Anyone who can honestly tell you that you are not good enough yet believes that you can do better is a friend.

Not that I ain’t romantic but I don’t believe in love at first sight. The same is true with friends. There is no such thing as friends at first sight. While it is true that sometimes instinct tells you that you can be friends with someone you just met, there is a process to undergo before the quintessential friendship is achieved. This process has four stages which I will refer to as fake, foul, fight, and fossilization.

THE FAKE STAGE

Do you know that feeling when you meet a new acquaintance holding his or her infant? There is this inevitable onus of having to say that the baby is the cutest creature you’ve ever seen next to the characters of Gossip Girl. But you know with all your heart that you are unwillingly lying. The point here is that it is a human nature to be polite and we do not want to be rude to people who are not that intimate with us. Normally, at first, all you wanted to do is to please a new friend. No matter how terrible you think the person’s dress is, you have to say it is not bad. Some people even exaggerate saying that the awful dress looked like it’s recommended by Tyra Banks. Flattery plays a great role in this first stage of friendship called fake. You want to build a relationship with this person and so, you have to make him or her happy and confident with you.

THE FOUL STAGE 

So you and this new friend enjoy each other’s company with all the compliments, common habits, and whatnot. This friendship honeymoon stage will eventually reach to a point when two new friends get sick and tired of each other’s company. Worse, they become fed up with having to lie just to flatter. Both of them will be surprised as they realize that for all the time they spent together, they never mentioned the things they didn’t like about each other. This is the foul stage. Some people hate being bothered even by a trivial altercation. So what they do is just to ignore the person and find another one to start the friendship fake stage with.

THE FIGHT STAGE

Otherwise, the foul stage is then followed by the fight, when friends become brutally honest to each other. Without restriction, one emphasizes how terrible the other is. In some cases, the emphasis is so exaggerated that one trivial error gets bloated.  Many fighting friends hate and hurt each other even unreasonably. More often than not, what they fight for is nothing but their ego. Unless this fight stage, which is the climax, is overcome, fighting friends will become mortal enemies.

THE FOSSILIZATION STAGE

The best part of the friendship process is the stage when the fight has been overcome. It starts with mutual understanding, forgiveness, reconciliation, and the promise never to do anything terrible to each other again. No matter what happens, real friends can “read” each other. This final stage is called the fossilization as the true friend is engraved in the heart which cannot be erased by any trials in the future.

Real friends still lie to each other as the circumstances demand but they no longer need flattery.