Warning this post is full of cliches; read at your own risk.

Once a friend told me, I tend to have high expectations from my friends. I disagreed with him at the time, but after I thought about it, I was convinced I do. This is not about me holding people to high standards that I more often than not ended up disappointed and confused, it’s about friendship, something we’ve been talking about since we were kids, read about in psychology books and philosophy, and saw on TV depicted by heroes and celebrated for a lifetime.

They used to say friends will always be there when love is gone. In fact, I’ve just remembered what Phoebe from FRIENDS told Joey when he ditched her for a date, she said “boyfriends and girlfriends will come and go, but friends are forever”. I’ve been hearing this “boyfriends and girlfriends come and go…” since grade school actually, and I always thought and still think it’s BS.

Friendship is just like love, neither is better or worse, neither of them stays forever.

Both are concepts that mean different things to different people. While I believe in the following definition of a friend many don’t:

“In terms of dharma practice, a true friend is more than just someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone whom we can trust to refine our understanding of what it means to live, who can guide us when we’re lost and help us find the way along a path, who can assuage our anguish through the reassurance of his or her presence.”

- Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor

The above sounds too dramatic, too demanding, unpractical to many people. In any kind of relationships, some people will demand total freedom and independence, and some will be insulted if their significant other is too busy to answer their call. People are different in their understanding of things. Some calls scratching each other’s back friendship, a girl might have the impression that going out with certain people regularly make them friends, or that her co-workers are also her friends because she spends a long time with them everyday working, talking, laughing and even eating together.

Accept that people are not like you, they think and express themselves differently so what might sound like carelessness could simply be bad memory and busyness combined with ignorance of how you feel about their actions or lack thereof. The same could be argued for mistaking someone for a friend, the attention, the shopping trips, the telephone calls, the care all could be nothing more than courtesy and niceness or a transitional phase that person was going through when he/she met you.

What makes life easier, not just relationships is to always expect less. If you don’t expect much, you’ll be happy when you receive just a little bit more than you expected. And if you don’t, it won’t matter.

On a lighter note, getting a boy/girl friend (or getting married if you’re so two centuries ago like me) will make you less lonely and chances are you’ll appreciate your friends more.

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