Hatred is usually a bond that people often see as an alliance. It’s like the saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Now that I look back on my friendships, I think that many of them have been based on negativity.

When I first went into high school, I was very nervous. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to make any new friends. This was why I was extremely delighted to hear my friend say that she had a friend from her middle school that was going to be in the same high school as me. After I met the girl, she and I gradually became friends because we were similar in a lot of ways. The thing that really made us bond was the fact that we disliked the same things. I remember my friend saying that Freshmen Friday was pretty stupid. This was probably one of the first conversations I had with her. After we talked about how much we hated Freshmen Friday and the fact that it didn’t really mean anything because in my school it was mostly all talk, we started to become more comfortable with each other. I remember calling up my friend that introduced us and telling her that I may have just found my best friend. After I moved to Roslyn, though, my friend and I drifted apart. The calls between us started to feel more like an obligation rather than a good time. I remember wondering why this could happen and after reading this article, I see that it was because our friendship wasn’t really as strong as it felt. It was basically based on negativity.

When I was in the third grade, my mother introduced me to a new girl in school because she knew her father. As a result, we were forced to become friends. This wasn’t so easy at first. We were both very shy and felt awkward when we talked to each other. It was only when a person came up to her and was making fun of her that we became friends. We bonded over our dislike of the person. We talked about people like him and how it was a terrible thing to make fun of people. This, therefore, created a foundation of negativity for our friendship. Later on, when we ended up going to different middle schools and then high schools, we drifted apart and barely talked to each other. Finally, when I was in ninth grade, I saw her at a supermarket and we talked about how we were since we last talked. I realized that we both had changed a lot. It was basically like we were meeting each other for the first time. From that day on, we started a new friendship with a more positive foundation. We are still friends to this day even though we live in two different towns.

In the end, even though negativity is a fast way to make friends, it is not a good enough foundation to make the friendship last. People usually drift apart because there’s no real foundation keeping them together. In both my experiences, my friendships felt like they were strong but ended up not being able to last a long distance. This article really opened my eyes and now I really can’t believe that I could base a friendship on negativity. It really is an interesting explanation to why friendships sometimes don’t last when people move on. I think that the reason why most people become friends through a negative bond is because they may think that the more common their dislikes are, the more similar they are.