Sunday, 5 January 2014

Of relationships between friends

These are thoughts put together when I was around 20 years of age (just found an old paper which had these on and have just typed it out!)

Relationship between people is a complicated and intricate puzzle. It is a mixture of emotions, sensitivities and misunderstandings. It is a rather complex phenomenon when one takes into account the fact that behaviour of persons change with time, surroundings and mood. A person might react very favourably to a particular thing at one instant of time and the next instant he might develop an aversion towards it. In a good mood a person might say ‘Yes’ for a thing which he otherwise would have said ‘No’.
A relationship between two persons is highly unpredictable because each person has his own moods and idiosyncrasies which are independent of the others’ mood. The point to note here is that the moods are independent. One, being in a jolly, devil-may-care mood might yak of something which the other will take to heart being in a bad mood. This might result in the breaking up of a good relationship. It is only when two people are very good friends that they resonate; one understands how the other is feeling and acts accordingly. Such a state is very difficult to achieve. One individual, being a completely different entity from the other, can never understand the other person completely. And also there is nothing like understanding a person completely, a because a person is not like a book, where you can say, after reading upto the last page, that you  have completed that book. On the other hand, a person is like a diary which is being updated every second. Each and every second, a host of impressions are incident upon the person and the person reacts to these incidents and there is a change in him.

Another person, different from him, can never claim that he knows him thoroughly since that ‘him’ is not the same ‘him’ as he was a year ago, a day ago or even a second ago. Everybody is changing and at best one can know another person to the extent of knowing his broad ideas, his likes and dislikes in the broadest sense possible. What I want to drive home is that one cannot predict the future behaviour of a person, on the basis of knowing him upto some point of time.

One more thing which makes human relationships interesting is the fact that one always acts on the basis of what one thinks the other is thinking of him. This also makes things rather funny and tragic at times. Most of the time man deduces a lot of things from the others’ actions, speech etc. These deductions arise from the fact that he would have exhibited similar actions, speech etc. when he wanted to convey that meaning. But, at times, it happens that the other person was not trying to convey what this person has deduced and this results in a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. There won’t be any conflicting ideas as such, but some missed signals, some minor actions which are no way related to the others persons’ response completely distort the meaning wanting to be conveyed and mess up the relationship. And it is a minority who are very frank in their speech. Most of the people do not word out their intention and this leads to further problems. Just wording out the intention doesn’t help in solving things, one has to make sure that the same misunderstanding is not repeated again and this can take place when there is perfect understanding between the two.


Relationship between two persons when they are alone and when they are in a group again differs. When they are in a group, they cannot be frank and they might act in a different way than they would have otherwise.