Friendship is but Shared Sorrow?

Relationships are strange.

A friend once told me, when we were first-year apprentices just fresh out of college, living it up in the trainees’ hostel of a large steel producer: “Friends are made of people sharing the same problems. That is why we are friends: been through the same college blues, and now the same industry blues together. Do you realize that everyone you meet in your life from now on, will only be an acquaintance?”

Interesting observation. Even some truth in it. He missed the mark by a mile though! People you meet at anytime in your life could very well, and every so often do, turn out to be greater friends than you might have thought possible.

One thing does not seem to change, however: shared, or similar problems experienced at some point in life. The fastest friendships may not even include an overt admission of having experienced similar difficulties. Often, the experience of having gone through the same travails so equips one to be a friend that relationships are formed based on an instinctive trust each has, that the other “has been there before”.

Why is it that shared or similar joy rarely produces the same effect?

Is the human race doomed to bond only in adversity?

And, when we are happy, do we walk alone?

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