It’s the day before Valentine’s Day. Coupa Café has decorations up, CoHo has red tulips by the cash register. Chocolate strawberries, baby Cupids, hearts and arrows — it’s everywhere.
For now, let’s step away from the glorified, boy meets girl, central plot of a rom-com sort of relationship and talk about the less celebrated love — not the significant other, but rather the person or people who are there for you when, suddenly, the significant other isn’t. Readers, I present: the mostly-forgotten-about-on-Valentine’s-day, otherwise known as friends.
There is something cathartic, yet so natural, about finding the people you are meant to befriend. A mutual understanding forms that, with them around, the most authentic version of yourself can’t help but surface.
They fulfill, listen, laugh at your jokes louder than you do. They endorse all — the private, the strange, the ugly sides of ourselves. There’s a gentleness about them and the way they seek to understand us. Friendships with them are a give-and-take — you revel in each other’s highs, are an endless reserve of comfort and consolation in each other’s lows. Whatever the favor is, they return it.
It’s underrated, having someone who isn’t a romantic partner to know what you need, what you dislike. Perhaps more than we would like to admit, we want to be intuitively understood by someone. We don’t want to always have to explain. What’s captured in a knowing glance across the room, what’s contained in an inside joke — that’s friendship. And more often than not, it’s the small things that count. For example, having a friend remember you don’t like sugar in your coffee when they bring you some shows that even your trivial, seemingly unimportant preferences matter to them. It shows that they listen.
As Stephen Elliot writes, people “can see in an instant something in you that you might spend years learning about yourself.” And the closer you grow with someone, the more of yourself you feel like they’re subjected to. It’s like zooming in on a picture, they see all the pores, all the flaws, magnified. The difference between people and friends, however, is that friends will show you what they know. They teach you, and are remarkably careful about doing it in a way that doesn’t seek to change you.
So tomorrow, put the romance movies on hold long enough to thank these people. Maybe you haven’t seen them in a while — your schedules clash, or your rich, in-person conversations have been reduced to the occasional text. Call them if time permits. Have lunch together. Remember the people who make you, you.
Contact Amanda Rizkalla at amariz ‘at’ stanford.edu.