You’ve heard of it before more particularly with this app so popular on Facebook where they remind you of the date you’ve been friends with people in your contact list.
But what exactly is the term”friendversary?” It is a slang word which is a combination of friendship and anniversary. Just like what BFF means to some people, best friends forever. It simply means friendship anniversary. I don’t really mind it when Facebook posts those reminders. I have been friends with some people in my contact list for so long even before Facebook was created.
For more than four decades now, I’ve been friends with three ladies whom I met at the UST Main Library. We were all student librarians before and were assigned at the same section of the library which was the Humanities. Thea is now a professed nun, a Franciscan working for the welfare of the Mangyans in Mindoro province. Precy is a successful businesswoman while Grace migrated to Canada and married a Canadian. We don’t often see each other now but we still get in touch. Precy, Thea and I are all cancer survivors.
What makes that friendship so special? Some say that the friendship you formed earlier in life is more enduring and more lasting. You have experienced things together during your younger years. You have shared a lot and it doesn’t really matter that you don’t get to see one another as often as you want. There is that bond that you cannot just erase. That kind of friendship that when you see each other, it seems that nothing has changed, you pick up where you left before. You have made them part of your family. You can grow separately without growing apart.
I always love these words from Henri Nouwen. This is what real friendship means.
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Dreams And Escapes 