Day 10 of 30-Day Writing Challenge
Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash
I don’t have a best friend. Do you?
What is the definition of a good friend?
Somebody whom you talk to most often? Somebody who doesn’t mind receiving your call in the middle of the night when you have an agonizing issue? Somebody who wakes up at 4am to take you to the airport? Somebody who hands you 100 dollars when you are broke and doesn’t expect you to pay back? Somebody you are comfortable with talking about your sex life?
Do you really think a single person can handle all these your needs? Let’s flip the side. If a single person count on you for doing all those things for them, would you be fine with that?
We do encounter these needs, probably more often than we wish. Some of the needs can be met by our spouse/partner. In such a case, s/he is our friend. Some of the issues we prefer not depend on your spouse/partner, because the issue is between us and our spouse/partner. We need someone else to go to.
The reality is, depending upon the needs that come up, we consciously or subconsciously look through our database in our memory and pick someone who can best fulfill the needs. Of course we don’t choose someone we have just met at the party last week. We select from those we know long and well enough. We assess the probability of that person saying yes to our request. Based on the calculated probability, we contact or not contact that person.
For this purpose, I think we are better off if the database holds decent number of contact names. If we have only person in the database, chances are we will lose that versy person from the database soon. We don’t need to nor should we have hundreds of people in this database, but we should have at least handful, not one. And if we are ready to be approached by one of these handful for such issues, these handful are more likely our good friends. Or vise versa.
I don’t think it’s a good idea banking on one person for all the issues or needs that may come up. I think everybody is better off having several good friends but no single best friend.