My Best Friend's Wedding

Friendship, and all relationships for that matter, are a mystery to me. I have tried to sit down and analyze all their components, trying to understand how they work and how to create them. I have concluded they are magic. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to them. Why do some people hit it off despite their differences and others not connect despite their similarities? Why do some people choose to spend the rest of their life with someone else? Magic.

My best friend got married two weeks ago.

Our story is a strange story and I don't want to say too much because, like most things on this blog, to discuss any aspect of my life in detail is to discuss aspects from other people's lives as well, and I don't want to reveal something someone doesn't want revealed. Having said all that, there never were two people more opposite than AH and I. How we became friends is really weird and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else trying to make friends. We got into a huge argument. We were in our teens at the time. Now, I'm not the arguing type of guy so how all this happened is a mystery to me. However, our fight was big enough that our parents heard about it. They forced us to get together and apologize to each other. We met up at a Tim Horton's on our own and our quick three minute apology turned into a three hour conversation. It was the first time I had ever really shared with a person. I can't remember all that was said but I knew that there was something different about this conversation. I didn't just stick to the usual social niceties, small talk, a few facts and jokes and then go on my merry way. I actually shared a little piece of me, for the first time in my life. And I wasn't rejected (which was my biggest fear most of my life). And AH shared with me too. This was a milestone in my life. I can't describe how foundational and life altering this moment was for me. Like any INTJ, I went home and analyzed what just happened. I think I just made a friend. Up until this point I can't say that I had ever had any real friends. I know I called people friends but they were really just acquaintances. AH was my first friend. It was a strange experience for me because up until this point what I thought were friendships were very shallow interactions. My relationships had no real depth whatsoever. My life changed that day as I came to understand there was more to real relationships than what I had experienced my entire life. My paradigm shifted. I woke up in the matrix and realized that what I thought I knew wasn't reality after all. It is a little disheartening to realize that your entire life up until that point was a mere fraction of what it could have been. Anyway, I have a lot more to say about friendships in an upcoming post so I'll leave it there for now.

AH is now married. I'm trying to understand what this means for me. You see, AH is a female. I guess AH is now AW. Anyway, all the things that we used to do seem more like a husband kind of thing now. Maybe I should explain what I mean before your mind wanders. First, AH and I were never romantically involved, ever. I just need to clarify that. I know my parents read this occasionally and I'm sure they had their suspicions. AH and I would get together all the time just to talk. We would share our thoughts and feelings and ideas and hopes and fears and all that friendship kind of stuff. As we grew older we even went on vacation with each other, sharing hotel rooms and what not. But now that AH is AW I wonder what our friendship will look like. We can't really go on vacation alone together anymore. I don't know if we can just get together and talk like we used to either. I know if I was married I would be extremely jealous of this kind of relationship someone else was having with my wife. I'm pretty sure we won't be sleeping over at each other's anymore either. I think it feels like I have been partly replaced. I just realized that at this very moment. I don't have a lot a friends, at least not this level of friendship. Relationships are a precious and rare thing for me. They are not a dime a dozen. I'm feeling unsure at the moment. I want to continue to grow the relationships I have now, not to replace AW, but to add to my life what has been missing for so long. I think I'm concerned that I will never have another friendship as deep as the one I had/have with AW.