A fresh week, can we be friends again?

Nov 14, 2012

You are inseparable. Together for lunch, for teas, at the hairdressers’, giving advice, getting advice, always on the phone with each other, allover shops and malls, name it. It’s a picture-perfect friendship, only, it stops on Friday afternoon and resumes on Monday.

By Shamilla S. Kara
 
You are inseparable. Together for lunch, for teas, at the hairdressers’, giving advice, getting advice, always on the phone with each other, allover shops and malls, name it. It’s a picture-perfect friendship, only, it stops on Friday afternoon and resumes on Monday.

That’s the latest trend of friendship in this big small city of ours, a relationship that is teeming with activities during the week and non-existent on weekends. Based on an unspoken pact, these plutonic, usually same sex relationships tending towards women mostly, have no communication whatsoever during the weekend.

Neither party as much as expects a text from the other. Come Monday and its back to business, the relationship fully resurrected. Is it normal, this habit of switching off knowing each other over the weekend?

From one point I understand what’s going on; that these kinds of relationships are usually between women who have families, families they have to concentrate their attentions and energies on. Children, husbands, partners, pets, and plants who all want a piece of her.

That’s understandable. What is not is why there can’t be any extra room for a couple of friends as well? How are friends friends if they are not with your family, the innards of your life? Isn’t it only fair to let theory meet practical at one point? Particularly for someone who has for a whole week been listening to what this child of yours did, what the other child’s teacher said to it, or what your husband is allergic to?

Unless one is secretly living two different lives, or whose family relish on human flesh, or has an ogre of a spouse who doesn’t want her to have friends or doesn’t entertain people at his home, there is no excuse for not merging one’s weekday life to the weekend one.

At least, once in a while - I don’t want any fingers being pointed to me for wrong advice when robbers visit on the same day. So once or twice is good enough, enough to gauge the weekday friend’s character in broader areas, and enough to erase that feeling from them of being weekday pawns of one’s boredom and loneliness from their families, or of being in a forbidden relationship that doesn’t have to be known to the other friend’s family and home.

For those persistent in separating their family lives from friends, it’s a choice thing. As it’s said, it’s always the pot on the fire that knows how much the heat is. Your reason must be valid, and even if it’s not, it’s your reason so that’s still good enough.

For those with no real reason, do you know how much help you have been missing out on? Think: House work, children’s homework, cooking.

A consolation to some of us who are not being invited to our week day friends’ cribs. Whatever reason or choice, whichever way we look at it, at least we are not faring badly when we compare with the second category of weekday friends; who share activities during the week yet one never knows whether they live on a tree or in another district outside Kampala.

The only guarantee in such friendship is that one will be sure of meeting them when they go to town.
 

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