YOU DON'T WANT A VILLAGE YOU WANT AN AUDIENCE

I think one of the saddest things I've realised as an adult is that a lot of people don't actually know how to have deep friendships. And I don't mean friendships where you go to brunch every few months, I mean the kind where someone truly knows you. Because my husband and I have always been very intentional about friendships. We don't really do surface level. If you're in our home, if you're around our dinner table, if we're inviting you into our lives, it's because we genuinely see you as family. And family means eventually seeing each other at your worst. I've had friends open up about problems in their marriage, money, anxiety, things they've never told anyone. And the funny thing is it never changes how I see them. If anything, I feel way closer to them because now I know the real them. But I've noticed something happens afterwards. Once life gets better, sometimes people slowly disappear. I don't think it's because they're bad people, I just think that being seen is so terrifying. Cause now every time they look at you, they remember that you know, you know about the arguments, you know about the struggles, you know about the cracks in the relationship. And I think a lot of people would rather lose the friendship than sit in the discomfort of someone truly knowing them, which is heartbreaking because that's literally what intimacy is. And I think friendships are supposed to work much more like marriages than they currently do. Not because your friends owe you anything, but because conflict shouldn't be the end. If you're friends long enough, you're going to annoy each other. You're going to say the wrong thing. Someone's feelings are going to get hurt. It's just what happens when two imperfect people are close. The difference is, when it's your husband or your wife, you usually work through it because you have to. You live together, share responsibilities. Walking away is very difficult. So eventually, one of you says, 'can we just talk about this?' But friendships don't have that built in. You don't have to call, you don't have to reply, you don't have to fix it. It's just much easier to quietly let friendship die. And I think that's why so many people say they want a village, but never end up having one. Because a village isn't built by finding perfect people. It's built by imperfect people who are choosing, who keep choosing each other after they've seen the messy parts.