During the first semester of my senior year of college, I had two different encounters that really changed my entire perspective on friendships and the way that I view my own personal relationships. The first encounter involved a long term male friend of mine who asked me to come to his sports event. In response, I initially said no for a number of reasons, not least of which was because it was my birthday weekend and I had to prepare for my own upcoming festivities.

Looking back on that experience, I think another reason that I said no is just because I’m a fairly introverted person and going out just isn’t fun for me sometimes. I’ll talk more about this in a later section, but introversion and extraversion really do matter in a friendship! Going back to the story, my friend asked me a few days later if I was sure that I couldn’t come and I responded, “Sadly, yeah I don’t think I’ll be able to make it”. I thought that was the end of the conversation; however, this friend just wouldn’t take no for an answer. They explained to me that it would really mean a lot to them if I were to show up to this event because they considered me to be a really close friend to them and they just really wanted to feel supported. The best way for them to get that feeling was if people showed up to this really special sporting event to watch him play in the game. After that conversation, I, of course, changed my mind and said that I would come to the game to see him since it really meant that much to him.

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This moment was just really surprising for me because I didn’t expect him to care that much about me just coming to one of his games. I knew that I felt that he was a close friend of mine but I realized that I had never really thought about how he felt about me. In fact, I had never thought about any of my friendships from a perspective other than my own. Before this moment, it simply didn’t occur to me that his perception of our friendship could be that much different than my own. I thought “It’s the same relationship, right? So how could it be any different?”. I continued to have a similar pattern of thoughts and question the reality of my friendships for the next few weeks.

I was already interested in the topic of human relationships before this, but now I was near-constantly thinking about my relationship with him and my relationships with other people in my life. Imagine my surprise when, a few days later, I had a different female friend bring up a similar conversation in our group chat. Now I was truly shocked because I had been friends with this girl for years and I thought our friendship was solid the way it was. When she informed me and the other five people in our group that she wasn’t feeling supported, and felt like we didn’t reach out to her enough, it was eerily similar to the conversation that I had with the friend that I mentioned earlier, just a few days prior. With this second revelation of a friend not feeling good about a friendship that I thought was fine, I really wanted to dig deeper into the reasons why this could happen.

These revelations were mind-blowing and heart-breaking to me because I was perfectly content with these relationships and didn't feel that anything was missing from them. I hated the fact that I didn't realize what was wrong sooner. These conversations sparked even more thoughts about how I could have such a different and apparently one-sided understanding of these relationships. When I realized the amount of creative freedom that we had with this capstone course, the initial ideas for this project website were born. Over the course of this second semester of senior year, I’ve been doing a bit of research about the origins of friendship, the requirements of a friendship, and how and why friendships look so vastly different between any two people. Please continue exploring my project page to learn more about what I’ve discovered over the course of the semester! Thanks for reading!