Image: tmadauhoo
Coming from the first generation of people whose number of ‘friends’ on Facebook, or the number of followers on Instagram or twitter often trumps the number of friends you can actually call in times of need, we have yet to define what friendship means to us. Are friends people we hang out with at restaurants, sorry let’s be honest here; people we share a table with while we are all on our phones, are friends those incredibly selective people who we binge-watch Netflix with, or better yet are friends the people we have fun with, whatever that implies?
I recently learned that someone who used to be one of my closest friends, someone you used to knock on my door first thing in the morning and was part of the people I used to hang out with till late at night, had dealt with some very serious health issues, was in a coma, fatally lost 3 of their friends and their grand mother and faced depression all within the last couple of months. Somehow, I had no idea about any of it. They never came forward to share or ask for help. I have no idea how to shake the feeling that I should have been there for them. Yes, we did have a fall out and hadn’t been in contact for months before anything happened but the fact that I was not there, does it mean that I am a bad friend or a bad person for what it is worth. Aren’t your friends supposed to be there for you in those times? And to top this all off, after trying to catch up I learnt that they lost faith in friendship because no one was there for them when they needed it the most.
Being a twenty-something in a big-ish city, does take its toll on friendships, while each and everyone of us is trying to figure out life and what we want out of it, we sure take separate ways. We all come from different paths on our way to other ones and we met because of circumstances or things that attracted us for a while but our search to finding our own individual way often involves letting go of things that we already learnt what we needed to from. So how does friendship play a role in all of this? Does your bond subsist through those up and downs?
What I learnt in retrospect is that we learn to function around others in a mechanical way without really connecting, investing and cultivating a bond beyond the immediate connection that we have with the other person. Often those circumstantial reasons that brought us together do not seem enough so we learn to not trust blindly, to weigh what is at stake and more often than not that involves staying at arms length. As much as it pains me to say, the weave that connects you to some people sometimes just get loose in some places, just like the weave on your favorite sweater does at the end of winter. At first, catching up becomes small talk, then it eventually goes into an awkward silence.
Until recently, I didn’t understand how big of a hold small talk has on our daily lives. On our commutes, in a waiting room, meeting people after a long time, realizing that you do not have much in common except for again those circumstantial coincidences, or while to fill and awkward silences, yet again it fills our daily conversations until the moment when you realize that this conversation is not going anywhere. So what’s the alternative; ignoring the other person, rude! wearing your earphones to avoid conversation, scrolling your life away without reading anything.
Day in and day out, we scroll down through thousand of ‘inspirational’ friendship quotes across various social platforms. This has given us a truly romanticized series of expectations of friendship. We want our ‘friends’ to always be supportive and to be present for us in all moments of need but yet we do not realize that often we do not let other people in close enough to make that happen. I think sometimes we don’t realize that friendship transcends immediate needs because our ability to place our trust in others is what helps humanity persevere. It is what make us an interdependent social species. Interdependence involves vulnerability on both sides, something we might not always want to do unfortunately. So how can we expect our friends to live up to our romanticized expectations when we are not open to them.
I like to believe in Vin Diesel’s “I don’t have friends I got family” definition. As dramatic as it sounds, a part of me wants to believe that friends are the people you can call up at 3 am with a situation and they’d come running. These are friendships and bonds you which work for regularly, you invest yourself emotionally, physically and financially in, these are the people you want to matter, people who you want to care for and who you want to cared for you. But is that too much to ask for.
