Friendships, Relationships, and what it means to be Faithful/Amizades, Relacionamentos, e Fidelidade

My best friend got engaged last week. She goes home to visit her family about once every 18 months or so, and this time she brought her boyfriend, a lively Scottish man with a playful sense of humor, with her. Everyone seemed to know what it was about: her family and friends on both sides of the world apparently all saw it coming, so when she made her phone calls to all her girlfriends, they squealed with delight and rejoiced with her that she would finally be joining the marriage bandwagon.

That is, everyone except me.

I can't really say that I was surprised, either - as soon as I saw that it was her calling, I knew what was up - but when she told me before leaving that she was not ready to get engaged and had no intention of doing so on the trip, I (perhaps foolishly) believed her. So when she rattled off the story of his rather unimpressive proposal (in her parents' garage, with no romance or fanfare), made in spite of the fact that she had asked him to wait, I held back my internal cringe, smiled, and offered a muted congratulations.

We had a fight about it over Skype a few days later.

I have been doing a lot of hard thinking about what it means to be a good and faithful friend, and trying to figure out if those two are somehow mutually exclusive. The aforementioned friend has always said that she believes that "honesty is the best policy" in just about every situation. While I have pretty much always disagreed with her, I did believe it to be true within friendships...until now.

Case study #1: When I was in college, I made a friend while living in a Catholic community house the summer after my freshman year. She was a beautiful girl, gentle and cheerful, and it seemed like nearly every guy at the university Catholic student center wanted to date her. Somehow, she managed to pick the absolute worst one. He belittled her, disrespected her (hell, he showed up over an hour late to their first two dates), repeatedly broke his promises to her, and one night she even showed me an e-mail exchange between him and some woman he'd met online that indicated that he was cheating on her. All of her roommates and her sisters told her over and over again that he was bad news and that she deserved better. And she cut us all out of her life and stayed with him, until she dropped out of college and moved back home, and her father finally confronted her about it. Now she is married to a much better man, but it was over a year before she started talking to me again.

Case study #2: After moving back to Texas from Cincinnati, Joel and I were happy to plug back into our old group of friends (and make some new ones, too). We were all a pretty close-knit group, and in groups like that there are very few secrets. One of my girlfriends was really distraught when she and I discovered (what we thought was) really strong evidence that a mutual friend was cheating on his girlfriend. Several of us went around in circles trying to decide what to do about it, until I finally decided I was tired of it all, and just called her. I told her that I didn't know anything for certain, and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it just didn't feel right. The end result: they both stopped talking to me, moved in together, and eventually got married.

Sometimes we fear that our friends are in questionable, harmful, or destructive relationships, and sometimes we know they are in them. But does it ever do any good to point it out? Does it make you a good friend to be the voice of reason, or to present evidence of infidelity, or even to voice concerns? The logical answer seems to be yes, but now I am not so sure. In all of my experience, and in all the stories I have ever heard told like the ones above, the person confronted always chooses their significant other, without fail. Never once has someone taken the counsel of their friend to heart. Instead, more often than not, they shut them out of their life completely.

Back to my recently engaged friend. She has only really known him well for about five months now. I have never met him in person, but based on the 10-minute Skype conversation I had with him once, I like him a lot, and I am glad that he makes her happy. But based on some details of his past history, and the age difference (she is 27 and he is 36), I just think that it would be prudent for them to date for a while before getting hitched. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person in her life calling for restraint. We got into a spat when she called me while waiting for her flight. Turns out she didn't like his proposal either, and she was also uncomfortable with getting engaged so soon - basically, the same things that were bothering me - but she was upset with me because she "needed me to be excited for her."

What?

What does it mean to be a good friend - should we place value on being honest, or being comforting? Should we wish our friends to be well or to be happy, when those two seem to oppose each other? Is it our duty to share fully in joy or sorrow that may not be good for our friends?

Does it make me a good friend to confront someone with the reality that they are being disrespected or abused by the person they love, if they are not willing to face it? Does presenting someone with evidence of infidelity make me a faithful friend, or just nosy, or both? Conversely, can I call myself a good friend if I see them being cuckolded and stay silent? Where do you draw the line between minding your own business and being a faithful friend? Can that line even be drawn? More importantly, how would I react to friends bringing these same concerns to me?

Friendships are difficult here. We create bonds so much more quickly than back home, because our time here is so short (at least for most of us), and it is so hard to know where the traditional boundaries fall. It's hard not to wonder if it is worth making friends at all.

