The screwed-up system that actually works fine

Remember that quote we used to write in our friends' autograph books when we were young?

"Friendship is like chinaware
Beautiful, fragile and rare
Once broken, can be mended
But the crack is always there"

And then we grew up and these quotes started to appear silly. We started to behave all mature and diplomatic. We started to pretend we did not see the cracks.

However, at times I feel that I may have natured in many ways, but when it comes to my friends, I lose about 20 years of my age.

Even though I have become more cynical of friendships over the years, and I have very few friends who I'm really really close to, but I love them, get angry with them, miss them, get jealous when they get close to someone else, accuse them, hurt them, fight with them, forgive them, ask for forgiveness and often get very silly and emotional about them.

And the most amazing thing is - I do all these things not just with people I know, but even with my blog friends, people I have never met before, but some of whom I cherish deeply.

What scares me is that contrary to my belief, I may never meet them in this lifetime.

But other than that, they're as much my friends as my real-life friends are. The funniest thing is - I have even had such major fights with a few of my blog friends that they have ended in fallouts. And I often wonder - do, or rather, can grown-ups really have fallouts with people they have never met??

Sometimes we take certain liberties with our friends, we say and do things that we don't mean in the way it is received. And we don't realise they may have hurt our friend. And if our friend does not talk about it, we just move on not even realising that a friend is still nursing a wound caused by our words. It's only when one fine day, we're hurt by our friend's words, and we don't talk about it, that we realise that our friend does not even realise we're still nursing a wound caused by his/her words.

If you're fortunate enough to be able to bring it out and talk about it, things may heal for good. Sometimes you can forgive easily, sometimes you are forgiven easily. But at other times, it's not so easy. And it's tempting to sweep the matter under the carpet. We may feel that's the mature thing to do. Just forget about it. But if we can't forget, why pretend? What's the point in being all mature and grown-up, if the problem is still gnawing at the back of our minds? By pretending to be okay when we're not, we're being unfair not just to ourselves but also to our friend who thinks we're okay. Sometimes, a fallout is better than a friendship held together for the mere sake of holding it together.

Over the years, I've come to realise that fallouts are not personal failures. If you can't forget, there is no point forgiving. You just have to move on. Don't look back - just let it go.

But what I am glad about is that there are certain friendships where you can have a fallout, you can patch up, and surprisingly, the crack will not be there. The only problem is that such friendships are extremely rare. Chemistry like that happens only if you're very very lucky.

I guess it's part of the package. You hurt your friends. Your friends hurt you. Fallouts happen. There's no way out of it. That's how the system works.

Luckily, there's something so endearing about the bond of real friendship, that when we find friends who really matter, we just find a way to work around the screwed-up system.