How the way we show bestfriendship changes as we get older

When we were kids, showing who was your best friend was easy. You spent every moment possible together. You shared even your favorite lunchtime snacks. You went through the whole ordeal of asking your mom to go to their house on the weekend even though you knew she'd make you clean your room first. When we were kids and some grown-up person would ask us, "Who's your best friend?", there was one clear and decisive answer.

Then we got a little older. Say, middle school and early high school. Suddenly there were these things called telephones and we wanted to be on them all day. It wasn't enough to perhaps be in every class all day with our closest friends--we now had to call them as soon as we got home and again after dinner to...do very little other than hog up the phone line. SH and I used to watch Friends together and take the deepest joy from being able to laugh at the same things at the same time. We used to listen to the radio and sing with each other. We'd do whatever we'd be doing if we were alone, except that we were together (but not really). [I just realized how much of a precursor these activities were to my later/current internet-heavy lifestyle, always talking to someone, yet simultaneously #foreveralone.] By this age, your best friends have become those people whose mere presence comforts you.

This continues through high school. Now you've got a friend group. This is the big leagues--it's three or four or seven people you can count on to hang out with. If you're going to the movies, or the mall, or to play mini-golf when you get out of school early after taking your AP Gov exam, it's with these guys. You do all the same extracurricular activities, so not only do you see each other at school all day, you also see each other afterschool, and then call each other to figure out the Calc homework and your lives. These are the friends you have deep serious important life conversations with for the first times. This has begun the era of seeking advice from friends, advice about that person you're interested in, what class you should take, what schools you're thinking about applying to, how to convince your Mom to let you do X-thing-you-know-she-won't-approve-of, etc. This is when your friends become partially responsible for keeping the pieces of you in order when you're freaking out. This is the era when your friends have started to surpass your family in terms of importance to your daily functioning as a social being. You show this by passing notes and lying to your mom to hang out with them.

In college, friendship begins to revolve around food and proximity. Your closest friends are maybe your roommates or the guys down the hall. They're probably the people you can call on to eat dinner together on a semi-daily (or actually daily) basis. They're the people you'll wait to go to events for even though being late is your biggest pet peeve. They're the people you have impromptu dance parties in your common room with. The people you don't mind overhearing conversations with your parents. The people with whom doing homework together becomes having incredible conversations til 3am and THEN starting the paper you have due tomorrow. They're the people you agree to stay up all night with for moral support when you don't have anything to do. They're the people that you know will come to your peformance. They do all of the advising and pieces-putting-back-together that your high school friends did, except on a higher level because this is real life shit. Your willingness to put pants on and do things with them in person, or let them come over to your hideously dirty room, talk soothingly to them when they're sobbing, let them borrow your shit for indeterminate periods of time, and to act normal in front of their parents are how you show that you care about them.

From what I have gathered so far of post-grad life, you show that you care about people in the real world by making and actually keeping Skype dates with them. By fitting them into your otherwise crazy schedule for dinner and/or happy hour if they live in the same city as you. By gchat and Facebook chat. By occasionally picking up your telephone to do something other than text and hearing their voice, which will inevitably make you realize how much you miss them in one knotty ball of want. By planning to buy plane/train/bus tickets to see them. By actually buying them.

But I have recently been introduced to what feels, to me, like it trumps any and all the myriad ways I have shown friendship for someone in the past (besides, perhaps, the not inexpensive roundtrip ticket to Denver I will be buying sometime before March). At its simplest, it means wearing this dress (without the black sash)

and standing in front of a room full of people who mean either very much to my dear friend and once-roommate, MJP, or her soon-to-be-husband, my friend CW. It means helping to organize the bachelorette party and the bridal shower. It means helping her get dressed, making sure her hair and makeup are perfect, and being there to tell her that she looks absolutely stunning, as do the decorations and the place settings. It is staying-up-to-watch-the-sun-rise-for-moral-support-alone on crack.

These are the things it is tangibly. The things it is practically. The things it will be in terms of real world actions and responsibilities.

Intangibly, impractically, in the amorphous world of my feelings, it may be the highest honor that has ever been bestowed unto me. It is you-are-significant-enough-to-who-I-am-and-how-I-got-here-that-I-want-you-to-be-beside-me-as-I-declare-that-I'll-spend-the-rest-of-my-life-doing-this-new-thing, specific-role-ified. It never occurred to me before that wedding parties are as much about love as are the weddings themselves until she asked those seven words and I started to cry. We all know how I feel about weddings and marriage for me, but that doesn't lessen my desire to want to be part of her wedding at all--she's the happiest I've ever seen her, and to be chosen to be a part of making that official? I think it might be the pinnacle of bestfriendship-expression.    

Things I Can't Stand Number Next:

when people don't believe that a man and a woman can be close friends without romantic feelings lurking under the surface on one or both parts. 

