Friendship and Love 

When best friends fall in love

Found the perfect partner for yourself-your best friend? But should you tell him/her or not? What if your friendship is ruined? What if he/she agrees and then backs out? What if you want to back out later? A truckload of 'what ifS' hits you...
-by Ambica Sharma

After thoughtful reflection upon the plague years, gay writer/editor Andrew Sullivan published a loving tribute to friendship in his book Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Surviva and lovel. The essay, "If Love Were All", claims that friendship is the most desirable relationship a human being can have. Backing his arguments with solid, detailed examples from the writings of great thinkers from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud, Sullivan repeatedly exhalts friendship over romantic love.

Sullivan writes:

promises but fails In almost every regard, friendship delivers what love to provide. The contrasts between the two are, in fact, many, and largely damning to love's reputation. Where love is swift, for example, friendship is slow. Love comes quickly, as the song has it, but friendship ripens with time. If love is at its most perfect in its infancy, friendship is most treasured as the years go by."

He goes on to say:

"If love is sudden, friendship is steady. At the moment of meeting a friend for the first time, we might be aware of an immediate "click" or a sudden mutual interest. But we don't immediately "fall in friendship". And where love is often at its most intense in the period before the lover is possessed, in the exquisite suspense of the chase, and the stomach-fluttering nervousness of the capture, friendship can only really be experienced when both friends are fully used to each other. For friendship is based on knowledge, and love can be based on mere hope."

Why two become one...

How does it happen in the first place, this falling in love with your best friend and jeopardizing a good friendship, something you may never have with someone else?

Spending a great deal of time with each other is one of the main reasons, explains Pallavi Thakur, 16, who has just finished with her class X boards, "You talk about everything-your crushes, his/her crushes, studies, parties, problems with teachers or with parents, sibling fights. You trust him/her with all your secrets. No matter how many predictions are made by the school gossip mongers, you believe in yourself and the friendship you've got."

To be or not to be... in love

Most of the time it is difficult to figure out whether it is just possessiveness at work when you see your best friend talking a bit too long to someone else, or a misplaced sense of love, or are you actually crushing on him/her, or are you in love with the idea of being in love.

Rahat, 14, from Delhi, says, "Infatuations are common. You can get into as many love relationships as you want, but if you have one best friend then let him/her stay in his/her place, otherwise the consequences may leave you isolated." Ritupurna Das, 17, from Loyola School, Jamshedpur, believes, "Life is a comedy of errors, so take it as you like it. Hence, if you ever fall in love with your best friend, go ahead and let him/her know your feelings, before you start building castles in the air!"

In the case of Anthony Lucky Thomas, 14, from Cochin, it was something as simple as never having been close to a girl before. "It happened when I was in class IX," he says. "I was very good friends with this girl. When I admitted to her that I liked her she refused me, because she did not have such feelings for me. I was shattered. I think that this happened because I was never this close to a girl before."

Sound familiar? First crush, best friend all rolled into one big confusion. A kind of obsession does set in about things you have never had or felt earlier, you are scared to let go, thinking you might never get something like that again.

I would do anything but I won't do that

Why does it have to be the roses and chocolate or nothing at all deal, asks Vinay Aravind, 18, from Bangalore "Why can't you love your best friend, I mean really truly and deeply love him/her without you being 'in love'. I really love my best friend and I would do anything for her and she loves me too, but we aren't 'going around'! We have a cool relationship with no emotional baggage and no guilt-tripping involved. We've been best pals for the last three years, she's away in college and I am here in Bangalore, but we still keep in touch through e-mail. We can never 'break up'!" he says. People who agree with Vinay's point of view are few and far between.

So, suppose you are in 'love', a conclusion you have reached after much deliberation in the form of hair-tearing and blank call making. Then why hang back, put yourself through more agony? Gaurav Srivastava from Lucknow explains that there is just one complication-increase in expectations. "Well, I fell in love with my best friend. When I asked her out, she refused because she said that our expectations will increase and our friendship might break up." An increase in expectations, too much analysis and also maybe a fear of rejection kept Ali Asgar Abbas, a 17-year-old from Bahrain, from admitting his love for his best friend. He says, "I made up my mind, I thought if I propose to her, it will hurt our friendship. So I think I will hang out just being her best friend."

