Bad-day Friend

They say it’s hard to find a bad-day friend. One you go to when you’re miserable day after day. One who holds your hand throughout the difficult times and one who offers the shoulder on which you can lean. As we’ve established before, they are considered to often be right. As we’ve also established, I often tend to disagree with them.

While I agree that hard day friends are more difficult to find than friends who ask you how you’re doing but don’t even bother to listen to your response, they aren’t the most precious kind of friends.

So who is?

I think that the best friends are the ones with whom you can share your good days. I mean your really good days.

“Misery loves company.” So the saying goes. I believe this one to be mostly true. When you’re really sad, having another sad friend gives you the opportunity to commiserate and bitch and moan till the wee hours of the morning.

Even if your friend were not miserable, most close friends would easily take a large chuck of time out of their day and calm you down, give you advice, or just listen to you. They will tell you that all will be okay, they will sit there for many hours and hold your hand. They will do anything they can. Cause everyone’s has bad days, most people know what to do when someone else is having one. Some of them might be scared to do the right thing and ignore you mainly from sheer discomfort of being unable to utter the magic words.

Now let’s take a day when you have amazing news. It could be something social like your boyfriend just proposed to you. You’re bubbling up with excitement and you want to share. You pick up the phone to call your best friend Terry. Just as you’re on the last digit, you stop. Terry just broke up with her boyfriend (or not to be that extreme let’s say Sheryl has been trying to find a boyfriend, or she just had a fight with her boyfriend.) Can you still call her? Will she be able to share your joy?

What if an agent just accepted your novel? Or you got promoted? Or you won the lottery?

When I have friends who I know will celebrate the great news with me, I know I’ve got a good friend.

Previously? La-la Land.