Friendships were never my strong suit. They were relationships I could never get right. I romanticized portrayals of friendships I saw on TV, yearning for a best friend that lived next door or climbed through my window whenever I needed them. Sincere friendships were reserved for fiction — they weren’t something that was actualized in my life.
At least not until I came to college.
Friendships are unique in the sense that they are different from any other relationship you’ll ever be in. You create its structure: there are no predetermined milestones you are trying to reach and they are strangely voluntary. We aren’t obligated to our friends, at least not in the way we are to our families, partners or work. Because friendships allow for so much independence, they are subject to life’s volatility. Priorities shift and responsibilities pile up and friendships are put to the side. People grow up, they go away — friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit.
For a long time, I didn’t know if I was ready to put work into a type of relationship that, to me, seemed very fickle. I was bound to things like my family and my work. They weren’t tough to navigate, and even if they were, they had a sense of perpetuity to them. Because I knew my family was always going to be there, I wasn’t worried about how much time I should’ve dedicated to relationship-building with them. It was also partly due to how my family functioned. Valuing family above all else was a mechanism my family used to fight against Western ideals of individualism. Phrases such as “blood is thicker than water” and “family comes first” frequently repeated by family members left me thinking that friendships were too capricious, less intense and unreliable. Even if it wasn’t explicitly said, it was an expectation to put family above all else. I internalized the message and used it as an excuse to push any friends away, running through new friends every year and leaving friendships whenever they got too hard or meaningful. I turned away when friends knew too much about me, wanted to be there for me or expected the same from me.
It was when I met my closest friends at UMich that I realized that friendships could be more than superficial connections. I didn’t have family around; I needed people to surround myself with. And when I finally gave in, by immersing myself in the company of people who weren’t my family, I realized that friendships were worth investing in, sustaining and putting the effort to be in.
My friends and I celebrate each other on our good days and embrace each other on the bad ones. I got through some of my hardest days because I had friends to lean on and to find comfort in. When my grandfather passed away this summer, I found solace in conversations with friends. When I got into my summer internship or got a good grade on an essay that one of them probably edited the night before it was due, I wanted to tell my friends before anyone else. I found purpose in devoting myself to something bigger than just myself, my family and my work. My relationship with friendship changed over the years with how much energy I decided to put into them, how real I wanted to be in them, and just how much I decided they were going to mean to me. This is not to say that my axis changed — my family is still very much my safe space, but it took a lot of me to understand that there was nothing wrong with growing that circle. My friends are my family.
The fickleness I associated with friendships turned into an appreciation of freedom. There is a lot of breathing room in friendships and space to navigate it all — some friends I won’t talk to for months and it works, other friends I talk to every day and it also works. I feel free in my friendships and don’t underestimate their importance. My friends have taught me so much about life and so much about myself. I’ve learned what it means to love unconditionally because of them, and with them, I feel at home and at peace. It took me a while to get there, and I wish I could say I did it all myself, that a magical moment of introspection changed my life, but I think I just got lucky.
To Lily, Zainab, Isha, Noor, Nahida, Rafee and Eli — thank you.
MiC Columnist Alifa Chowdhury can be reached at alifac@umich.edu.