Old friends, like old Liquor

*This post is written from a straight, platonic male perspective. Please bear this in mind.*

The one that got away

I find it odd how old friends I haven't seen in years can get grouped into the same categories as crazy old girlfriends. "The one that got away" or "The one who was too smart for her own good and gave up on my chump-ass". Do I base the friend classifications on my "ex" categories, or vice versa? Which group do I hold in primary esteem? I hope it's somewhere in the middle, but realistically I believe it's not.

"The one that got away" is an especially tricky category for old friends. I think we have been raised to act on social tendencies that romanticize old friendships, which were probably mean to fail from the start. Childhood friendships were exactly that. Merely elements of childhood. When we try to make them into anything more, we do it to validate ourselves, and maybe even to validate some emotion that was too complicated to describe properly at the time.