Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst

From a young age most people have gone through many relationships with other people who were not their family. Thus, we often acknowledge these relationships as friendships. But the word friend is too broad, so people categorize their friends to several types. In her book “Necessary Losses: The Lovers, Illusions, Dependencies and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow”, Judith Viorst divided friendships to six types. Those are convenience friends, special Interest friends, historical friends, crossroad friends, cross-generation friends and close friends. In my life, I have been friend with many people since I was little. Although I have met all six kinds of friend of Viorst, convenience friends and close friends are two important kinds of friends in my life.

First, we will talk about the kind of friend who we meet every day, the convenience friends. Viorst described them in her book: “these are the neighbor or office mate or member of our carpool whose lives routinely intersect with ours.” (1). That is my good neighbor, George, who always say hello to me every morning. We often talk to each other when we are cleaning up our car on Sunday. We only have casual talks as we do not mention about our own families and personal stories. Besides that, there is nothing between us, just the neighborhood. Base on Viorst opinion, convenient friends is those that we would not have been friend, only cross each other occasionally. These people are not really friends in the sense of it. These are people we get to relate with out of convenience, we would not have talk to them too much about ourselves. Even Viorst admitted that: “But we don’t with convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much: We maintai...

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...s based on the intimacy, so whether you are just a convenience friend if the relationship base on good deed, the convenience friend could still become a close friend. That’s why the most important in friendship is a good intimacy. Nobody could live a life without friend, so we need to open our heart to let other have a chance to be friend with us. With friend, our lives will be better, our days will full with joy, and our unhappiness will fade away. Friend will take care when we in need as we will support them in everything with the best we have. Life with friend will always give us wonderful memories that we will never forget for the rest of our days.

Works Cited

Viorst, Judith. Necessary Losses: The Lovers, Illusions, Dependencies and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 7-9. All Kinds of Friends. Print.