It Isn't Like Sex & the City...It's more Like a Highway...or some metaphor like that

Carrie. Charlotte. Miranda. Samantha. Four fabulous New York women, leading busy lives, yet find the time to get together at that all-familiar diner. The show focuses on each, in their own way, finding love (or lust), while maintaining a very strong friendship. Though the series ended a couple of years ago, it still captivates me, and I can't help but plop down and watch how in this episode they manage to accept, tolerate, hate, or love the romantic situation their friend is in.

You see, when I watch the show, I try to get some real tips in how to handle, interact, cope, maybe even avoid friends in relationships (if they're in unhealthy ones). In one particular episode, Carrie and Miranda are perusing through clothes at an outside vendor, and Carrie tells Miranda that she's back together with Big. (Big is the proverbial playboy, the off-and-on again boyfriend of Carrie Bradshaw.) Miranda scoffs, and says, "I don't want to hear when he hurts you again. I don't want to know anything about it. I am not going to be the you you come running to crying." (Something like that.) The two get into an argument/tiff about this. But how badly I've wanted to be as gusty as Miranda! And tell it like it is! And, as only HBO writers can do, in one hour, Miranda and Carrie manage to sort out their problems, and Miranda and Carrie are A-Okay.

BUT...STOP RIGHT HERE!

All right, so I can't compare my life to a TV show. Now I view friendships as being more like a highway...like US 1, or I-10 if you will. More specifically, I'm beginning to see friendships like taking a long road-trip down one of these highways.

Let's say you start your journey with 3 other friends. You initially have the same goals, to get to the same destination, so to speak. You're excited about it all, excited to be together and bask in the experience it will become. But, ahhh, the highway. The highway will test your friendship and will offer hard lessons you never saw coming. But it's not all bad...at first. During the road-trip there will lots of laughs, many stops that you share in and make memories from. There will be times when it will be silent, and this is still good at the beginning. These are one of those silent times where you don't have to share a word with one another and it's the best kind of noise out there.

However, certain things begin to happen. All of a sudden your destinations get fuzzy. Some want to go here, some want there. And so it appears that the friendship starts to shift, and you want to go off into different directions. What happens? You all begin to take seperate "exits." And, once you've exited, you begin to make a new life out of the "exits" you take. These exits---some of them great, some of them not so. It's these "exits" that drive us to change the way we interact with our friends, change frequency of when we want to visit them or when we want to see them, change the way we perceive them, etc. Unfortunately, these "exits" we take are some of hardest lessons we learn from the highway of friendship. The silver lining, however, or that I hope is there, is that one day, if one of us, or all of us, decide to meet up again on that highway, there will be some road leading back to it. Some of us come back, and at times there might be 2 or 3 of us on it. Hopefully, one day, we will all find ourselves back on it together...to pull ourselves away from the "exit" life we made (even if it's for a little while) and just enjoy each other again...