Here is the thing about me — I don’t really have many friends. I do know quite a lot of people and they’re all quite nice, but, for me, it takes much more than knowing who someone is to consider them a good friend. I have very high standards when it comes to friendships. In fact, when it comes down to it, Kubo Queen is the only one who has always been a true friend to me. A friend who I can truly depend on, who I can admit my flaws to, who I’m willing to make sacrifices for, and who pushes me to be a better person. I came to the realization a long time ago that she is pretty much the only one I really need.
A great friend is someone who will open up a whole new world to you, a world that wasn’t even on your radar. Before I met Kubo Queen I had a terrible habit of spending a huge portion of my free time on the Internet. In fact, the first thing I did as soon as I woke up in the morning was open up my laptop and begin surfing my favorite websites. I would browse YouTube to see if there were any new interesting videos to watch, and I would scroll through my favorite internet forums to see if there were any new interesting threads to read. I was hooked, and so I would do this throughout the day and throughout the night. One of the saddest things about this was that I relied on these shallow websites for important information.
I noticed that Kubo Queen was quite different pretty early on in our relationship. She didn’t mindlessly surf the internet. And when she wanted to know what was going on regarding an important issue, she valued the written word, like a book or a newspaper article (things that survived a review process), over random YouTube videos uploaded by random people on the internet. Reading actual books was one of her favorite activities. It took a while, but her enthusiasm for reading turned me into a reader too. Now, whenever I want to learn about a serious topic, my default is to look for an important book on the topic so that I can read about it. Doing this has given me a lot of benefits. Not only do I get a deeper understanding about the topic I’m trying to learn about, since arguments presented in texts tend to be more logical and well thought out than videos or forum threads, but every time I read my attention span gets wider and my ability to focus on a task gets stronger — skills that are valuable in my career as a software engineer. Reading is now one of my favorite activities. I truly enjoy it, and Kubo Queen was the one who opened up this whole world for me.
Another thing a true friend does is support you in achieving your goals in meaningful ways. When I finally found an engineering job after I left university, I decided that the most important goal for me (financially) was to pay off my student loans within a year. In my circle, Kubo Queen was the only one who believed I could achieve this and, in fact, a lot of the people I shared this goal with pretty much just laughed at me. I guess they just couldn’t fathom how $35,000 worth of student debt could be paid in a year when most people choose to stretch it out over 10 years. Kubo Queen was so supportive that it also became her goal to pay my off student loans. She was the one who always tried to find ways to cut down our monthly expenses. And she even gave me $10,000 (money she received from a scholarship she had won) to help me make a dent in my student loans. Kubo Queen is one of the main reasons I only have two and a half more months to go in paying off my $35,000 student debt. In the end, it will only take me a total of around 9 months, which is well within the goal I set. Kubo Queen’s support was a tremendous help to say the least.
Perhaps the most important thing a true friend can show is loyalty. Loyalty, to me, is the most important characteristic of a true friendship. Kubo Queen and I have been together for 7 years now. And we’ve already experienced quite a lot over the span of our relationship. There were a lot of hard times and there were a lot of good times. We’ve also changed quite a bit. We are both different people from when we first met years ago. However, a thing we’ve always done was put our relationship first, before we made any decision or took any action. This is apparent in the little things we do. Like making sure we reserve at least one whole day out of the week just for the two of us to spend together — no work, no chores, and no phones. Or rejecting other friends when they invite me out if it would limit my free time to spend with Kubo Queen even more. There have been big things too. For example, Kubo Queen rejected a full-time six-figure software engineering job offer from Google since it meant, at the time, that we would have to do a long-distance relationship for about one year. I suspect that most people would risk their relationship to jump at such an opportunity. That was the moment when I realized Kubo Queen was not like most people. She’s a true friend. She’s the most loyal person I’ve met. And so I will do my best to keep her, forever.
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Beautiful