Through The Mind’s Eye Still Strangers, aren’t they? [Archives:2007/1079/Community]

By: Maged Thabet Al-kholidy
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Friendship is a strong relation. It is sometimes stronger than brotherhood, love, and even marriage. Only true friends feel this!

Sometimes, two persons start friendship through email, chat, or even through mobile, but their relation go stronger not only as friends but as lovers, businessmen/women, or such alike. Some others, unfortunately, take it as a fun, wasting time, claiming that they are mere 'strangers'.

Due to the widespread of modern means of communications, relations among people take place faster than before. Not all the people are alike in their personalities. Some of them, for example, are frank and honest with all, while others feel more honest and sincere in a relation through email or chatting or mobile rather than relations with normal friends or relatives.

Accepting others as friends in such a way is good. There might be no reasons for that. It is a mere feeling according to which at least one or both trust each other. Maybe because they do not know each other face to face, so they do not doubt or fear each other. The relation may go stronger with the process of time, thinking and feeling of each other as real 'soul mates'.

No advantage is sought by any one of them. No boundaries exist between them while exchanging secrets or personal affairs. They exchange secrets which might have been told to none ever before. They, or at least one of them, really 'miss' each other, feeling that they would get lost if a day passed without any contact. Both, or at least one of them, respect, like, and sometimes feel a 'dire need for each other'.

However, when one of them 'misses' the other one or, at least, misses to hear the other's 'voice' or news, that feeling might not be felt by the other who may reject the other's feeling when says 'I miss you'.

The real problem really occurs when one of them is 'moody' or 'selfish'. Nevertheless, the other accepts him/her with all prose and cons. For, He\she forgives whenever he\she gets abused, and never says no when that 'friend 'needs him/her' though he\she gets rejected in his/her needs.

A more complicated case occurs when one of them does not accept the relation in the same way the other does. By this, he/she does not feel as the other does, nor does he deal frankly and honestly like the other one. He justifies him/herself by claiming that they are still 'strangers' and one day they will go apart.

It is really surprising to say 'mere strangers' though they know each other more than what the others know. I think, at least, they can not be called strangers, and they will not go apart except if they (or one of them) want(s) so.

What to call a relation like this? Actually the one who keeps on saying this is really pessimistic. I do not know why he/she keeps on saying that 'we will go apart sooner or later'. Is he/she a god to say this, or a prophet to foresee others' fortune? Sorrowfully, he/she is not.

Actually, every one of us meets thousands of people a day. Every one of us has hundreds of relatives, friends, colleagues, classmates, etc. A close friend is something else in spite of the means of communication. It is only a matter of trust and intimacy through which one can make an enemy a close friend.

Face to face acquaintance is good, maybe to take pictures together. It is also good for those who are miser because using internet or mobiles to contact is costly to them. It can also develop true friendship. But this does not keep friends of the internet or mobile as strangers.

So it is not a matter of seeing, looking, or even having a picture of such friends together. It is, however, a matter of accepting others, who are good, of course, as friends, dealing with them honestly and frankly. Only through this the distance fails to shake their relation and they will no longer remain as “mere strangers”.

The world has become a small village due to the widespread of the electronic ways of communication. The idea is not to stop face to face relations. It is, nevertheless, to widen one's scope of relations because everyone can have friends any where in the world. The only thing one needs is an email Id, or mobile number, taking the matter easily through the mind's eye.

Majed Thabet Al-kholidy is a writer from Taiz, currently doing his M.A. at English Dep, Taiz Uni. He is an ex-editor of English Journal of the University.
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