Friends are an interesting piece of the life pie. (https://steemit.com/life/@genxlifelessons/how-is-your-pie)

They are there to support and nurture you when you need them. They are there to experience those amusing situations which are so difficult to relate afterwards – you know the being drunk and trying to buy pies but buying shampoo in a 24hour Tesco’s at 2am type of moment. They are there to push you when thing get tough. To be the sounding board for your problems when it would be difficult to turn to someone else.

So my theory on friendships is that you really don’t need to sweat the small stuff in analysing your friends. Life is not Facebook – you don’t need followers and thousands of linked in friends giving you thumbs ups every day. Some people have few friends that they trust implicitly and share everything with. Others seem to swan through life being the flavour of the party, centre of attention with thousands of contacts and friendships but no deep connection with any specific one. Because that is alas the trade off and possibly a mathematical rule that could be postulated whereby the value of friendships decrease as volume increases - The more friends you add to your friendship circle, the less time you can spend with each and the lower the friendship connection! But that’s ok because we are all different!

The other things with friends is they can sometimes be situational friends and needed for a specific purpose. When I first moved to the Philippines, I was quite lonely the first few months. I was hanging out either at the rugby club or expat bars and making vague friends with business people passing through. My boss was helpful in trying to set me up but was married with 2 kids and had his own life over the weekends. I finally had a breakthrough in meeting up with a fascinating American girl S. Now S was not probably someone I could introduce to the parents. She was rather rough around the edges, swore like a trooper, could drink or arm wrestle anyone under the table, enjoyed pissing in public and was hilariously unconventional. I actually tried originally picking her up but she left me stranded in the taxi by getting into someone else’s taxi and it was at that point that I realised that romance was off the cards. But when she randomly phoned me a few days later we started developing a great friendship (although non sexual – especially when she introduced me to her fiancé from Norway I think a few weeks later).

But we had a raw friendship where I felt I could say anything and not be judged in any way and she was crazy and a lot of fun to be around. When the school year ended and she left we tried to keep in touch and a few years later I actually visited her in Geneva with my wife. She was obviously the same as she always was. Her opening line was don’t sit on that couch - I gave birth to my daughter there a few weeks ago! (And I don’t think she was joking). But I realised that our lives had moved on. She was happily married with 2 or 3 kids in Switzerland and I was in London and we had actually very little in common.

For that year in Manila we were possibly the best of friends. In London we probably wouldn’t have ever even become friends! When she left Manila I managed to find some like-minded young (20-30’s) expats all working in the Philippines. I believe there were about 8 of us and a complete cross section of Australian, US, Canada, India, and myself being the token South African. And we also had a superb year of visiting attractions, drinking at each other’s houses and apartments and generally causing havoc. But now I am sadly only in touch with one directly and find out bits and pieces on the others through Linked in. I believe there was a place and time where we were all good friends and now not. And that’s ok!