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Conditional friendship
Jul. 7th, 2005 02:46 pmAnd in the latest instalment of LJ Drama Theatre... ( Fake tales of animal abuse. )
It was an interesting and perfectly valid experiment, it was simply carried out in a way that neglected to take into account certain easy-to-forget, though very important, things... It seems to me that if something like this would destroy a friendship, you probably weren't very good friends in the first place.
And I say, bugger the notion of 'unconditional friendship'. Trust is one of the most precious things that I can give somebody. When I give it, I accept that people are fallible, and that trust may be broken by carelessness, or misunderstanding, or anger, or failure of will. Those things are difficult and slow to forgive, I won't pretend otherwise, but with time and goodwill they can be forgiven.
But if they don't even understand the importance of that gift, and treat it as a lightweight thing to be bartered or spent for some purpose, that sort of thing doesn't fall under "everybody makes mistakes". If you can forget that trust matters, we're too far apart to share anything I'm willing to call 'friendship'.
(Admittedly, my reactions to this are somewhat coloured by my own memories of the Great Sarah Fiasco of 1997, but I think I'd feel much the same way even without that little ray of sunshine in my past.)
It was an interesting and perfectly valid experiment, it was simply carried out in a way that neglected to take into account certain easy-to-forget, though very important, things... It seems to me that if something like this would destroy a friendship, you probably weren't very good friends in the first place.
And I say, bugger the notion of 'unconditional friendship'. Trust is one of the most precious things that I can give somebody. When I give it, I accept that people are fallible, and that trust may be broken by carelessness, or misunderstanding, or anger, or failure of will. Those things are difficult and slow to forgive, I won't pretend otherwise, but with time and goodwill they can be forgiven.
But if they don't even understand the importance of that gift, and treat it as a lightweight thing to be bartered or spent for some purpose, that sort of thing doesn't fall under "everybody makes mistakes". If you can forget that trust matters, we're too far apart to share anything I'm willing to call 'friendship'.
(Admittedly, my reactions to this are somewhat coloured by my own memories of the Great Sarah Fiasco of 1997, but I think I'd feel much the same way even without that little ray of sunshine in my past.)
