In one of my previous articles, I wrote about the interesting nature of college friendships, on how quickly some friends can come and go and how just being exposed to the vast amount of people that you meet in college can quickly change your friendships yearly or even monthly. Many of these friendships that we used to have, when we look back on them, we may or may not have any malice towards them, in the sense that we may even be nostalgic, reminiscing back on the days that we spent with that group and how we just grew past each other either due to graduation, change in classes, a new living arrangement, and the other ways people just fall out of touch.
There are probably many people that you can name off the top of your head that you lost touch with but would be more than happy to just shoot a text over to and get together for a coffee or a beer or just something to catch up and see how the two of you have changed over when you last hung out and see if you can pick up where your friendship may have left off.
Then, there are the evil friends, the friends that you don't like to remember, the friendships that went down the wrong path and just left you in a disaster, names that pop up on your Facebook or Twitter and you just cringe when you see them, because you remember all the things that that person may have caused you, that person, who was near and dear to you just so recently.
Isn't it interesting to think what happened. You could think about one such friend off the top of your head, I have several people who I used to consider my best friends that I wouldn't even look at in public or wouldn't even acknowledge their presence as peers. As much as we like to consider ourselves as tolerant people that have a good eye for the people that are compatible with us, it's hard to really nail a friend that you know will stick with you for the rest of your life, or just become a sweet memory rather than something you never want to think about.
Where in our judgement do we select these people, because at some point in our lives, we couldn't be without them, we wanted to share every second with them, every moment with them talking about our personal lives and issues we were having inside and out of school and suddenly it just evaporates from our memory and all that lies in front of us is this blinding hatred that we can't get over because they did something to us that really changed our lives and the course of how it went for the next period of time.
The concept of these "evil friends" is interesting because like it or not, it's impossible to avoid them. There's the accepted norm that when you mess something up once, there's a small chance you'll mess it up again, especially if it steered your life in an unfortunate direction. But we meet these evil friends constantly and unintentionally fall into the same web that we may have fallen into years earlier. We get dependent on them, we share with them, and eventually in some ways, get our trust broken by them and promise ourselves to be more careful in the future on the people that we deal with.
Scroll through your phone or just through your Facebook messages next time you get an opportunity and spot the people that you may have talked to as best friends mere months or years before and now you consider them even more distant than a stranger. Evil friends come up in our lives a lot, and even if we try to run away from them, oftentimes our running leads us in a circle right back to them.