My best friend on this campus is a man. Since wresting that title from the women on this campus who used to share it, he has also managed to supersede people from home who have known me since the days of Lunchables and Sailor Moon. Not only do I never feel like I have to pretend to be anything I'm not when I'm talking to or hanging out with him, I also never feel like I can't be anything I am--those are very different sentiments, even if they initially seem like two sides of the same coin, and I've actually never had that before. We can communicate with just a look, and finish each other's sentences, and I feel like he truly and thoroughly gets me. I have this wonderful feeling of home-ness when I'm around him or talking to him that I hope never dissipates. 

But I'm not romantically interested in him in the least. First off, while I recognize that he's a beautiful man, I'm not attracted to him. Sometimes we party together and will find a section of a dance floor to dance around each other in, but I can't imagine actually touching him while we're dancing. I find the thought of grinding with him both disturbing and hilarious. I actually can't even bring myself to imagine kissing him. I don't even want to think about his dick. Even typing this has me skeeved out. We very rarely make physical contact of any sort, but I can come to him crying because my boyfriend just dumped me or because my mom is going to be in the hospital for a month and he will help me put myself back together again with just his words and the way he cares.

But when I casually mentioned to two of my former roommates that he and I had talked about maybe living together next year if he also got a job in D.C., they started making skeptical and disapproving faces at one another. I asked them what was wrong, and they both said, "Nothing." It was obviously something, so I pressured them on it, and M finally said, "Don't you think living with him is a bad idea?" I don't understand why it would be, and said as much to them. They launched into this big spheel about how living together will bring feelings that I don't know that I have to the surface and how I'll be jealous seeing him with other girls and yada yada yada. I was listening to them spewing this nonsense and this scene from Awkward Black Girl actually played in my head:

 
They could have asked things about how neat/messy he is, or whether we fight about silly stuff that would get really annoying in a shared space. They could have brought up the fact that living with J almost destroyed our friendship sophomore year, which is both valid and relevant. But no, these bitches--who actually know me quite well--basically went straight to this idea that I'm already in love with him and just in denial and how living together would force me to quit playing.

...The fuck?!

I wanted to rebut that I didn't fall for either of them when we lived together, even though we were very good friends, but Idk how much they know about my recently embraced non-heterosexuality and didn't feel like putting my shit on blast in the middle of an already tense conversation.

I don't understand why people assume that having a very emotionally intimate relationship with a person is, by definition, a precursor to wanting a physically intimate relationship with that person. Do I love him? In some ways, more than I've ever loved anyone. In other ways, not. at. all. There are countless ways to love a person, and I don't think any of them necessitate any other. It deeply offends me that these ladies seem to think I'm incapable of non-romantic love with a male-gendered person I like to share various aspects of my life with.

Whenever a woman says, “I hate girls; they’re catty bitches,” a patriarchy fairy gets its wings.

Reblogged from freedom fighter 

Once upon a time, I used to say variations of this. That time was basically 8th grade after an incredibly stupid fight with my best friend that left us not speaking for a few years, but the sentiment carried on for a good while longer, and for almost all of high school I thought it was "easier" to "get closer" or "be open" or "be myself" with my guy friends than it was with my girlfriends. One of my biggest shocks upon coming to college was developing such instant close friendships with so many girls. It was a big change for me. But not as big a change as the fact that once upon a time, I used to say variations of this. Once upon a time, I was an ignorant bitch who paid no mind to the social and political implications of the words that came out of her mouth, and who bought into racial and gender-based stereotypes without allowing herself to see the complexity and heterogeneity that is any subset of humanity you could possibly choose. Once upon a time, I was an ignorant bitch who went around saying things like this. Don't let that be you. 

Things I Love about the First Week of School:

Everyone still has TIME for each other. I think I had forgotten what it was like to have a whole group of girls gathered in a circle around my room eating snacks and having hours-long conversation about boys/relationships/love/sex, fears, being a woman, the future, ways we think we'd raise our hypothetical children, insert-anything-else-under-the-sun-here until damn near 4 o clock in the morning. This is bonding. This is how friendships are made and cemented. This is part of what I want to always remember about college. I used to have roommates (three of the four girls in my room tonight used to be my roommates), and this kind of thing happened often, but since we all moved into singles, my girl-talk has been mostly one-on-one or (don't call me a traitor) with guys. (Guys can girl-talk surprisingly well. Many of my closest male friends are incredibly insightful, oftentimes in very different ways than my closest female friends, and I value that more than they may realize.) I am so tempted to say that nights like these somehow ARE college. They're the quintessential experience I'm not sure it's possible to have under other circumstances. Even when you feel like the conversation keeps circling back to earlier points/roadblocks and going nowhere. Even when you feel like it's the entire room against one or two of you. Even when shots are fired at a member of your group and everyone else falls all over themselves laughing. Even when inside jokes/knowledge are exchanged between certain members of the group, leaving others out. I was in a philosophy class for 25 minutes once. I couldn't do it. I prefer my philosophy to be of the 4-am-exchanged-between-friends variety.

