What brings people together?

Dear Friend,

I was listening to "Circle of Life" from the Lion King (don't ask) and it got me thinking (again, don't ask: my train of thought is horrific at the best of times) about what brings people together. Of all the hundreds of people we meet on every boring week with our windswept hair or accidental toothpaste smudge on our black jeans we keep trying to get rid of that keeps recurring all day, what catches our attention to a person, or what makes us click?

Now, I don't mean this purely in a relationship sense. In fact, I don't mean it in that way at all. That one's kind of easy to work out - I mean friends.
My mum once told me about how she met one of her best friends Angie in the RAF, and she said
"At that time in our lives, we both had only one thing in common: we both needed a friend."

I got thinking about a few of my friendships and what brought us together. What did we bond over? What made us friends? Surely just needing a friend isn't enough? How can that be substance enough? But then, they have been best friends since their teens on just that premise.




Are we friends because we have been for as long as we can remember? We've been friends so long, incidental facts such as how we met or what we bonded over no longer matter; we're the Will and Grace that cannot avoid each other ever. Sort of like an eternity bond. No matter what those stupid little details are, it seems that our friendship is something that transcends all of that.

Are we friends because we found kindred (mentally unstable  introspective) people in each other that we had been seeking? That we found that kind of friend we'd been looking for, the person we could talk about those things with really, deeply, and intelligently. Philosophy will never die.

Are we friends by proxy? We get on, but perhaps we would not spend as much time with each other had we not other mutual friends in common, but we have been roped into the cycle? Will we only be friends as long as we have that mutual friend there holding us together?

Are we friends because we need something from each other that we can give? Did we need someone to talk to that understood what we were thinking? Did we need the shoulder to cry on and that arm at night? What more is there beneath that? The friendship ends there.


Hmph. Okay, I'm not entirely sure where I was going with this, but I said what I was thinking. That's better than no blog entry, right?

Sean
x