Lessons Learned

… you can’t be friends with everyone (unless you count on Facebook)

If you subscribe to the theory that there is one person for everyone: one perfect partner, one perfect friend: then university will surely shorten your life with an exploding stress bubble right to the temple. The sheer quantity of potential relationships that fly past you like meteroids from year one to three will either quash that romantic notion or leave you juggling more nights out and coffee dates than Paris Hilton. And I doubt she has to go to the library on top of that as well.

From the four thousand ‘Kates’ and twelve hundred ‘Johns’ you accumulate in your phone during even a meagre participation in Freshers’ Week, through to all the lovely people you have had seminars and study groups with by the end of it all, what percentage will really end being the friend that cheers you up after he cheats on you, or better still; the first guy who never does?

And yet annoyingly, when else in our entire lives is there so much potential for these people to form, so many people with so many different backgrounds, personalities and interests just like us? We squander school working through our insecurities in cliques and will most likely rattle through our adult lives watching our priorities turn to more urgent concerns. Now is the time, at the peak of our sexiness and freedom, to be in love with everyone, while everyone is at the peak of theirs just the same.

In reality, I’ve learnt that isn’t possible. Most of us will end up with a healthy circle of wonderful friends by the time we toddle off into the real world, and maybe a successful love story or two. But the vast majority of the people we meet and get along with or desperately want to ravage will have to be given up to the tide, swept away unspokenly in the cruel whirl of time and circumstance. People who at one time seemed as though might become your best friend steadily and quietly drift away and the girl who made the inside of your mouth feel like putty every time you sat beside her to discuss an assignment will head off to other modules. There just isn’t enough time to mean something to them all.

Of course, there’s always Facebook. Sometimes I think the true value of that en masse turbation is to deep freeze a chain of contact with all the brilliant people you meet but never quite had the time to forge a bond with. That and every weirdo from your past, of course. But perhaps it’s possible to reprise all the relationships that never got a proper chance via this medium, or perhaps its very existence is an affront to the natural inevitability that in life, people leave one another behind, and accepting that is as essential to inner peace as accepting loved ones will die, time will eventually heal and Newcastle will never, ever win a cup. Still, here’s to ones that will get away: and to the perfect friends, or perfect lovers, they may just have been.

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