How do we ever lose time for this? Why do classes and homework and things with deadlines take precedence? When does this time for each other and stimulating conversation become a waste? It didn't always when we were roommates. What do these walls (read: buildings) between us do to us? How do we make it stop?

Through Distance and Time...

When I told two of my co-workers that my best friend from middle school was coming to spend the weekend with me in New Brunswick, they were shocked that I still TALKED to such people, let alone arrange visits. I told them that we had never really lost touch, despite the fact that she moved away when we I was thirteen (she was still twelve. baby.) and we'd never lived in the same state since. Even as I was explaining this, I realized how downright weird it was. I don't talk to the overwhelming majority of even the people I graduated high school with--only about two on a semi-daily basis. There are more I'll have occasional catch-up convos with or hang out with while we're both home, but on the whole most of my once-best-friends and I have grown apart. 'Tis unfortunate, but that's life, man...and we can still hang out from time to time, so it's not the worst thing in the world. 
But SP...it's different with her. She was whisked away out of my life before we had cell phones and regular internet access...we actually mailed letters back and forth for years. We tried to have hours-long conversations but 8 people live in her house, so tying up the landline for that long was nearly impossible. She didn't give up on me even when it looked like our trio could never reunite because T and I weren't speaking. Going to visit her the summer after our freshman year of high school was my first independent non-familial adventure. Enter facebook: she's someone I actually have regular communication with, not just a random status-like or whatnot. Through elaborate schemes of lying to our parents, she was with me the first time I ever got drunk, and when I found out that Greg and my mom broke up. And now she was here with me again this weekend. We combined childhood--water gun battles, swings, and sidewalk chalk--with grown up games--drinking Jenga, Dirty Minds, Uno with the added rules that you have to drink every time you draw a card--and like every other time, it was like no time had passed at all. 
We're such different people from such different backgrounds. It would have been ridiculously easy for this friendship to fizzle out. But it never has, and it never will. We've been friends through the miles for wayyyy longer than we were ever close while we lived in the same town. And we're luckily not one of those multiperson friendships that can only function with the whole group; our trio has awesome reunions, yes, but SP and I and SP and T can each have separate awesome hang out sessions too. And the best part is, it has never felt like it has taken a lot of effort or like we're fighting against a world that tries to pull us apart...we don't get to see each other as much as we'd like, and we don't always talk super-regularly, but something right found us in the hallways of William Davies Middle School and we're never going to let it go.
You never know who's going to come into your life. You never know how they're going to change you by doing so. You never know if the person you rely on today will still be around the next time you need a shoulder to lean on. You can bulldoze your walls and let people in. You can share and trust and love all without quite knowing if the person you're sharing with and trusting and loving is giving as much to you as you are to them. Relationships of all kinds have as much power to hurt as they have to heal, and you never quite know which will do which to a larger extent. What I'm saying here is the strength of this friendship never ceases to surprise me. May you all have such ride-or-die chicks.     

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day Ten: Letter to Someone You Work With

Hey girl heyyyyyy!

You do happen to be someone I work with, but you're also a good friend. In fact, you're a surprisingly good friend respective to like, the amount of time we actually spend together. I always know I can talk to you about any issues I'm having (and visa versa), even the stuff that sometimes embarrasses me to talk to other Princetonians about like my family or money, because I know you feel me on stuff like that. On being black at Princeton and not religious. On being natural. On gender normativity. On...anything. And you're one of those people that I know I can count on when shit is rough. I will never forget how you SAVED MY LIFE when I left my wristlet (contents: student ID, government ID, debit card, insurance card, dorm keys, house keys, about $60 cash, random other important things) at the movie theater at the mall--running into you walking across campus while I was freaking out was the best thing that could possibly have happened. 
You're one of those good people in my life that makes me wonder whether I'm a good enough person/friend. I hope you feel like you can count on me in all the same ways, even if I don't drive or can't do some of the more practical things. I've got your back the same way you've got mine. 
As much as I do enjoy having gotten moved to a desk where there is a computer to keep me occupied as we "work" (#Ihopemybossneverfiguresoutthisisn'tarealjob), I miss getting paid to sit and chat with you. I feel like we got a lot closer that week we guarded the double doors together. I might start randomly taking "bathroom breaks" to come visit you out there. 
Long story short, I wanna spend more time with you. I'm excited for our roadtrip to AC to see Erykah Badu next weekend. I'm excited to just like, randomly chill with you over the course of the summer. I guess you got hired late, or whatever, because your email address wasn't in that original list our boss sent out (which I scoured looking for people I was excited to be with), but working with you is a wonderful surprise. Let's make a pact to keep this going when the school year starts again, okay? 

:),


Maya