Name some situations that you’ve had in which you’ve learned who truly has your back vs. who just hangs out with you.
I have 2 in particular:
Moving. If someone helps you lug your heavy couch up a flight of stairs on their day off work and expects nothing in return (other than the obligatory pizza and drinks, of course) … IME, that person is your friend. If they do it in the middle of summer - they love you.
I have really been surprised this year since my mom died at how many people have just vanished into thin air from my life. Just poof, gone, no emails, no “how are you doing?” … nothing. Lose someone you love and it’s like you have the plague all of a sudden. I’ve learned your friends aren’t necessarily the people who go to the funeral and hold your hand. Your friends are the ones who ask you 4 months later “so how are you REALLY?”
So share. What are your litmus tests of true friendship?
The day after I’d had a kidney removed I was awake and wanted to eat a little something. I was given some Jello, a small square of green, and a small square of yellow, with the warning to take it slowly. So I did. Jello isn’t my favorite snack, but I wanted something, anything, with flavors. I felt fine.
Right up until the moment a friend entered the room, smiling and bearing flowers and a gift book. I smiled back and then grabbed desperately for the pan to throw up in, and all there was was that little thingie that’s no good at all. My friend dropped what he was carrying and took the pan and held it for me. I was urping so hard I know some splashed out and got on his hands.
A person that willingly holds the pan when you throw up is a friend.
Of course, later on he updated my health status on another board we both belonged to, and told them about how I’d done “my best Linda Blair impression”. But he deserved the chance to rib me like that, after what I’d done!
I once had someone tell me that if heard he had heard that I had made a bus load of nuns and orphens run off a cliff…that meant they deserved it. Not that I was just having a bad day.
People who not only help you move, but help you move knowing that you have about 100 heavy boxes of books to move (not an exaggeration).
When you’ve planned to have people over for a while, and on the day of the get-together, you are feeling so worn down and rotten (not sick, just exhausted) that you end up ordering a bunch of pizza - and everybody has a great time anyway.
Earlier this year my wife had to take me to the emergency room because of some abdominal pains I was experiencing. I was in the hospital for about six hours. My wife had to call a friend to babysit our infant son on essentially zero notice for the entire time I was in the ER. She came immediately. This was a true friend.
I broke my foot last Friday, and was inundated with (public) Facebook messages from friends offering to bring shopping, help out etc. I gratefully told them all I was fine for shopping thanks, what I would really appreciate was their company while I was housebound. It suddenly all went quiet.
Apart from one non-Facebook friend who sent a private text and is coming today - first visitor in the week since it happened!
I guess being seen to be offering help is more important than helping?
During those floods in England a few years ago a couple of my school friends went over by my mums house and cleared all the sludge out, since they knew none of her children were in the country. One of them she hadn’t seen since we were teenagers thirty years ago.
So, so true. I broke with a family member because they not only never called me or even sent me one measly e-mail after my mother died, they didn’t call my dad either. let me make this clear - this was my mother’s younger sister’s kid. My First cousin, and he couldn’t be arsed to pick up the fucking phone and call me. Random people from India were calling me out of the blue and they couldn’t do it.
A few months ago someone I know was driving in the mountains of Morocco when her car went off the road and flipped over three times. Given the odd set of circumstances, she’s very lucky to be alive.
When I was finally able to have a real conversation with her, I wanted to know all about what happened and what it was like for her. She was glad for that, because most of her friends couldn’t even talk to her after that. They couldn’t handle it. She said that it let her know who her real friends were.
