"You can choose your friends but you can't choose your family"

That's an old saying that (As far as I'm aware) means that if you're friends are being idiots to you, you can ditch them but you can't ditch the people related to you by blood. For the most part, I don't like that saying. You can't choose your friends. You can choose the people you spend your time with, but true friends? That's something you don't choose, that's something deeper than that.

I'm gonna sound like a Yu-Gi-Oh! episode right now, but true friendship is something beyond just people who have similar interests and who like hanging out together. True friendship is a tight bond between two people that can become fragile at times but won't break.

I'm gonna throw out a few examples from my life here, not using real names for various people's sakes, just to kinda demonstrate my point.



First case: Asshole

Most of my IRL friends will probably know who I'm referring to when I talk about asshole. He was a "friend" of mine who did some stuff involving a girl I dated for a brief period of time that I won't go into detail about but, in short, it broke my heart and I went through the worst 3 months of my life living with the two of them. But I'ma let bygones be bygones and, like I said, not go into the details. Although I've probably said enough.
Anyway! He and his girlfriend both insisted that he was my "best friend" and that I should treat him as such. I never saw him as that. I never trusted him beyond being a good friend, and well, bad stuff happened and I refuse to be anywhere near him.

Second case: CSG

This is a more recent one and is what actually inspired me to write this particular blog. CSG was one of the first people I met on WoW, and became one of my best friends on there. Then, towards the end of last year, lots of bad stuff happened and we wound up having a lot of arguments and, until a week or so ago, didn't speak for months. And now we're talking to each other (Although I must admit, it's somewhat uncomfortable) and our friendship seems to be on the mend.

Third case: Chad Kroeger

This one is a bit of an odd one because it's one that I still feel rather bad about. Chad (lolol injoke, it's obviously not his real name) has been my best and closest friend for the majority of my life and there's really this bond between the two of us that seems to be impossible to break. When we were in primary school, he moved to another town, moving back in high school and winding up at the exact same school as me and in the same class, entirely by coincidence. We wind up being best friends through all of high school, and now work at the same place.
But the most amazing part to me, is some really dumb stuff I did a few years ago (Which I'm again, not going to go in to) and we wound up refusing to speak to each other, despite working together every week. This went on for a month or so, until one week, we happened to be working on his birthday. I wished him a happy birthday, but nothing more became of that. The next week, he asked me how WoW was going (I'd just started, I believe I was level 27 or so) and we just... wound up talking about WoW. We've never actually talked about what I did and I don't consider that a bad thing, but our friendship is as strong as ever.

So. The lesson is, WoW fixes and creates all true friendships. Wait. What? No! That's not right!