to understand people and the world. We start to have responsibilities and often struggle with finding time for ourselves. Speaking from my experience, friendships have had an immense impact on my life. As a child, I saw friendships as something that revealed my worth. I assumed having a large group of friends indicated me being ‘cool’ and loved. More often than not, I valued what others thought about me. For instance, when some teacher in school suggested ‘Your friend group decides who you are’, I felt guilty for being an introvert who could probably count the number of friends she had on her fingers. Back then, friendships seemed to have conditions attached that my younger self couldn’t recognize, and parting with friends was a heartbreaking affair. The eternal promise of ‘Best Friends Forever’ induced by pop culture affected how I viewed friendships.
My younger self adopted a view that I had to be of ‘use’ to my friends to gain their support. I vividly remember watching the movie ‘Kal Ho Na Ho’ which ingrained the idea in my mind that ‘Naina’, the female protagonist, constantly body-shaming her best friend ‘Sweetu’ was acceptable in friendships. The media we consume often has large-scale consequences on how we perceive the world around us. The constant representation of unrealistic and unhealthy ideals of relationships often distorts our worldview. Having experienced something similar, it is a general realization that cinema or books are sometimes constructed around certain tropes and should not be considered an accurate description of reality, as found by a study.
But now that I am significantly mature and have reached a certain stage of adulthood, I’ve realized that friendships are much more than what my teenage mind thought of. I’ve certainly come to terms with the fact that we aren’t required to label our friendships. We all have best friend/s with whom we tend to share an unspeakable bond, but they are meaningful in themselves and do not have to be defined in rigid terms. I often come across situations where it gets hard to explain my relationship with a fellow friend, and over time, I have stopped trying to put every bond I have with an individual in a box. I believe they are meant to be flexible, don’t necessarily require a label, and that having a person who listens and understands you is enough.
Hence, to address the edge-of-adulthood crisis, we all go through such emotions when we fail to provide time to our loved ones. However, this shouldn’t make you go hard on yourself as time and space can never truly define a bond. It’s not always about how regularly we meet, but the support and love we share.