When Friends Take Backseat...

Well…copyrights of this sentence belong to my very dear friend’s hubby. When we met for the first time we had this interesting discussion about how their life would change after marriage. That time he said this line that friends will take backseat in future and later it remained in my memory forever.

Somehow I couldn’t digest this friends and backseat funda. It disturbed me for sure. It surely came across as a bitter truth. May be because it was hard for me to imagine myself getting decoupled from my dear friends’ lives and it was even harder to imagine my life with my friends taking backseat. We keep saying that we can chose friends but we cannot chose relatives. Then why do we take this chosen relation for granted? We seldom think before imposing expectations on friendship. We don’t take pain to be vocal about our expectations thinking that friends will understand. And in many of the cases they do. But somehow it weakens the ties of friendship.

It is quite natural. When we see our friends getting into a relationship, initially we make sure that we are there for them. We make sure that we help them out in decision making process so that they can choose the best for themselves. But once everything settles down we start assuming that we should better step back. To a certain extent it is right because we would certainly want our dear friend to have some beautiful moments with the special person in his/her life. We assure ourselves that they can take care of their problems and we start maintaining a distance. This too is acceptable. But we need to decide upon this definition of distance. Can we go that far from where we won’t even come to know if our friend needs us or not? No, we can’t. As much as we understand that we can’t interfere in our friend’s personal life after a certain point, we also need to understand we cannot subtract ourselves from their lives. That ‘special someone’ and a friend need to coexist. None of them can replace each other.

Now when I look back and recollect that line, I feel that now I have understood it correctly. I can see a dear friend driving a car with me sitting on a front seat. Both of us are enjoying our journey. Later his/her special someone joins us on that ride and I take a backseat. But it doesn’t bother me because I haven’t left my friend midway in that journey. If at all my friend needs me I’m just sitting behind. I’m not interfering till the time ride is smooth but if he/she messes around with the controls then I won’t hesitate to offer a helping hand without their permission. Backseat or front seat…all I have to do is to be there for my friend in this long journey called life.