Nothing is Wrong

Not so Witty Banter

Well, this is quite a weird thing to write about because friendship is one of those things that everybody understands until they try to explain it. I have always had a habit of making friends and, looking back, I think I get attached to people much more easily than I should. Over the years I've met people through school, clubs, competitions, random conversations, shared suffering, shared stupidity, and somehow many of those people became important parts of my life. Yet if there is one thing that has remained consistent throughout all these years, it is that eventually many of those friendships become distant.

Sometimes the reason is obvious enough. People change cities, priorities shift, schedules become impossible to align, or life simply drags two people in different directions. Occasionally there are conflicts, misunderstandings, and disagreements that neither side fully resolves. Those friendships are sad when they end, but at least they make sense. You can point towards something and say, "There, that's where things changed."

What I find much harder to understand are the friendships where none of that happens. Recently a friend and I found ourselves talking about exactly this. We both felt that something had changed between us and, naturally, we started searching for a reason. Did we have a fight? No. Were we avoiding each other? Not really. Had our interests diverged? Not particularly. In fact, if anything, our lives seem more similar now than they have been in a long time. We have similar responsibilities, similar schedules, similar goals, and yet somehow there was this strange feeling that things were not quite what they used to be. The frustrating part was that neither of us could explain why.

I think what bothered me wasn't the distance itself but the absence of a cause. Human beings are surprisingly comfortable with pain when they understand where it came from. Give us a reason and we'll build a story around it. We'll convince ourselves that things happened the way they did because of some mistake, some decision, some turning point. What becomes difficult is when there is no story. How do you solve a problem when you cannot even identify what the problem is? Naturally, because my brain insists on making everything more complicated than necessary, I ended up thinking about Gilgamesh.

Now, Gilgamesh (absolute goat and do recommend reading his tales) and Enkidu are not usually the first people that come to mind when discussing friendship. Most people remember the story because it is one of humanity's oldest surviving epics, while others remember it because it eventually becomes a story about mortality. What interests me, however, is the friendship itself. When Enkidu first enters Gilgamesh's life, he doesn't merely become his companion. He changes the entire trajectory of Gilgamesh's existence. Together they hunt monsters, challenge gods, travel beyond the boundaries of the familiar world and, through those experiences, become inseparable. What fascinates me is that their friendship is built almost entirely on discovery. Every step of their journey reveals something new, whether about the world around them or about themselves.

And that made me wonder whether friendship has less to do with proximity than we like to believe.
We often assume friendships survive because people spend time together, but that explanation never fully satisfied me. If proximity were enough, every coworker would become a lifelong friend and every classmate would become family. Clearly something else is happening. Maybe friendships survive because people continue discovering one another. Think about when you first become close to somebody. Conversations feel effortless because every topic uncovers something previously unknown. You learn how they think, what they value, what scares them, what excites them, and every answer seems to reveal three more questions. There is a constant sense of exploration.

Then, gradually, something changes. Not because either person stops caring, but because both people begin to assume they already know the other. You know what joke they'll make. You know what opinion they'll have. You know what story they'll tell. You know who they are. But do you? That assumption has always struck me as slightly absurd because I barely understand myself from one year to the next. The person writing this blog is not the same person who wrote one a year ago. My priorities have changed, my fears have changed, my ambitions have changed, and even the way I understand the world has changed. If that is true for me, why would it not be true for everyone else?

Perhaps the greatest misconception in friendship is the belief that people remain static. Maybe the reason some friendships begin to feel distant isn't because people stop caring about one another but because they stop investigating one another. They continue speaking, continue meeting, continue occupying the same spaces, yet the curiosity that once fuelled the friendship quietly disappears. The friendship becomes familiar, comfortable and predictable. And while all of those things sound positive, familiarity has a strange side effect. It can trick us into believing there is nothing left to learn. The irony, of course, is that there is probably more to learn than ever before.

A person who has lived another year contains another year's worth of experiences, fears, failures, victories, regrets and questions. Yet we often continue interacting with them as though they are frozen in time, preserved as the version of themselves we first became close to. Maybe distance begins there. The certainty that we already know somebody.

Perhaps that is why some friendships worry me. Not because I think they are ending, but because I forced me to confront a possibility I hadn't considered before. Maybe friendships are not maintained automatically. Maybe sharing a schedule, a workplace, a classroom or even a common goal is not enough. Maybe closeness requires the same thing it required at the start, curiosity. And perhaps that is what Gilgamesh understood, even if he never said it explicitly. His friendship with Enkidu was never meaningful because they stood beside one another. It was meaningful because they continued walking into the unknown together. The monsters were never the important part, the discovery was.