I am glad that we have been able to remain friends!*

It was a normal Monday afternoon. I was walking towards my apartment. Victor, the security guard in my apartment was waiting and opening the door for me. “Hay cosas para Usted” (there are things for you), he told me. So I, thought it must be related to the bills that I had to pay immediately. 

I was about to mock myself, thinking that I had to pay some more bills when finally I realized that there were no pending bills. In fact, I got some sweet surprises; two post cards from two friends who live in a different continent finally reached their destination, ME!

A very sweet surprise indeed! I remember holding the two post cards with a big smile on my face. I felt like a little girl who got her birthday presents, feeling overwhelmed and simply content because my friends have thought of me.

Call me sentimental, but there are deep and emotional meanings transmitted by these two post cards or by these two amazing people. Yes to the notion that sending post cards now can be seen as an old fashioned or quirky gesture. But, I don’t care. My friends could be old fashioned or quirky and I declare proudly that I am as old fashioned and quirky as they are.

Some cards that I have received.

To me those cards are memorable and monumental. When I see them, the old memories just fill me instantly. It brings the connection that has brought us to be friends. Yes, friends or friend, this word is I, sometimes, frequently use and I, sometimes, take its meaning for granted, or maybe I, sometimes, do not really bother.

Well, I do bother it now because I am on the mood of valuing what I have been taken for granted in my life.
    

What friends mean to me

I personally define the word friend as someone who really makes efforts to keep in touch with me and to whom I feel attached to, after the test of time and the distance.  I have met so many people in my life but only a few of them who are bother to ask me constantly until now, how I am doing or what has been new in my life. They are those persons who do not care too much about the distance, the time difference or any other reason, and bother to give sweet gestures asking how I have been lately or telling me, what they have been up to or some guys they are seeing, or how their kids are now, new places they have visited or even sad news. These persons are the persons to whom I feel attached to and are more real than some hundreds “friends” in my social media.

The friendship that I have with them helps me to be mentally healthy. When I relate to some studies about friendship, I support the findings which say people with good friends have lower levels of stress hormones. I remember that in my difficult time, they have been the ones who offer me their shoulders to cry on and have given me some comforting taps on my shoulders which I feel like some magic mantra to ease my pains.

Physically, having friends can make you even healthier. Studies found that the closer social networks you are in to, the lower blood pressure and the stronger immune systems that you will have. People who do not have these types of network are prone to die young. Based on a research conducted by  scientists at Brigham Young University in 2010, poor social relations can cause a premature death as high as that from a smoking habit and even higher than that from obesity. The message is clear, if you don’t want to die young, find friends!

I think that friends can have impacts in our life and the impacts can be life changing. I remember that one day, a friend of mine called me to tell about the job opportunity which she thought tailored for me. She is one of my friends who know that I have enthusiasms to work abroad, to meet foreigners and to make the best practice of what I love the most; English. So she called and informed me all the things she knew about the job opportunity and told me that I had to try. I thank her for the call which is one of the factors that change my life forever; I have landed at a work place where my enthusiasms can live in their beats.
  

A bond that lasts

I have realized that real friends mean those who are willing to interact with me reciprocally. I found myself trying keeping contacts with those whom I believe as my friends and found out that they did not bother to respond me. Time and distance can really tell who real friends are.

My point is that friends are those who develop strong bonds that last for years. I heart this point because I do witness that those people whom you thought can be your lifetime friends are disappeared. I understand this because sometimes, we become too busy with our lives; husbands, wives, kids, jobs and other thousand things that we encounter in our lives and naturally we leave our friends aside. These things soon occupy our times and make us forget to maintain contacts with our friends. When we come to this stage, we will invent those sentences, like “yes, she was my friend during high school” or “we used to hang out together”. Slowly and surely, those people become some persons in the past.

I personally value a friendship that lasts. Even animals feel that too. Interesting findings about animal friendship show that even animals are capable to be loyal, compassionate and build a long-term meaningful relation with their friends.  The story of Hare and Ellington, two male chimpanzees who are friends until the death of Ellington in 2002, show the findings are true.
  

According to John Mitani, a primatologist at the University of Michigan who had been researching Hare and Ellington that live in the forests of Kibale National Park, Uganda, since 1995, Hare and Ellington showed the pattern of friendship; going together to hunt, sharing prey with each other, backing one another in a fight, and searching each other when they were apart. When Ellington died in 2002, Hare did not want to be with any other chimps, he mourned for the loss.

The friendship that they share is far from the reciprocal altruism theory which implies that “if I help you today, I expect that you will do the same way tomorrow”. For them and for the other chimps, friendship is not about getting even with and getting some benefits from. In some difficult days, maybe their friends cannot share meats and cannot back up when some other crazy chimps want to mess around. Surprisingly, they can tolerate these because what matters the most is the long term relationship.

I think humans also share the same sentiment. Our friends maybe cannot be there for you all the time; they probably cannot be at your wedding, they probably forget to send you a birthday greeting, they maybe forget one of the little promises that they have made for you, like sending you some info about some topics. There millions of things that they cannot do for you, but it does not matter. What matters the most is we can tolerate their imperfectness and remain friends.

Friends come and go

The truth is that in life, friends come and go. Some prefer to stay with you and some prefer to leave you, intentionally or not. Some have impacts in your life and some just pass by. Those who prefer to stay and have impacts in your life are those whom deserve to be called as friends. They will be the ones who share the durable bonds with you, just like Hare and Ellington had.
 

I look back to one of the postcards sent to me.  One particular sentence that she writes hits my head with a bat, making me to realize that I should value more my friends; those who prefer to stay with me -although I can be annoying sometimes or maybe most of the time- and those who have made impacts in my life.  I want to echo this sentence and say it as loudly as I can to all of you, my dearest friends “I am glad that we have been able to remain friends!”.          

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*I owe most of the idea to write this from Carl Zimmer who writes Friends with Benefits, published in Times (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2106488-7,00.html) and to Jessie Calderon who write me the sentence “I am glad that we have been able to remain friends!”