Having friends means they will be your number one supporters always, of course, and constantly want what is best for you. Or is that not the case? Is competitiveness an obstacle to making or keeping friendships?
Friendship is about sharing experiences and supporting one another. It is about understanding each other in ways others do not. Why is it that competition gets involved throughout growing friendships? As you get older, more significant events start to happen. I have learned especially throughout senior year, many important chapters start up like committing to college.
When you and your friends commit to a school shouldn’t that be a good thing? Senior from Yorktown, Ellie Glicksman, shared her thoughts about the competition between friends with college, “Personally I am happy for all my friends. I love to see them thrive and get into the colleges they have always wanted to go to. During this process I definitely see some people envy others because of their success.” The college process is very competitive especially because certain people get into places that others may not.
Ali Passarella, another senior from Yorktown, added, “I agree with Ellie. I started to notice the people who truly wanted the best for me after sharing my big success with my college acceptances. Sometimes I felt like some of the people in my life did not care about my success, but I realized they are jealous and not true people in my life.” It is proven that excessive competitiveness can stir up jealousy from “friends” which causes them to not care about anybody’s accomplishments other than their own.
Building trust that your close friends want the best for you shouldn’t be hard if the friendship is genuine but sometimes people change. Senior from Yorktown, Zoe Pearce, speaks on this by saying, “The importance of quality over quantity in a friendship isn’t spoken about enough. In middle school we started out with a huge friend group of so many girls that did not actually like each other.” In middle school, having tons of friends was “cool” because everyone seemed popular. There was a huge reality check stepping into high school.
Pearce continued, “Going into high school, I stayed closest friends with just four of those girls. Those four girls were my quality friends and still are. Now it is senior year and they are still my best friends from freshman year.” When there are a huge amount of people that are considered your friends it is hard to have an open honest friendship with all of them. Senior Reese Bruno added, “Trust is huge nowadays. The friend group I’m in is filled with the most loyal girls because we know how to communicate properly and with one another. We are never hesitant to share our achievements because we know we always have each other.”
The question next asked was to think about if one of your best friends were secretly jealous of all you did, how would that make or break your friendship? Passarella started by saying, “I have definitely experienced a type of jealousy with some of my closest friends. It was just recently in senior year when I saw who the real people in my life were. There is no doubt that jealousy will break your friendship, even friendships I expected to last a while.”
Similarly, Pearce added, “Throughout my close friendships, I have yet to experience someone envy me and be jealous of me because then they would not be my close friend. I can read when someone doesn’t care about me and I know to distance myself.” Both responses show different sides that signify really good points.
Your best friend could be your biggest hater behind your back without you knowing until the day they show their true colors.
