It's Saturday night and I'm back on the blue couch in my black fleece pants. I'm a little sick, I've got a head cold. My roommate Erin and I just got back from seeing The Nanny Diaries in our pj's, with lots of candy in our purses. Its been a good night. I've been thinking alot about friendship today and how real friendship is hard to find and hard to give at the same time. In our culture it seems like for the most part your friends become your family. Especially if you're single and living away from home. But this poses somewhat of a problem- familial relationships are pretty stable because you're related and you can't change that. Friends are the people who you choose to let into your life. By their very nature friendships are more noncommittal and unstable, and because of this they can often be pretty competitive.
I've seen myself put up walls with different women because I felt like if I really let them in they were going to jeopardize my standing in my perceived "friend family" (Matt and Rob). I was scared that they were just using me to get to the guys (and some of them may have been doing that). But its intimidating when the friends you love and value think another girl is more fun or engaging than you are.
I really think this kind of thing is what keeps women from having really close relationships with each other. We're scared. We're scared that if we let a beautiful, intelligent, lively new friend into our circle she'll get more attention than us, and that the boys we like will like her more than they like us. But I'm seeing that this mentality, this way of operating is toxic and it only pushes people away and leaves us alone. We demand a kind of friendship that we can control. We put up walls and are careful about who we introduce them to. Its selfish. We're playing god. Its arrogant to think that I can control who is friends with who, and what people think about eachother. If God wants two people to be together I will not be able to stand in His way.
I think we just have a tendency to use eachother- what can this person help me do? who can i meet through this person? how does this person make me look? We think of everything but the other person. Lord help me to repent, change my heart.