FAMILIAR

FRIENDSHIP ? ? ? ?

I was sitting in my bed today and considering my life growing up and what it is like now and something struck me. I realized that friendship is very much overrated and nonexistent. I grew up a loner and I liked it, I always had fun by myself and the few friends I did have never seemed to truly stay around for very long. Or, what was worse, they always seemed to be nice at first and when you thought you could trust them they would let you down. My dad always noted that the friends my brother and I seemed to attract were those who wanted to use us for some reason. I do admit on looking back that he was right in many instances.

In school, I was very different in that my conversations seemed either too mature or children categorized them as strange. I was made fun of by the boys in class and this caused me to never hang out with the guys at school. Most of my friends were girls who understood me better than myself. I did have guy friends like one boy called Joe who was from Britain; we were really good friends and talked a lot, we use to hang out with a girl called C. and the three of us were inseparable. However his parents were called back to England and we never saw him again. Up to my late teens I wondered how he was doing. Other than this I only had two good friends and both were girls. The few guys friends I did have in my teenage years were always hanging around for either a drop home, to borrow what I had or to just try to look good by making me look and feel bad. I always recognized it too late into the so called friendship but when I did, I would stop hanging out with them.

My idea of friendship was one where I felt the person was a buddy who understood you and cared enough to understand, listen and be there for you as a person. This individual was not there to use or abuse the friendship and should be there in good and bad times as well as be an impartial judge. But I also felt friendship should go so much further and I was never able to find that something further in anyone. Even the few friends I did have would sooner or later become very possessive and try to manipulate or control the friendship. I got very bored with people, not because they had to be exciting, but because they used me or brought nothing positive to my life. So called friends would want me to help them with things like homework or with a problem and when it was my turn they were never around.

I am a great listener and at one time gave great advice, I never judged and tried as best as possible to be unbiased. One guy who hung out with me in my late teens wanted to steal my girlfriend and another used me as a stepping stone to get into a particular type of crowd. As I moved into my twenties, many people used me too get an opening to hang out with my brother or worse hang out with my mom. They were never real and I grew to realize that friendship led to betrayal, yet, I did feel alone a lot and wanted that one true friend I could confide in. My search resulted in two friends whom I later realized were not good for me.

The first was a girl A. who was born on the same day as I but who was a few years older. I met her in a youth group and from the start we hit it off. I did not see her as a potential mate but a true friend. We confided in each other, called each other at all hours and hung out all the time. Yet when she got a boyfriend and she wanted me to make him part of the group, trouble began brewing. It manifested when they broke up and she demanded that I to stop liming with him. I could not because he had become a good buddy. This control was not what I wanted. We slowly lost track of each other and I moved on.

Then there was M., who I meet while at University and whom I felt was a good friend, one I could hang out with. I confided in him, had intellectual conversations with him and we helped each other when either had problems. But when I met my future wife he became possessive and kept asking me to go out when I was going to spend time with my girl. On many occasions he would question me on my feelings for her and ask if she was right for me. I thought he was just concerned for me and that he did not want me to get hurt. My wife S. noted later that M. never made her feel comfortable and she felt as though it were a competition for me. When M. and I started working together and shared a room I really felt I had found a true good friend. However, it was after my wife and I got married that I truly realized that M. was really sexually interested in me and hated the fact that I got married. He actually worked with my mother on many occasions to try to break us up. Once this was exposed I cut all ties with him.

I did not want friends because I could not trust people, I have realized that no one can be trusted, not even oneself. I thought I was a good friend to my wife because I always based my relationships on a good friendship but my secret gay affairs really destroyed all sense of trust and friendship between us. My wife noted this, that our friendship should have been strong enough to enable me to talk about the desires I was having for men. What my adultery proved was that not even I was a true friend.

My gay feelings really prevented me from having friends because it was this dark secret in a country that hates gays that made me scared to trust. Also, and I know this is a major cause, my mom and dad never made me feel as though I could trust them and certainly they were no role models for friendship. Even though I grew up wanting but not wanting a friend, I also believed that I could never truly be a friend myself. For a long time after my second girlfriend D. I could not trust anyone with my secrets or love, this was because it hurt so much to share love with someone and then have everything pulled away. I did not care to share myself with anyone or allow anyone to get to know me, many people would say how I just dropped them off the map or treated them like dirt, but it was a way to protect myself when I saw in them things that made me realize that they were not being true.

The only person who I could say in my whole entire life was a true human friend and continues to be is my wife S... S. is the only person I met who really helped me to open up once more, especially opening up to loving once again. I was even able to tell her about my struggle with gay feelings. After we got married I knew that I did not need anyone else in my life and having friends only took away from us. Yes, I would admit that there were times I even tried to bond with my brother's friends but in all of the cases I did not fit in or felt uncomfortable. It was through my affair that I truly learned that I was as bad as all the people who used me and I was even worse than they. The one person my wife thought she could count on in a crunch betrayed her in the worst way. I even used the argument that I needed male friends and how could she expect me to be stuck at home without friends. It was only after my wife really showed me how much I was not a friend that I felt ashamed of myself. I was ashamed because I had said I would never do such a thing to her as my dad did and I was always criticizing others for being fake, when I was the one who was fake.

What I know is that the only friend you can have is God and that you cannot trust people to be a friend, because at any one time those people can be a tool of the devil to destroy others. The only friendship with a human being is one that is ordained and defined by God. I know, because I have learned the hard way. It is even harder to rebuild a friendship with the person you love when you yourself destroyed it in the first place. If it were not for God, I know my wife and I would have long ago parted ways and certainly not be friends.