<p>The thing about being someone's friend is you expect stuff from them, and in all probability they won't live up to how you think they'll be, and then you'll regress to a state of nature.</p>
<p>I know how you feel that happens to me sometimes.</p>
<p>Yeah, I think it’s normal.</p>
<p>Friendship isn’t about your friend doing things for you. You must do things for them, without expecting things in return. The true friends will do the same for you. If not, they weren’t your friends in the first place.</p>
<p>Still … after a while you expect them to spend time with you, not tell your secrets, call you once in a while. But a lot of my friends treat relationships as a Markov process. They only pay attention to the last thing that happened, not the entire history of the relationship.</p>
<p>I’ve always thought that a state of nature was one of the more ******** philosophical ideas.</p>
<p>It just makes me asocial.</p>
<p>the past means less to people who live more in the moment, or for the future. to maintain friendships with those people you have to keep being exiting to them somehow. otherwise they’re likely to move on. that’s what happened with some of my friendships. when we see each other now, there’s this feeling of it being for old time’s sake, because we’re not actually involved in achieving goals together that we’re mutually invested in, which is how it used to be, and which is why it was so fun.</p>
<p>I never really had to feel expectant with my closest friends because we always knew what we were doing together, and why. Once we didn’t know what we were doing together anymore was when I started to get expectant, which is no fun.</p>
<p>Somewhat. </p>
<p>My friends don’t expect material things from me (unless it’s white chocolate- one of my friends is absolutely nuts about it; I personally find white chocolate unnatural and disgusting) and I don’t expect material things from them (unless it’s dark chocolate… I may sorta “borrow-without-asking-permission-or-intending-to-give-it-back” the chocolate a lot… my friends and I have chocolate issues, lol).</p>
<p>However, when it comes to being a good friend, then yeah, we do expect certain things.
We want to support each other and encourage each other. We want tactful honesty from each other.</p>
<p>People move, but friendships can still last. I’ve moved but we still keep in touch by annoying each other via Facebook.</p>
<p>Why are none of you making statistics puns?! Goddamnit that was the whole point of the thread.</p>
<p>Because I haven’t taken a statistics class advanced enough that almost surely has become ingrained in me as a technical term.</p>
<p>The variance of your posts made it hard to tell that that was the whole point. Also I didn’t recognize half of them until just now.</p>
<p>That’s probably true…that’s why I don’t have expectations. Put’s less pressure on people who’d want to interact with me. But I don’t think that stop’s other people from having expectations. That kind of explains an incident now that I think in retrospect. I never really thought of it that way. Interesting…</p>