I've got you babe...

What of those who don't want to hang back but get it over with, one way or the other? They go ahead and admit it to their best friend after, of course, overcoming that tremendous fear of rejection-and they strike paydirt. Like this 18-year-old guy who doesn't want to be named, "We started out as friends. We actually admitted to each other only when I went out of town. We would call and mail each other daily. Then one day she landed up at my doorstep and we could not help but hug and hold each other, inspite of all the people present there. We hope to stay together forever!" Karan Khosla, 18, says, "Mind you, this kind of relationship is far more promising and reliable than the 'love-at-first-sight' kind of stuff, because unlike those crushes, now you know everything about the person."

In absolute agreement with him is Himanshu Sabharwal, who says, "I do love my best friend. We met during the fresher's party in our college on 24th Jan 1999. We celebrated our first anniversary this year and now we are so close that there is no place for any kind of misunderstanding between us."

When Best friends Fall out...

So you are best friends. But does that mean you will be the best bf/gf ever? Nope. Not always so. Kamayani Tripathi, an 18-year-old from Mumbai, says, "I know a lot of people who have fallen in love with their best friends. However, the results have not always been sweet. Often, a certain amount of awkwardness comes into the friendship. BUT NOT ALWAYS. some friends can turn out to be a great couple."

Unhanged melody

"I knew her inside out," says Vikraant, 19 (not his real name). "When we started going around, it was okay for the first few months. But both of us had nothing new to offer each other. We were still the same, but if I behaved differently she would say 'this is not like you' and I would say the same to her. We just could not change ourselves." But the fact is that if one or both people involved think that they are on to something new, that their partner will change overnight, then they might as well be butting their heads against a wall. As Tanmay Bahulekar, 16, from Kolhapur puts it very poetically, "I loved my best friend, she/he said 'no change', now my life is at an end, I whine all day till my ass gets sore, I am not complaining, guys, she/he was such a bore!"

Unpleasant surprises

Your erstwhile best friend and present gf/bf may turn out to be a totally different person as a gf/bf. You think you know what you are getting and then surprise, surprise! This 18-year-old girl and 19-year-old guy, best friends who thought that they were in love, later broke up and now, fortunately, are still friends-not best, they specify. They explain how it goes, "A few days after we had told the whole world that we were 'going around', we were saying to each other 'you are supposed to be like this and I am supposed to be like this. You should go here, speak to him/her. I am like this and you are not.' We decided this was not the kind of relationship we were looking for at all. Starting this thing was a bad idea. So we split up. Our friends made fun of us, but we just could not stay together, we did not know each other at all."

Pal pressure

The two of you were best friends and now you have become much more... so what does that leave your common friends with? Each time you look at each other, smile, coochie-coo, it makes the people around you uncomfortable. Why? Because your common friends are not used to seeing the two of you in this cozy state. The high-tension emotional state takes its toll on the relationship. To solve this awkwardness, the two of you try to behave differently, stop being yourselves. So there goes your love life crumbling down the drain. 17-year-old Asheema Singh, who backed out of accepting her best friend's proposal, says, "I find it very unreasonable that I should lose out on my friends because of one person. Yeah, so I felt very bad for a few days, and that best friend will never be my friend again. Still, I can get another bf any time, but never get friends like the ones I have right now."

So does turning a best friend into a gf or a bf dilute the friendship or strengthen it? It could work either way... but whatever way it works, it definitely changes the nature of the relationship. The faster one wakes up and smells the change, the better it will be for the relationship. Nope, it won't so happen that because you have been better than good friends, you are going to ski smoothly over all the little and big obstacles that mushroom in the way of any relationship. And then there's the old one about how familiarity breeds contempt, you know. The worst bit is when you fall in, fall out and can't go back into the friendship. So, look before you leap, if your best friend you want to keep... Amen!

Courtsey-Teens Today