Bitty Ruminations 92 – The friendship equation

So I am doing a Jeeva ( 🙂 ) and getting serious, thanks to a question put forward by a friend — a really intense being who is going through a lot of mental hand-wringing. (I did tell her I would write about this on the blog, so she could read the responses, and she was okay with it.)

The issue is this. She feels that her friends are not as invested in her as she is with them/their lives. She feels they are content talking about random, generic things — and she understands that earth-shaking events don’t happen all the time. But what she talked to me about is this feeling of helplessness that almost every conversation is… well, depth-less.

I told her friendships are like relationships. I mean, they are a kind of relationship, too. And just like we cannot expect our spouses / partners / BFs-GFs-SOs to behave the way we want them to, the same goes with friends. “Why can’t you be okay with the fact that you give more than what they give back to you?” was my basic argument. Because if you don’t make peace with people’s nature, you are going to be left wanting forever.

She understands the logic of this, but she says she wants help dealing with this “expectation” issue she has. She wants a world beyond that of her spouse, and she wants at least one or two people in that world who are “deep beings”. Being the movie nerd I am, I told her she reminded me of Laurel in Jerry Maguire (she’s the sister of the Renee Zellweger character), who says, “I am incapable of small talk.” I got a shoulder swat in return.

So, dear readers, what would you say to such a friend?