What friendship taught me.

From their childhood, everybody can remember that one friend they were very close with. A friendship that sometimes blossom into adulthood. We usually consider these kind of people our best friend, because they have stayed longer in our lives than the rest of the people we might also consider friends.

Childhood Friendship

You even hear some people say that the real friendship they made were the ones they made in their childhoods. Reason being that childhood friendship have no strings attached, because then, we haven't learned cunning and manipulations as young humans, so everything we do were done without strings attached. Including friendship.

Real friendships were the ones we enjoyed as children because of the reasons stated above, and also because adult friendship become more about what we stand to gain. We ask questions and weigh our options strongly before going into friendship with people, and when we get into this friendship, we start testing these friends to gauge their capacity to sustain friendship.

I have had a bit of both kinds of friendships, the ones from childhood to adulthood, and the ones I formed as an adult.


I had a childhood friend with whom I had been friends with from around ages 3 till our days in the university. My memories of friend and partner in crime as a child were with him. But then life happened and we didn't see much of each other as adults. Just here and there.

What happened was, the times circumstances brought us together in our adulthood, we had become completely different people with little or no values in common. Whenever we recounted each other's values or even things from the past, it was purely based on nostalgia and not out of anything that had happened recently.

Friendship In Adulthood

Then, there are the friends I made along the way in life, in my adulthood. Two of them stand head and shoulders above everybody else I have known in my life. One of them is the type of friend that, we may not talk for 6 months, but whenever we talk, we seem to pick it up from where we left. No complains about not keeping in touch and the sorts. We usually just continue like we saw each other the previous day.

Then the other ones is passionate and intentional about friendship. He is intentional about communication, reaching out first and helping out without being asked. With him, I am more on edge because I always judge my own actions as friend against his. I use him as a standard for how a friend and even though I take a bit from him, I find it tasking keeping up the way he does, because sometimes I need my space. But I love to reciprocate the same energy, keep the same standards he brings.

What these two friends of mine have in common is, our friendship kicked off in the same childlike ways of having no ulterior motives. Just people liking each other's energy and the presence they bring and then giving the best of themselves to make sure they stay being friends with the other person and not necessarily expecting the other person to do the same, at least to the standard that they bring.

Sometimes I can't help but remind them how good a friend they are. Like genuine people giving their all for a bond with an otherwise stranger. This is the standard friendship should be about and I value it more than any nostalgic recollections from the past.