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Exploring the important stuff
For as long as I can remember, I have loved peeling back layers of pretension and social masking we all have been taught to use. I adore having real discussions with real people about real feelings. I don’t have much appetite for non-stop surface talk, especially when it is clear that it’s all about avoiding intimacy.
My favorite kind of group to be in is somewhere that encourages people to open up and tell their stories truthfully. Here is some of my personal history that may shed some light on why I love deep, heartfelt conversations so much..
Friendship is the bridge to another soul
Whenever I see It’s a Wonderful Life and get to the ending that never fails to make me teary-eyed, despite knowing exactly what’s coming, I still find myself both nodding and cringing at the part about no man is a failure who has friends. It tugs at my heart because close friendships have been rare in my life.
How do I explain this? How do I rationalize this? Most important, how do I overcome it?
The idea of true friendship has always been powerful for me, yet ever since encountering the famous sentence “Let’s just be friends” from girls back in high school, I recognized that as a culture we don’t think much of the institution of friends. “Just friends” is an insult, a buy-down, a limiting of a relationship. But then “more than friends” usually means becoming lovers and in a strange way, sex sometimes inhibits intimacy. Lovers frequently keep secrets from one another as a strategy for not rocking the emotional boat with confessions or sharing their vulnerabilities. The result is that lovers are often less intimate than friends and the sex that lovers have is often more like acting in a movie than being real.
