Day 24 - Friendships: Nurture or Nature?

You cannot choose your family but you can choose your friends. I remember this line being told to me by my parents when I was young. It always implied that one must choose one's friends with care as your friends not only reflect your character but help shape your character as well.

While this is great advice I've always wondered if friendships need to be nurtured or are formed by chance, by luck and by nature. I haven't found a perfect answer for that.

I think the real answer lies somewhere in between nature and nurture. We don't go looking out for perfect friends or best friends. We come across multiple people in our lives but only a few of them turn out to be really good friends. People whom we love and people for whom we would do anything at any time. People whose moves and moods we can predict and people in front of whom we stand exposed and transparent with our emotions. These are the real friends.

But do we need to nurture these kind of friendships? Do we need to spend time and effort to make an acquaintance into a real friend? I think you do. A friendship, in my mind, is like a seed. You have to give it water, enough sunlight, sometimes a fertilizer and enough attention to make it bloom. But a friendship is also a two way street. It has to be a symbiotic relationship in that both the people involved must feel that they have gained from the relationship. A relationship that is based on only one person giving at all times and another only receiving is not friendship. And this give and take can be anything - it can be emotions, it can be love, it can be attention or it can be support. I believe that in a friendship there also needs to be a show of emotions i.e each party must be comfortable to show the other the value of that person in their lives.

A relationship cannot become a friendship if it is parasitic in nature. If a person does not get reciprocation of their emotions, then the friendship can never bloom into something amazing and lifelong. Then the 'friendship' is restricted to presence. It becomes a case of out-of-sight-out-of-mind and it can't really be called a friendship. It gets relegated to an acquaintance.

But the initial stage of this relationship is by chance, by luck. Of the many people you encounter in your life, there are but a few with whom you 'click', with whom you 'hit it off' the first time you meet. You feel comfortable in that person's presence and can talk and exchange ideas. This is the nature part. This is the luck part. You might meet that person again sometime and realise that your ideas and thoughts match to an extent or that you like to debate with the person and talk to the person. These are the many seeds that you sow in your garden of friendship. And you come across many such people.

The challenge post this is the nurture part where you start to focus on a few of these seeds and realise that you are getting the same response from that person as well. This then grows into a friendship that can become a crucial supporting factor in your life.

So the answer to forming a friendship is somewhere in between Nature and Nurture. It starts off with Nature but you need to Nurture it for it to become a deep and a meaningful friendship.

I can count at least 5 such friendships that I know reciprocate my feelings and 3 more that I hope they do!

What about you?