For me, high school was hell.
Freshman year, I struggled to find a core group of friends as my grade school friends branched out. I had a broken femur during the first three months of sophomore year and got influenza twice during the second semester. Junior year consisted of countless pre-calc tears and a homeroom teacher who hated me. And the only thing I can distinctly remember about senior year was an aura of stress generated by college applications and taking on too many positions for the newspaper staff.
But the worst part wasn’t even everything I mentioned above.
The worst part of high school was my constant battle with my “friends.”
I’m not one to burn bridges, but I had multiple toxic friendships in high school, and I was unaware of this until two young women showed me how friends are supposed to act. The summer between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college taught me a very distinct lesson:
Friends fight.
That’s not to say that I didn’t fight with my friends in high school, because we certainly did. There was a lot of crying, a lot of subtweeting, a lot of phone calls after school trying to figure out what was wrong. Yet there was never any confrontation.
I had a friend who, whenever she was upset, would sit and pout. Everyone always knew something was wrong, but when she was asked what was bothering her, she sighed, huffed, muttered “nothing,” and went right back to pouting. It was infuriating.
Another friend would spread rumors about whoever did something that ticked her off.
Another tried to turn everyone against you, recruiting others in our “group” to sit with her at lunch as a sort of boycott.
Still another turned to Twitter with the most passive aggressive subtweets I have ever seen, and she always thought her problems were far worse or superior to everyone else’s.
One of my friends felt the need to get parents involved over the smallest of fights, even at the mature age of 18.
One thing that was consistent throughout all of my high school friends was their love for the silent treatment, and nothing has ever angered me more.
You accomplish absolutely nothing by not talking to the person you are mad at, other than most likely angering them as well.
Whenever a fight was resolved, I always attempted to persuade my friends to communicate with one another when someone was upset. I was insistent that it was more effective than turning to Twitter or creating a big to-do, but after so many juvenile fights, I started to believe that confrontation would only cause more harm than good.
I have come to realize that such an outlook is wrong.
Senior year, specifically the summer after senior year, brought two new friends into my life, and they are two of the best friends a girl could ask for. We like the same music, hang out more often than we should, and are perfectly content with sitting in someone’s basement on Friday nights coloring in our adult coloring books.
They are amazing ladies - supportive and completely crazy - but the best dynamic of our friendship is the fact that we fight. All the time.
It’s usually petty little things, like, “I can’t believe you went to Sonic without me,” or “Stop trying to make it sound like your major is harder than mine.” It’s rare that a week goes by without someone getting ticked off, but the situation is always handled in one of two ways.
Option One: No one sends a single text in the groupchat. That might seem irrelevant or not too abnormal, but for three girls who text each other 24/7, it’s a definite statement that we are, indeed, fighting. And while that is technically a form of the silent treatment, it’s not the same as it was in high school, where people held grudges for days (or weeks) on end.
The group chat silence is always broken by someone, only a few hours after the fight started. The lack of messages is traded in for our normal multi-text conversation when I find a GIF of One Direction that they just have to see, when Mon finds a dumb Vine that she thinks is funnier than it actually is, or when Rach finds the latest celebrity scandal on ONTD. As soon as that first text is sent, it’s as though the fight never happened.
Option Two is more highly encouraged. When something really makes us mad, we hash it out, either in person or over text. We fight, speak our minds, retaliate to what the others said, and get even more angry. But eventually it dies down, the issues are resolved, and apologies are usually made. That is that; end of fight.
We don’t hold grudges.
We don’t subtweet.
We don’t get parents involved when it’s completely unnecessary. We are all 19; that would just be immature.
We don’t pout and resist confrontation when someone asks us what’s wrong.
Talking through our problems is a lot more effective than scheming against one another.
Friends fight, and they should. Fighting is healthy for a friendship, or any relationship for that matter, but only if you're doing it the correct way.
