Dealing With Friends Can Sometimes Be Like Picking Blackberries

Especially if one expands the simile to include making new friends ...

There are always barbs.
Some berries are all–around, general purpose berries; others might be best suited only for a recipe or two.
Trying to harvest all the ripe ones can be an exercise in painful futility.
One can overlook some of the yummiest ones because they’re located higher or lower than one’s used to looking.
Reaching for more when one has a handful can cause a few to be dropped.
I did mention the barbs already, right?
Ripe-looking ones can turn out to be sour.
One may tire of some familiar berry recipes, while others age very well.
There’s always the risk of falling face-first into the brambles if one doesn’t mind the terrain and one’s reach.
A ripe-looking, perfectly suitable blackberry may resist being plucked.
The leaves can have barbs.
If not tended to after picking, the berries can go rotten.
Sometimes the pursuit can lead one farther in to the bramble thicket than one intended or was willing to go; then one turns to go home and finds oneself surrounded by thicket with no clear path home.
Pests like mosquitoes and spiders can make picking much less fun unless one’s prepared to deal with them.
Bees can sting if they perceive one to be a threat.
While long-in-the-tooth berries tend to be discarded or overlooked, they can add extra flavor to one’s recipe.
Spider webs seem to lurk everywhere in the brambles.
Even the stems sometimes have barbs.
A perfect fruit may not taste very good, for no apparent reason.
Despite all the challenges, the pleasures to be had vastly outweigh the bug bites, scratches, heat, and fatigue.
One can act like an idiot and end up dumping the bucket.