I'm not sure why we're friends

Had lunch with R the other day. I knew R in college, we had the same Tagalog class. When we were in the Philippines at the same time, he came up to the province and hitched a ride with my family to Baguio. He went to Binaue rice terraces travelling by himself, my family thought he was crazy.

Every few years I get an email from R, asking what's up and talking about where he is now. I respond graciously. I enjoy hearing from old friends. But we don't really hang out. The emails peter out and we go on with our lives until the next email.

I like R, he's a good guy. We sit waiting for dim sum carts, talking about our respective SOs and the various life adventures we've been on the last couple of years. He's getting married this weekend. We'll be in attendance. I was surprised that he wanted to invite me to his wedding, but I rarely refuse a wedding invite. It's a big moment and it's an honor to be there for them.

What's interesting is that me and R were not hang out buddies or even study buddies in college. I think at the time he was just a guy I knew from class. But 10 years later, here we are talking about moving into the marriage stage of our lives.

We are not the kind of friends that have to see each other every day or get upset if it's been a while. No apologies necessary. I'm not sure how we got here, but I do know that we're friends I think because we open the door when the other person knocks, no questions asked. When we get in touch after a long while there is no guilt about "not keeping in touch better" or resentfulness for not keeping up with each other's lives, it's simply "hey, good to see/hear from you," "how are you doing?" "what have you been up to?" That for us, is enough.

Sure there are other friendships that we both probably have where we keep in touch more often or hang out and those relationships satisfy other relationship needs and those kind of friendships are necessary as well. But our friendship is about as simple as a friendship gets.