You know those types of friends you can’t bring home?

mm....WHAT?

During a conversation with one of my colleagues, he said something on these lines and I was totally taken aback…..well, surprised. He said something like, “you know, we had to only meet outside of home (wife/spouse doesn’t know). We are friends but that’s the way it is, you know these things right?” No, I don’t. He is also a small town guy, but has had a much better exposure to the western world than I’ve ever had. I have never ventured out of India, as a matter of fact, never been to the northern and eastern parts of the country at all. But, I don’t think I have friends I cannot bring home or talk about at home. My parents knew all my friends, but for those one or two that don’t deserve any mention because we ourselves knew we wouldn’t last a week as friends and maybe we would never see each other again.

Agreed, this could be the issue with the way we could have been brought up, but don’t we form our own opinions when we get exposed to some new experiences. And, this is not with a guy-girl friendship alone, even where I do not subscribe to such a stupid idea that you ‘cannot’ bring them home. Why, because you become answerable to many questions on how you met, how come you became friends yada yada yada…again, how stupid is this?

When my colleague uttered such a thing….I wanted to ask him these things……..

Are there any such types of friends at all in the first place?

Are you ashamed of your own friends?

Are you actually friends or have something else going on but call it friendship?

Even writing about such a thing makes me feel very childish. I find myself asking, ‘Is this something that needs any mention at all?”. But many people out there are hypocrites. I realize this very late in life, maybe because I hadn’t met many like them before? I don’t feel comfortable calling that colleague of mine a friend now. I don’t want to. People like him are better left as colleagues or acquaintances, I think.