- My mantra is, if we did not have trust, we would not have betrayal. As such, I do not encourage trusting blindly or trusting everything to one person.
- Friendship is a lot more than sharing about our personal lives. Being a good friend does not mean that one needs to be with their friend all the time.
Image: BBC
Around this time last year, Germans were left mortified by a story that had never happened before. In the small town of Freudenberg, a 12-year-old girl was found dead in the woods.
The young girl only identified as Luise was found dead in a pool of blood where she had been stabbed 74 times. Such a case had never been seen or heard of in the small town of only 18,000 people.
Who was the killer you might ask? No, it wasn’t a perverted paedophile or a convicted murderer, it was two of Luise’s best friends. You can imagine the shock when people found out that the gruesome crime was committed by a 12 and a 13 year old. The worst part is that the girls knew what they were doing as they had searched the legalities of being an alleged killer who is under age, just a few days prior.
Even though I do not live in America, the news of Shanquella Robinson’s death filled my homepages on my social media for most of October 2023. Shanquella Robinson was on a holiday in Mexico with a group of friends, who beat her up, naked, and left her dead in an empty vacation rental before fleeing to America. How do we know the friends did this? Because they recorded a fight between Shanquella and another woman and uploaded it online.
In the video, we see a clearly drunk and naked Shanquella being mercilessly assaulted by the other woman while everyone else just watches. Shanquella did not fight back, and in the background we hear the voice of her alleged best friend saying “Quella why don't you fight back?”
Many might be familiar with the story of Naomi Oni who was splashed with acid by her best friend Mary in the United Kingdom in 2012. Mary, who was to be by Naomi’s side throughout her healing journey, kept acting like her good friend. It was only after the police investigations concluded that Mary was in fact the perpetrator behind the veil that people learnt of her true colours.
These are just the tip of the iceberg in the mountain of stories of people who have been wronged, betrayed and, worse, killed by their so-called best friends. These stories are cautionary tales and life lessons to us and those we choose to keep by our side. Call me crude, but I do not believe in the concept of best friends. I do not believe that a single person should know everything about you. Why? It’s simple.
Humans are fickle creatures. This is a given. No matter how good a person is, they can still be driven by feelings of anger, animosity, jealousy or simple wickedness.
We know that people can be bad yet we still want to be around them. The need for socialisation is generally a good characteristic of humans. We even analyse children and adults on how ‘sociable’ they are or how they behave in society to have an inkling of their psychological traits. It is just in the nature of humans to be surrounded by others.
However, this does not mean that we should bare our souls to other people. They should not know our secrets and desires, these are the things we tell only to God. Growing up, it was made clear to us that we were not to have intimate friends with whom we would spend the vast majority of our time or share our deepest thoughts.
The other thing my parents completely forbade was sleepovers; 30 years later, I have learnt that sleepovers are the number one leading cause of sexual assault in minors.
This, I believe, is the outcome of having best friends or people we trust blindly. They can directly or indirectly cause us harm the moment they believe our existence impedes their own progress.
My mantra is, if we did not have trust, we would not have betrayal. As such, I do not encourage trusting blindly or trusting everything to one person. Friendship is a lot more than sharing about our personal lives. Being a good friend does not mean that one needs to be with their friend all the time.