Shelf Life: Seven Years

"Every time I try to make a friend, I try too hard and come off as irritating."

When does one become friends with someone else? When do you decide, "Ok, we've seen each other enough times, I like you enough, we're friends"? It just...kind of...happens, doesn't it? How many of us can actually pinpoint the exact moment when we make a friend?

Not many.

Yet, just as friendship doesn't really have a beginning and just "begins", it can just as easily end; it simply dwindles off into no man's land where neither of you officially recognize that it's past the point of no return.

And then it's just awkward.

But maybe it's all meant to happen this way? Maybe we're meant to cycle through the circle of friendship and slip out of the cycle just as seamlessly as we slipped in. According to a research conducted by Dutch sociologist Geral Mollenhorst, the majority of our friendships are fleeting and exist merely out of convenience and circumstance. When it is no longer convenient and the circumstances no longer stand, the friendship will slowly fall apart and fade into a nostalgic distant memory.

According to the research, friendships expire at around seven years. Thinking it through a litle more thoroughly, that sounds about right. In seven or so years, people will experience at least one milestone in their life. Whether it be moving, physical or emotional growth, college, graduation, getting a new job, marriage, parenthood, retirement, or death, each event becomes a dogeared page in the book of life, marking a period of change and progression (or regression). When we change, the circumstances of time and or place that made a friendship so easy and natural no longer hold. And as it goes with human nature, when something requires work, instinct says that its better left untouched.

Because whether we recognize it or not, real friendships require work. Because a true friendship will extend past seven years. If something is important enough to us, we will find a way, if not, we will let it go.

I'm someone who lives by the idea that if something has to be forced, it's not meant to be, because if it was meant to be, it will happen naturally on it's own accord. Follow me? To clarify, if mom has to force me to play with my sisters, it's going to be rough for everyone involved. If you have to force motivate yourself to wake up in the morning, ah, stay in bed. But no, really, on a more serious note, if you have to force a friendship to continue, maybe time's just up. And maybe that's ok because that's just how it's meant to be.

But then again, this doesn't mean that we should drop relationships the second they require a little more work. I've met some very good people in high school but I haven't seen or spoken to since graduation. The convenient social environment of high school no longer exists to make some of the relationships I've had hold.

But hey, a quick text isn't that much work, right? And if they really matter to me, they really deserve a personal phone call.