When we were little, we made plans to be best friends with our elementary school friends forever. We wanted to go to college together, live in the same city, raise our kids together. If you're still friends with those people, then I'm extremely happy for you. But for most of us, those friendships sort of drifted away as we got older.
We've all grown up watching tv shows that have these amazing friendships: Friends, How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, and Parks and Recreation, just to name a few. Somewhere along the way, we've all hoped that one day we could have a Chandler, Ross, Monica, Joey, Rachel, and Pheobe in our life. Or that we would move to a new city with our college best friends to start an adult life. But, realistically, how can we make this happen?
As we go through life, we make lots of friends. We make lots of plans and lots of promises. We meet amazing people we hope will be in our lives for years to come, but what happens? We let our hopes and dreams go over time, and with those hopes and dreams go the friendships.
Watching shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother showed us that it is possible to have friendships that last forever. From watching Friends , we know that Chandler, Monica, Ross, and Rachel have all known each other for years. And after going through parts of their lives on their own, have found their ways back to each other.
How I Met Your Mother showed us that it is possible to move to a new city with your best friends to start a new life, so we go off thinking that we, too, can do it. Realistically, we know it's so much harder. You prepare for life after college by looking for jobs in a new city, secretly hoping you'll find one somewhere close to your best friends. Or you decided to go to graduate school with your best friends.
But somewhere along the way you lose touch. We start making a life for ourselves. Work and school slow begin to take up more of our time and we begin wishing we had someone like Leslie Knope to push us to work harder and remind us of how beautiful we are. We seek out the kind of friendships we've grown up watching. We all want to find the Leslie Knope to our Ann.
New Girl shows us that it's possible to make friends with the complete strangers you move in with. The ragtag group gives us hope that we'll become besties with the strangers we live with. While this might be true in a few lucky cases, are we really going to want to spend our time at home getting to know someone? The forced interactions do help, but sometimes those are all they are.
Although none of the friendships we watch are completely perfect, they work. They set an unrealistic standard that we one day hope to achieve. We want to find the friends we can sit in a coffee shop or a bar with and just enjoy each others company. But is that really what adult friendships are like? Living with our best friends and being able to spend time in a coffee shop or bar we live near? I guess we'll all just have to find out for ourselves when we get there.
