She's Just Not Worth Your Pretty

Everyone knows about the awesome phenomena that is "He's Just Not That Into You"; it's an awesome book, movie, and liftstyle! But my love life is pretty awesome right now, so what need do I have for it (excluding the obvious because of what will happen in the future crap)? Well, I've found that most of these concepts can be applied to friendships, too. I mean, what is a friendship but a non-romantic relationship, right? So here I present to you:

She's Just Not Worth Your Pretty.

Introduction: You are all friends with her.

She is the flake who constantly blows you off for other plans. She is the one you've known for years and takes advantage of that fact. She is the one who will choose her man over you when she's forced to choose. She is the one who just started a new job and she's got to make friends at the office, lest they think she's a loner. She is the one who has been betrayed before and because of that has severe trust issues. She is the one who know he's not good enough for her but stays with him anyway. God, she must be important to have all these problems and still keep you in her life.

She is the friend made up entirely of your excuses. Granted, this might be easier to spot than in a man, but it's harder, much, much harder to axe her out of your life. There had to have been common ground between you two before, or you'd have never been friends in the first place, right? It can't be that all of a sudden she's not the girl you thought she was or the girl she used to be. Well, it can because of one simple thing: people change. Maybe it's you: you've outgrown the phase of your life in which you two fist began your bond or you're not into the things you used to love and obsess over. Or maybe it's her: she hasn't grown up or she has and it's in a direction totally opposite from yours. Whatever it is, your dynamic has changed and that girl- your BFF, your bestie, your sister at heart- is no longer that, but a stranger that you just don't have the heart to take out of your life because, at one time, you loved them, and it's hard to just let that go.

Derived from Greg's, "Don't waste the pretty," philosophy, I hold that friendships are just like romantic relationships, with one exception: they're even harder. Yeah, of course it's hard to find love, to keep love, to maintain a romantic relationship; but you need to balance it out with a platonic relationship, that solace from when romace gets weary and eventually drifts away. Friends are supposed to be about support, open communication, and no judgement. For men we put on our sexiest makeup, perfume, and lingerie but with our friends we should be able to strip away those layers of extra work and just be ourselves, messy hair, sweats, and all.

It's just not that simple, though. In our lifetime we will go through thousands of friends, only about twenty or so we'll truly deem worthy of calling our best friends. And, a lot of the time, transitioning through these friends is painful because there is a deep history there: sleepover, bowls of ice cream, chick flicks, hair dye and tears over boys, parents, family, work, other friends. Sometimes we hold on to friendships just for the sake of nostalgia, even when that friendship is beginning to hurt us and make us unhappy. Even after the friendship is over, there is resentment and anger that one could feel so easily discarded, like Kleenex. Well, after a lot of hurt, I'm here to offer my advice. Try and bear with me as I blog these chapters and remember: you deserve only the best when it comes to your friends.