I once had a conversation with someone and I said something about going out with my primary school friends and that someone was kind of surprised. That someone was more close to secondary school friends if I didn’t remember wrongly. From then on, whenever conversation topics revolve around the topic of “which group of friends do u hang out with” I’ll take a special interest in it.
Personally, I believe that the state of maturity that we are in at that period of time and the number of years we have in that schooling period affects how close we are to the friends we have at that time. Even though we spend 6yrs in primary school (which is the longest as compared to sec, jc, uni etc) we were too young to really fully understand what friends are and how important close friends are. In theory, the best period of time to form close friendships is during secondary school, where one has 4yrs to bond with friends in the same school and we have a certain level of maturity. In JC we came to realize that friends are important, more so than in our previous 16yrs of existence and therefore we try harder to bond with our JC friends but the 2yrs we have is just too short. It is especially true for us male who have to go NS after JC. Some people we know just lose contact and disappear from our lives.
I don’t really follow this model though… For me, I’m closest to my special group of primary school friends (yes, you can see them all here). But why is that so? I joined my friends’ primary school at primary3, so the time I spent with them was about 4yrs, similar to the amount of time I spent with my secondary school friends. The difference is that I’ve lost contact with almost every one of them. JC friends… they are friends but not really that close.
I think that what really drew me to from strong bonds with this special group is that we live close to each other, we have the same interest in soccer and we just grew from there. In the end, the more things we share with each other, the better our relationship became.
Looking back, there were friends who did share the same interest with me but did not live near me; similarly, there were friends who lived near me but did not share my passion in soccer. Our relationship remained as before: just friends.
I’m proud to call this group of friends 知己, the kind of very close friends that everyone wishes to have but are so hard to find in life. 跟他们在一起有一种随心所欲，畅所欲言的感觉。在他们面前我是真正的我，无需像在他人面前那样戴着面具，作别人影像中的我。I’m also proud to call them 兄弟, the kind that I know I can rely on, no matter what.