Winter Blues: Easily Cured by Epic Ski Trips

So I knew that it had been a long time since I had written anything on this blog, but I didn't realize that it had been over a month until I logged on to update just now. I have been telling myself for the last few weeks or so that I needed to write, but slogging through this winter had just made me...sluggish. Lazy. Though I undoubtedly seem wimpy to people who have experienced "real" winters (e.g. in Nebraska, Michigan, Minnesota, or Canada), growing up in Texas simply did not prepare me for this kind of gray, extended cold. Even the year in Cincinnati didn't help - plus I absolutely hated it there, so I may not have been able to distinguish the cold-induced misery from my general distaste of the place.

I have had a legitimate case of the winter blues, pretty much since shortly after New Year's. I have had trouble waking up early, which means I have not been exercising or taking quiet time in the mornings much at all. I hate going outside, which means I haven't gone to the market or to E-mart to buy groceries, which means I haven't cooked at all. I haven't wanted to Skype (sorry friends), go out, answer e-mails, or really do anything at all...except play Fable on Xbox. I have definitely done plenty of that.

I also had a bit of disappointment earlier this month when I wanted to go see Aung San Suu Kyi accept an award for democracy here in Gwangju. My Korean teacher was gracious enough to call City Hall to get information about where the award ceremony would be, and at what time, and she even let us reschedule one of the classes so that I could go see her (there are only two of us in the class, and the other student was going to be gone that day, too, but still). Anyway, I had to take both the bus and the subway to the convention center on other side of town (a trip that took over an hour one way), and when I got there, they told me that I needed an invitation to get in. I even had a random Korean dude try to help me, but no dice. It wouldn't have been a huge deal, even, except that a friend of mine who lives right by the convention center got there early and was able to get in with the crowd that followed her into the building. Talk about a let-down.

Things have not been the greatest at work, either. Our Korean head teacher has implemented a new policy that all afternoon teachers have to be in two hours earlier than usual on the first day of the new session, ostensibly to prepare for our classes. What this actually means is that we are supposed to come in early so that we can get our test scores into the one computer shared by thirteen afternoon teachers. Unfortunately, there is always someone (usually multiple people) who isn't able to get their grades into the computer before classes start anyway...because there is only one computer for thirteen of us. On top of that, the kinder program is holding its big graduation ceremony this Friday, which puts additional strain on the kinder teachers (and, of course the Korean head teacher). Combined with the fact that we didn't have any kind of extended time off between the end of September and the New Year, and then again until last weekend...suffice it to say that tempers have run a little hot.

Luckily, the stressful monotony was broken for us last weekend with a ski trip to High1, a ski/snowboarding resort in Gangwondo (the northeastern-most province in South Korea). There is a Daegu-based travel group that organizes occasional trips to that resort, so we opted for a change of scenery and hopped onto a bus to Daegu to catch the group tour to the resort over the Lunar New Year. It was definitely a hike to get there and back - three hours from Gwangju to Daegu, and then another three to the resort - but it was absolutely worth it. We got in two full days of skiing on Sunday and Monday, and the travel group hosted a party on Sunday night.

Alas, we did not have a say in the color of our rented ski clothes. Luckily, Joel was pretty excited about his bright pink ski jacket.

I was also happy with my much-more-subdued blue jacket...and the matching hat (now my new favorite hat) that I picked up for only W10K. 

 It was really nice to meet some new people and make new friends, though we were really surprised at how few Americans were on the trip. Apparently, most of the Irish people who travel to Korea to teach wind up in Daegu, so there is a massive Irish community there; we also met lots of English and Scottish people, several South Africans, a few Aussies and Kiwis, and a couple of Canadians. There were maybe ten Americans that we met on the trip - including us. The skiing was really good, too - the nice thing about this particular resort is that it had several long beginner-level runs from the top of the mountain down to the valley, so I was able to get some good practice - and I even screwed up the courage to try some of the intermediate-level runs. In the end, we had such a good time that we are planning to go to Muju (the ski resort on our side of the peninsula, which is much closer) this coming weekend for a skiing day-trip.

I had another minor let-down this past week when I headed into church on Wednesday morning to go to Ash Wednesday Mass...and found out that they were only holding one Mass, and it was while we were at work. Seriously, guys - what kind of church only has one Mass on Ash Wednesday? That was disappointing, but I am trying to keep a positive attitude this year for Lent (or, at least, keep more of my complaints to myself). Hopefully we will start to get some warmer weather soon now that March is on its way.

If not...there is always skiing. And Game of Thrones.