“Who loves us? Who, besides those whose expectations for us are kept in the foresight of sameness? Love is that emotion. That emotion that tells a person that another should never improve, for they are ‘perfect as they are’.”
– Modern Romanticism
As a friend, we are here to tell our own that they are, in our eyes, a perfect person. For in our love, we say that. In our love to them, disappointment or the factor of “betrayal” would be the reaction, were there to be downfall. Though, would we have betrayed ourselves of our ability to protect, or is it simply the notion that this friend of ours has turned a different path of more importance than the friendship?
For instance, someone who craves addiction more than their friendship, might lose all their friends. Their loneliness might be the realization that material substances are not as valuable as a friendship. This intense feeling of loneliness might be what cures them of addiction, or to at least take the first step to that destination of being relieved.
The one universal difference between a friend and a therapist, is that a friend will offer you all the time in the world to speak at no cost, though a therapist will offer you a limited amount of time to speak at a cost attached. Perhaps to a troubled person, a therapist is more of a fitting match to their state, due to them understanding themselves as limited. In seeing something limited, like the therapist for what they offer, it is unlike in the perceived unlimited supply to perhaps an addiction, that compared to the objective infinity of love. Though, it was not love that became limited, of those former relationships. It was trust. That addict’s former friends lost the ability to trust, though the memory of them will not become erased. It will simply be a bitterness, until trust can be rebuilt off how they were before the addiction.
As a friend had expected their own to always remain the same, it was to this naivety that made change either unseen or unpaid of any attention to. If attention has not been paid, or this issue has simply been so hidden, then therapy may become the better fit over a friend. For that is because our reason to love, as a friend or even as a lover, is to always view them through the eyes of sameness. We see them, to wish them to remain as they are, for we tell them in our love that they are perfect, and thus, need no improvements.
Modern Romanticism 