Titles Are Over Rated

Certain relationships are the way they are because the environment that they grew within requires them to adhere to certain rules, often not of your choosing. While these rules may seem rigid and counter productive at times, they serve the helpful function of preventing you from doing something that you might really regret, and somehow altering said relationship in a bad way. In other words, certain rules often seem pesky but they're often the only things saving you from yourself.

The other day I had a conversation with somebody whose friendship is emblematic of these relationships. As is the case with all of our chats, it began informally and promptly escalated as we both shared our eventual desire to remove ourselves from the environment that is currently imposing these rules. Not for the sake of our relationship of course, but for other reasons having to do with other life changes, seizing better opportunities, whatever. Growing up, I suppose you could call it. Anyway, the exchange was punctuated by a peculiar moment where I realized that these rules we've been abiding by had suddenly been assigned a shelf life. I rather limited one at that, and that within the relatively near future, we should expect to find ourselves free from the limitations that our friendship has flourished within. Although potentially liberating, the revelation is cause for minor alarm. As much as I like railing against convention, there's a certain amount of comfort to be found within its constraints. Safely cocooned within its arms, you're amounted very little room for personal error.

It's utterly impossible to know right now what will happen when this embrace is removed--whether it will prove itself to have been a preventative factor, or if it will reveal itself to be the one thing that held everything together in the first place. But for the first time, life without it has gone from an abstraction intended to postpone a possibly scary scenario, to an inevitability.