Respect, Not Intimacy

When I was still too short to reach the top shelf of the display cabinet in our living room, I believed the meaning of words like “friend” and “friendship” was much simpler. Most of my thoughts were bits of a fantasy. I imagined a friend as someone who would accept me just the way I was.

But after I left home and began living alone, many things in my life began to change, including my view on friendship. There were people who suddenly texted me out of the blue, asking to stay at my place during a trip to Europe, or others who’d ask, on first meeting, whether I knew any Germans they could talk to. Some simply drifted away, leaving my contacts list full of names that no longer meant anything. And through all these experiences, I began to slowly reorganize my thoughts.

But that wasn’t the only reason. What made it hardest was the way I myself kept changing — my thoughts, my behavior — the longer I stayed abroad. And because of those changes, I started drifting away from people I used to understand so well, like I was stranded alone in the middle of a sea. I was forced to accept the fact that the people I once called close friends — those now immersed in the absurdities and injustices of Korean society — could no longer understand a single part of my life, and that I, in turn, could no longer understand theirs. That wasn’t a good feeling at all.

Still, by the end of that year, I came to a surprisingly simple conclusion: “So what?”
Instead of obsessing over our differences, I realized I needed to respect them, especially when I couldn’t understand them. Just because someone is also living in Germany or can relate to my life here, that doesn’t mean we’ll make good friends. At least, that’s what I learned that year.

The real problem came the following year.

After returning to Korea, I started hanging out with some old friends again. One day, all of a sudden, it was like the blood drained from my body. I had believed that this one friend, whom I had spent years with, knew me better than anyone — my likes, my dislikes — but the moment I realized how wrong I was, I went cold.

She had always been an individualist, and truthfully, we barely spoke the entire year I was gone. But unexpectedly, when we met in Korea, she still treated me as someone very close. And perhaps because of that assumption, she acted completely unfiltered during the two months I was there. She would crack jokes instead of apologizing when she was late, ignore even the casual “how are you” texts that I — someone who usually hates small talk — sent first, or push me into doing things and then pretend she had nothing to do with it.

At first, I was furious. But as time passed and my emotions settled, I began to see something more clearly:
She had simply acted according to her own values and personality, without any regard for my thoughts or feelings.

But here's the thing: this whole idea of “a friend who accepts me just as I am.” It rarely exists.

Friends are not family. They’re not people bound to you by something unbreakable. They’re strangers who, over time, build a house out of invisible bricks. And yet people often mistake the two. They think, “It’s okay to be this rude,” or “A real friend should understand,” or “If they’re meant to stay, they’ll stay no matter what.”

And in those cases, the person on the other side of the table always ends up pedaling twice as hard. There is no such thing as a relationship that requires no effort, or one where you can bare your entire self and expect full acceptance.

Sure, some relationships grow through fighting, crying, and exposing your deepest wounds. But unless you’re both willing to do that, the only way to maintain closeness is through respect and care. The closer you are, the more important that becomes.

If you expect someone to accept all of your flaws and weaknesses just because “that’s who you are,” that’s selfish.
That’s what I truly came to realize through this experience.

And one more thing I’ve promised myself:
Too much closeness can become poison. Keep a healthy distance.

I used to keep a very small circle of friends and formed extremely deep bonds. But most of the time, it was those very people who crossed the line, intoxicated by how “deep” or “close” we were. And after a few years, I realized that I had seen too many ugly sides of people. Sides I wouldn’t have needed to see if we had just stayed on good terms, instead of getting so deep.

No matter how close two people are, once that relationship hits rock bottom, it strips away everything. And just a few months later, you can’t even stand to think about them.

Journal Entry, January 4th, 2020