Sometimes it is easy to love your friends and sometimes it is not. The easy days are those when you both feel on top of the world. The support between you two is strong, the laughs shared are loud and the hugs given are tight. Those days are filled with an incomprehensible feeling of love. Those days are the ones brimming with gratitude. But these days need to be balanced with the hard days, the sad days, the annoying days, the disappointing days. The days where you butt heads and even their breathing triggers something inside of you. These days need to be taken with a grain of salt, because they’re a natural part of friendship.
College was the first time I engaged in every single part of my friend’s lives; living with my roommates meant I knew everything about them. I knew all about their boyfriend issues, which friends they were having drama with, their family, their hobbies and their dislikes. I truly seemed to know everything about their lives, and they knew just about everything about mine. Being this close to a person, both physically and metaphorically, is sure to lead to some disagreements and disputes.
Issues are sure to arise involving their habits, their decisions or their viewpoints. And being so engaged with my roommates’ lives sometimes gave me the impression that I knew what was best for them. Sometimes I had the feeling that my view on a situation or how I did things was the right way, and they should be doing what I would do. I wouldn’t like the decisions they made, and I would get frustrated that they couldn’t see things in the way I did. Then they would get frustrated with what they thought was an attack on their character. This would go back and forth, exhausting us both in the anger we felt.
I’ve had to learn to navigate these situations and my own opinions, because the stability of the friendship is always more important. And to keep that stability sometimes means allowing your friends to make stupid decisions. It sometimes means allowing their hearts to be broken or consequences to be had. Sometimes it means putting your own pride away and supporting them in situations that you hate. It is the hardest thing to see a friend in pain, but their pain is theirs to have and theirs to choose. I can’t stop them from their choices, even when I don’t agree with them. It is their life to be living, not mine to be controlling. This was a hard pill for me to swallow because I’ve always only wanted the best for them. I want to see them succeed and be happy. But mistakes, regrets and bad decisions are all part of the journey to success and happiness. They’re an integral part of character building and discovering what is truly important to a person. I can’t shield them from this, so instead I had to learn to support them through this.
Friendship comes with a choice and a compromise. A choice to love and support each other even when we don’t agree with each other. A compromise to allow each other to follow our own paths. Through the good decisions and the bad, we need to be support systems for each other.