This past weekend, my best friend came to visit me at U.Va. for the first time since we both left for college, moving out of houses just a few doors down from each other. Needless to say, I may have been a little excited. We were inseparable from the moment she stepped onto my front porch Friday until she left on Sunday afternoon, when I reminded her she could just stay forever, if she wanted to. My friends joked with each other all weekend, “My God, there are two of her now.” It was true, I kind of felt like my other half was there.
We all have these friends in our lives — the people who make us we feel more like ourselves. These people optimize what it feels like to be home. There are a thousand songs about this dynamic, from Taylor Swift’s, “I’m Only Me when I’m With You” to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros “Home,” and I’m sure there will be more written.
However, I don’t think similarities are responsible for this dynamic — it doesn’t just comes from being alike. As human beings, and especially as college students who are in a time of transition, we love to feel understood. It’s tempting to want to trace this mutual understanding back to shared perspective, likes or dreams, to attribute the best understanding to having a lot in common. We want to say that we understand and are best understood by people like us.
I think this falls short of what really makes up the understanding we crave from the people we are closest to. My best friend and I are not the same person. In fact, sometimes we point out and laugh at the insanity of our relationship due to our innumerable differences. We joke that we don’t know how we chose one another when we share so little. The richness of our friendship doesn’t stem from similarity, it stems from the knowledge we have about each other.
It’s not knowledge of what we’re doing, a knowledge of the other’s every move — even though we share that on Find My Friends all time — and it’s not even necessarily a knowledge of the most recent updates from our lives. It’s knowledge of who we are. There is something that universally feels good about having someone remember your birthday, be able to pick out a present for you that you love, or give you sound, personal advice because they know you enough to be able to put themselves in your shoes. We love to be and long to be known in these ways.
While our actions certainly contribute to who we are, there is a certain wholeness of ourselves that is achieved in the big picture, from more than what we’re involved in or what activities we spend our time on. Our hearts are behind these actions, and that is what we really want people to know.
Similarity can be good, but there are times when it’s just not quite enough. We want to be known because eventually, we all want to be loved. The difference is that it’s easy to love other people when they are similar — sometimes it’s just another form of loving ourselves. Love somehow becomes more real when we love someone as a result of gaining knowledge of them, to know their shortcomings and love them anyways.
Our lives, as college students, revolve around relationships. We love them, we stress over them, we learn and grow from them and we long for them to deepen. Our relationships reveal a great deal about us. It is absolutely essential to understand our closest relationships grow when we are known by our friends not for what we do, but for who we are.
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