Never Walked In High Heels

At first our friendship was easy. A favor for him here, something for me there. It was a relationship which hardly seemed tit for tat, as the jokes seemed to cover any form of transaction we pursued. It was the perfect no-pressure friendship, which lasted for several years, seeing each other week in and week out, without any source of conflict. Until The Storms came. Now The Storms themselves were not my fault, nebulous as they may seem. In fact, The Storms had no direct impact whatsoever on the friendship itself. But The Storms directly affected me, and my own reactions rocked the friendship. I became exceedingly difficult to love and, in my mind at least, my friend became incredibly irritating.
Here we sat at a crossroads. Either choose to forgive the other of their own special form of obnoxious behavior, or go our separate ways. Here was where our friendship began in earnest.
I have often heard that love is a choice. Through hot summer weddings and cold church services told me over and over again that love is an action, not a feeling or chemistry. You choose to love somebody. I heard it so many times growing up that it managed to loose all meaning for me. It wasn’t until recently, when I saw two people wittingly choose not to love each other that I realized that it the end, love comes down to something as mundane as choices.
The difference between friends and family is that, like it or not, you are stuck with the people in your family. You can’t leave them. Travel across oceans and foreign lands but somehow, but annoyingly, DNA and blood type always manages to hunt you down. In reality, friends are people you can walk away from. They aren’t going to hunt you down and ask for a kidney at two AM on a Tuesday morning.
The more you love a friend however, the more of a conscience decision you have to make not to walk away when things become difficult and The Storms hit. Friends are family you choose not to walk away from.
In recent weeks I’ve been tempted to walk out on several friends. As we get older the friends of the past have lives which are becoming less and less like mine. Or mine is becoming less and less like theirs. Often these differences become catalysts for conflict, sometimes flat out pain. So for the first time this holiday season I found myself making a choice, and knowingly deciding to love my friends even in the moments when I felt like picking them up and hurling them across the room.
As for me friend who is willing to stay with me during the storms, despite my erratic behavior and the unfavourable conditions, he stays. And I stay. Both of us know that we have chosen to create a relationship based on choice, not on what we feel in that moment. And that choice gives each of us the freedom not to worry about our passing feelings during The Storms.