“The real friendship is like fluorescence, it shines better when everything has darkened.”?Rabindranath Tagore
Over the past few months, I’ve come face to face with one of my greatest fears recurrently – losing people. I’ve lost more relationships with people in my circle over the past year than I have all my life. In most cases, I could do nothing to hold the relationship together. It was like watching a storm blow away the roof of your house; uncontrollable and unstoppable. For others, we drifted apart slowly. The lack of communication and prolonged silence created an abyss that we couldn’t leap over to get back together – so we stood on separate sides and waved goodbye. Sadly, days later I would still find myself yelling ‘hello’ across the abyss only to be drowned in darkness; or sometimes I became tongue-tied, unable to reply to a lost friend’s hi.
Throughout my life, I have desired to build long-lasting bonds with people – not temporary ones. Yet and still, throughout highschool and college, I’ve lost many friends along the way with only a few who stayed. Some days ago, a friend and I had a long conversation on friendships and bonds and in the middle she asked “ Ivans, who is your best friend?” This struck me deep. For the third time, someone asked me this and I replied with my voice stuttering, “I… I’m sorry… I don’t have a best friend” and I continued, “while there are so many people I’m acquainted with, I have a very few friends.”
The next logical question for many now could be “Who do you consider your true friends?” The ones you go playing football with over the weekend? The person who keeps you down with long conversations at midnight? Or the one who always sends you airtime? People’s definition of true friendship varies with their social values, beliefs, cultures, or sometimes needs. Some tend to be more attracted to people who align with their thoughts and dreams, and others, their emotional and mental needs.
Like many, I’ve always been faced with the question ‘Who are my true friends and how do I assess them?’ About two months ago, my Pastor preached a sermon on friendship. According to him, there are three kinds of friends we keep in our earthly life, and all of us are either one or the next to someone.
The first category of friends that exists is your constituents. Who are they, you ask? Your constituents are people that are not necessarily for you, but they are for what you stand for. They care less about your personality or traits but are staunch followers of your ideological beliefs. This kind of friendship is common in politics. People care less about who an individual is or what substance he carries; they cast their ballots in his favor on party-line sentiments- because of what the party stands for. The day you leave that party they won’t vote for you again because what you stood for was the party’s ideology and leaving the party says something else. Your constituents are your friends who hail you because you love music or football, not because you are you. The day you stop fancying the genre of music or football which was the shared interest, your friendship with these groups of people ends.
The next is your comrades –they are those friends who are not for you nor for what you stand for either, but are only for what you stand against. Ideals of comradeship are what unites many in friendship too – not shared interests, but shared dislikes. A friend is your comrade not because you both love going to school, but because you both shun alcohol. The moment your friend starts liking alcohol you turn against him, even if he stays in school and starts obtaining higher marks. This kind of friendship survives only on mutual dislikes and dies in the absence of such. Many of our friends, or even us, fall in either of the two categories with people – constituents or comrades. We are friends with people because of a mutual idea or shared dislike. There is nothing wrong with this for many – those are key values they build friendships on.
The third category of friends is called confidantes – we seldom meet these people. They are friends who aren’t friends with you because of what you stand for or what you stand against; they are friends with you because you are you. Even if you stop going to school, they won’t leave you because you desert a shared interest, they will encourage you to go back to school. Or if you start drinking alcohol- the bond won’t dissolve because you fell in love with a common dislike, they’ll support you as long as you are drinking responsibly and stand by your side if you need to stop altogether. Your confidantes are people that will enter into your experience, they will find you wherever you go and stick with you till the end. Even if you are in trouble, they will endure with you. They will identify with you, support your, challenge you to be a better person and give you the right advice, which might not necessarily be the kind of advice you want to hear as per your feelings.
My Pastor then pointed out a clear example of confidantes from the Bible story of Jonathan & David in 1 Samuel 17 – two lads who fell in love with each other so dearly. They built a bond on mutual trust, respect, care, and Godly love. Jonathan couldn’t forsake his friend David even when his father Saul decided to kill him; he plotted his escape and supported his calling as King of Israel, despite him being of the royal family.
Confidantes are people we all need in our lives, people who will help us gather our broken pieces and mold them together.
But the ultimate question is, “What kind of friend are you to others?”
Authored by Bill Ivans Gbafore
