How there is so much silence, a lack of communication and not enough understanding in Friendships these days. Friendships does seem to be a very favourite topic of mine, but what can I do? I have gone through so many things, seen the many facets of people and life, that nothing surprises me any more.
There is a popular saying of Marilyn Monroe, “If you are going to be two-faced, at least make one of them pretty.” I agree there are two-faced people, but more than two-faced people, their are people with many facets to their personality. For me personally, that facets of personality are more important, than whether a person is a two-faced individual or not. Multi-faceted people are more unpredictable. They are more dangerous in a way.
You literally cannot predict what will happen with them. At least with two-faced people, to some extent, you know that it is either this or that and when someone lies to you, you think in your mind ‘I know he/she is lying, but I am going to enjoy it anyway.’ Now, back to the point of what I am writing and why. I have noticed many a times these days, people end up losing their friendships over petty reasons. Usually and most of the times I have observed is that, it is the lack of communication which causes many issues to arise.
Silent. Silence. Why be silent? When you can talk to your friend and sort out the issue. I have been thinking about this a lot the past few days. People have become too lazy to communicate with other people. People sometimes don’t even bother when something happens and they don’t make the effort to sort something out. It hurts when friends say they love you or care about you, but then they do something or act in a certain way to prove you wrong. Loving someone or caring about someone is not inconsistent, it is not a break even graph, that one month the love is in deficit and the other month, love is in abundance and there is a profit.
Loving and caring about someone should be synonymous to walking on a straight smooth path which leads to somewhere. Also, there should be a purpose behind walking on that path with your friend. Things go wrong, when instead of choosing the smooth path, you travel on the rocky road and instead of steering clear of the bumps and the rocks, you hit them straight on. Things also go wrong, when you don’t know why you are walking with the person in the first place. Why is it that this person is in my life in the first place? Is having this person in my life worth it?
How do things go this wrong that you go adrift from the relationship and lose your friend? Some people think about what happened with their friendship after it gets ruined and the ship has sailed without them. A lot of people don’t even bother to go over what had happened with them and they keep making the same mistakes over and over again, which leads to them having no friends and people in their life at all.
Majority of the issues that start and are not resolved are because of the lack of communication, or what I am calling it ‘in the name of silence’. Communication and understanding are very important in a friendship or any kind of relationship. Without both of these, there would be huge trust issues. Some people blindly trust just about anyone, without even getting to know a person well or understanding how that person’s mind works.
You wouldn’t want to tell all your secrets to a person, who is a gossip monger and will most probably tell whatever you are saying to them, to other people would you?Â
You would love to talk to a person who understands you, who you are comfortable talking to, who you know will not tell all your secrets and whatever you two talk about, to other people.
Understanding and communication are key. Some people say, they are being silent to get back at a person. Psychology calls it Mind Games. Few people have this tendency to have revenge on a person, by being silent and forcing the other person to get paranoid and get in to this guessing game. They would remain silent for days and then suddenly reappear in a person’s life. Then these people actually have the audacity to say, we love you or we like you or we care about you.
If you care about someone, you don’t force them to be paranoid and you don’t play mind games on them. You don’t disappear and then just reappear in their lives, hoping everything is normal and it will be okay. A true friendship is consistent and no matter what happens, the other person still somehow manages to come back to you. They don’t just leave you. Why would this happen though? Why would a person leave you, break the friendship, when something happens? Two reasons mainly. They have heard something about you from someone else and they didn’t talk to you enough and trust you enough to keep you above what they have heard and from whom.
There is a quote on silence that I particularly like and it is “Spiteful words can hurt your feelings, but it is the silence which breaks the heart” and it is true. Being silent and treating a person as if they don’t exist hurts and I am sure no one would want to go through this, so why do we inflict this pain upon others? We shouldn’t do this to our loved ones. If there is a problem, sort it out and talk it out. Being silent will not solve the problem.
Silence can sometimes be good, but most of the times it can be really bad. Silence is comforting when you are hurt and your friend is there with you in your time of need and shares silence with you. Sometimes silence is all that exists between the best of friends. A friend would not even need to say anything and the other would know what has happened. Like you have this connection with a few people and when they are sad, you can feel it. They don’t need to tell you.
The other time when silence can help you is, when you are angry at your friend for whatever reason. Silence can help cure the anger. In American slang terminology, this is called taking a time out. A break from what is going on between two people. There is this silence that envelops both of them and then there is nothing to say. More than time, it is silence which heals as well. Silence which makes you reflect and then forces you to make a decision, make a choice.
Usually though, silence is bad. Silence is only helpful in the first place, because you let increasing silence and lack of communication in the friendship affect it. If the friendship had communication, if there was understanding between the two people, even if something had happened, the person would be able to sort it out with the other person and everything would be back to normal. However, people don’t do this. If something happens, they go silent. Misunderstandings are created by silence. Silence is evil. Silence plays evil tricks on the mind. People go crazy because of silence.
It is different if you want mental peace, but after a while silence comes to bite you and haunt you. You miss the noise. You hate the darkness in your life, you miss what it used to be. Don’t let silence destroy your life and friendships. Communicate with people. Try to understand them. Make the right choices. Be a better person. Most importantly, learn from your mistakes and experiences. Do not make the same mistakes twice.
