Causes of Broken Friendship
You make some good friends in your life and continue your relationship with them your whole life. On the other hand, you sometimes make friends that you want to intentionally keep distance and eventually lose contact with. But, as life goes, friendship you want to keep falls apart and never comes back to you. What can cause a friendship to break apart?
First, long distance can make friends feel distant from each other. If your friends are a continent away from you, you can't normally go to them and talk about your everyday life. This physical distance separates you and your friends emotionally, too. You can't possibly feel how your friends feel since you are not in the same place with them. To elaborate, you are unable to feel their emotions on FaceTime as much as in face-to-face conversations. Also, it gets harder to get in touch with them because of the time difference. Let me give you an example. I had an American friend who was teaching at my middle school, and she went back to America when I went to high school. Even though I tried to talk to her occasionally, our conversation wouldn't last long because I sent her texts in the daytime and it was at night there. She was always tired in our conversation, so I felt guilty talking to her. Therefore, I was hesitant to keep in touch with her, and 4 years passed since we talked more than half an hour. Because I don't know what is new in her life and how she's doing, I feel distant from her. Moreover, I'm not even sure if we are friends now. Like the situation I'm in, long distance makes it much easier for friendship to break apart.
Next, different backgrounds can make friends feel uncomfortable with each other. Before I go deep into this, I want to remind you of a proverb: "Birds of a feather flock together." I personally suggest economic, cultural, and racial backgrounds for broken friendship. Surely economic differences can lead friendship to break apart. For example, if you have an excessively rich friend, you would feel inferior and you would think of him as just an acquaintance, not your true friend. This feeling of inferiority can certainly result in a failed friendship. Even if you were the rich friend, you would have to consider your friend all the time in making decisions on where to eat and what to do with him/her because of the economic differences. Why bother doing all of that? So, it's quite likely that you might choose another similarly rich friend over your current friend and put an end to your friendship with your poor friend. Cultural and racial differences can also lead your friendship to fall apart, because there are so many different things about your friend that you wouldn't understand due to your different perceptions. People from Europe or America might have a hard time understanding why they should use honorific forms of language in Korea when talking to older people. Again, why bother? They wouldn't bother continuing their friendship with Korean people who are older unless they are interested in Korean culture. Also, racial differences are a major factor in unsuccessful friendship. Racial issues have often been the focal point for countries with a lot of mixed race, and this could be applied to friendship. Let's say that you unknowingly make discriminatory remarks about your friend's skin color. Your friend would get really upset and it can end your friendship right there. To sum up, economic, cultural and racial differences pose major obstacles to overcome between friends, and most people wouldn't want to put in a great deal of effort to bridge cultural gaps just in order to continue their friendship.
With the reasons above, it is very likely for a friendship to break apart. If a friendship can bear all these hardships, then your friendship is solid and you wouldn't have to worry about it. But, you can't be so confident in all your relationships and friendships. No one can maintain their friendships against long distance, economic, cultural, and racial differences. But, it's okay. Some friendships are bound to fall apart and it's important to put in efforts to understand your friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment