Exposition.

You know, I think the gestation period for a good friend is about 6 months. Why so long, you ask? Because it's not so much about getting to know the person, whether you click, or get along. It's a lot about finding out that you're sharing the same secrets, and often those secrets have to do with shared experiences.

Let me explain it this way: it's very easy to be agreeable with someone, and you can admire them and respect them and want to get to know them better and that's an OK criterion for a friend. But when the chips are way down or way up is when you're going to find out whether you're both on the same page about things. The reason for this is that there's a big difference between telling someone what you think and showing them how you feel. Telling someone your opinion can get mixed up in so much bullshit: emotions, courtesy, misinterpratation, verbal communication can be a terribly flawed medium. A lot of people never say anything particularly worthwhile.

I'd say it's often more telling to see someone's reaction... the fact that they're angry, defensive, or upset about something, than to hear the words they might be saying out of spite or pride or despair. When you see reactions, that's when you say "Ah, so that's the kind of person this is." Character isn't the cold, calculated image you deliberate on and project out to the world, it's the visceral, gut response you can't help but have whenever something affects you personally.

So when I say secrets, I'm thinking of these reactions people have that aren't getting shown. You don't shout in anger every time a person you hate walks by and you don't collapse in tears whenever someone asks about your family. For the most part, no one will have a single clue about how you really feel about many things.

But as time goes by, and the people that you thought of as acquaintances come to be normal fixtures in your life and you begin labeling them as friends, you carry around more and more of these secrets, these small, supposedly insignificant reactions that no one sees. And ultimately something will happen, be it the straw that broke the camel's back or something with more weight, and these secrets will start to come out, and you realize that those minor reactions that no one saw, well... someone else was having them too.

I'm not sure it works with past experiences, because I've spoken to some people with similar ones as I've had and we haven't always seen eye to eye about them or in general. It could be for a lot of other reasons, but who knows. The point is that there seems to be something important about the shared experience, the one where you were both there and simultaneously feeling and responding to it. Another thing that seems important is the realization that you and someone else had been sharing these secrets all along and just didn't know it, as if you had always been kindred spirits and were only just now lucky enough to discover it.

Maybe this is a good model for why people grow apart with distance. Or why it's so hard to be friends after a breakup. In the former, perhaps you didn't reach a point where the secret you shared was that you were close friends, and that might be the only constant in which you can have any certainty once you're apart. In the latter, there was a time when there were no secrets, where you essentially became one person reacting together. In a sense, once the relationship is over, you don't really know the person anymore, because suddenly there are secrets again. It's like forcing yourself to treat your best friend like a stranger.

Huh. Maybe that last bit is why I began this whole train of thought in the first place. The mind can be so tricky.