Collective Friendships

Following on from one of my previous posts there is an issue I touched upon but never went into in much depth, that is the idea of shared friendship versus individual friendship.  Whenever you have a lot of people sharing an experience, such as attending University together or another setting where there is something that binds everyone together in commonality, there is a tendency for friendships to develop that overlap.  If you were to draw these friendships as a chart then you would have each person dotted around the outside as points on a circle, and lines through the middle showing the connections that exist between each person.  The amount of overlap that happens, with lines crossing can become quite heavy.  This can be considered to be a heavily integrated group of friends where almost everyone is friends with everyone else.

The problem with having this kind of density in relationships is that whenever conflict inevitably ensues and one person severs ties with another, there comes an expectation for everyone else who is connected to that person to also sever their ties.  You can say this is childish and pugnacious, and you would be right.  This is the idea that friendships in such densities are collective rather than individual and that you should determine the strength of your friendship based not only on your own experience but the experience of others too.

Whenever I wrote about the way we treat other people I said that the way someone treats others is the way they end up treating you.  In these scenarios you have to be very careful about who you believe.  There is a willingness to believe the one who cut off contact is the one who is right, that is not always the case, and even when consensus follows and people join in that effort and also cut off contact, that isn't an indication that they are right either.  As we said above this is the notion of shared friendship as opposed to individual friendships, and this collective action can be explained as a herd mentality, it doesn't imply a deep level of thought has been devoted to the decision by each individual.

Going further than this, as I said above, the way someone treats others is the way they end up treating you.  If someone severs ties with another person and then insists that everyone else follow suit, that is an indicator that they are a controlling person which can imply much deeper levels of manipulation.  If they were virtuous and believed they were in the right without a doubt they would have the confidence to believe that others in time will see for themselves that truth.  In other words if they think they are right they shouldn't have a problem with you continuing to be friends with the other person until you see for yourself what they already knew - there is of course the possibility that in time you will realise the problem was with them all along, not the person they tried to exclude.

I prefer to judge people for myself and see through their words and actions who they are.  I don't like to rely on other people's perceptions in such scenarios because I know how easily people can jump to false conclusions.  I know first hand how many people make false assertions and come to false conclusions about me personally.  I gave up on the idea of correcting other people or trying to "win them over" long ago.  What other people think of me is none of my business, I know who I am and I know what I am, no-one else gets to define that but me.  They can think what they like, and if anything I find it highly amusing when I see people come to the wrong conclusion.  I know in time they will see they were wrong, or if they never realise that then they will never know the real me, which is their loss, not mine.

I realise this sounds arrogant and rather condescending but it comes from a long battle with self confidence issues that stemmed primarily from other people's perceptions of me mainly due to the fact I was a shy person and it took time for me to open up to people.  I know that I can come across as cold when you first meet me or uninterested, that's not usually the case, I'm just trying to determine whether or not you are someone I want to open up to.  For a time I tried to change this behaviour and be more outgoing and be more outspoken and I never felt comfortable.  That's not who I am and trying to be someone I am not, only caused more problems than it fixed.  So a long time ago I accepted myself for who I was and with that accepted that the vast majority of people will never get to know the real me, and I'm okay with that.  If you have a friendship with me, that friendship is between you and I and nobody else.

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