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Posted on behalf of a reader, Peter Tran:

It’s an expression we all use, particularly when we run into people we haven’t seen for a while. But the thing is, there is a reason you haven’t seen them in a while.

We all know that through the different stages of our lives (e.g. elementary, high school and post secondary), friends come and go. The friends we keep are the ones that weren’t just convenient, they were people we naturally gravitated towards. These are the people you can spend time with sitting on a swing set, going for walks or even cleaning your room while the other watches. We all have these friends with whom we can spend time with doing practically anything. I call these people close friends. I could be cleaning toilets with them and I’d still enjoy their company.

Then there are the friends who you drift from but every once in a while you can easily call up and be like “Hey! Its been a while, come over tonight.” You don’t need a regular dose of them, nor do they need a regular dose of you. It’s so easy to pick up right where you left off even if its been weeks months or years since you’ve seen them. I call these people old friends. These are the people who are going to fly all the way up from Australia to see you get married or take a day off work to help you move into your new apartment.

However there are those friends we don’t keep. The friends that… in reality, were convenient. These are the people who you had class with, who you worked with, who you saw on a regular basis out of circumstance. These are acquaintances. Though you may like them and you enjoy the time you spend with them, they may never be a close friend and you may easily confuse them with old friends. Don’t make the mistake of keeping all your acquaintances as close friends.

One of the key indications that someone is an acquaintance is when they or you, out of sheer politeness say: “We should hang out sometime!” Yeah, running into them brought back some good memories, and it would be nice to catch up but at the end of the day, you can’t be bothered. Never have I ever ended up catching up with an acquaintance. We forgot about each other for a reason. Though one might think to sense hostility or negativity around the title of acquaintance, I believe its perfectly polite and neutral. We meet new people every day and our lives seem to get more and more busy as we grow. Its just impractical to keep everyone in our lives.

Have some integrity. When you run into an acquaintance, tell them the truth. “It was nice seeing you again.” At the end of the day that’s all it was, nice. Or perhaps it is a chance for you to reconnect with someone from your past but it’ll require a bit of effort. So go ahead, drop that line but you’re gonna actually have to go through with it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 10:08 am and is filed under We've Got Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.