Friends, Followers and the rest in-between

It feels good to have taken a break from writing. I spent the time thinking about all kinds of things. Some important, some completely mundane and trivial and a few that started as trivial thoughts and refused to remain so. One particular thread has been occupying my mind. Friendship.

As a kid, one always wanted to have a lot of "friends." It was almost as if popularity could be measured by the number of other kids who knew your name. The more people who waved at you in the school corridor, the more important you somehow felt. There was probably an innocence to it. We were children after all. We didn't really understand friendship. We understood company. Some of those childhood friends, however, stayed. A few became confidants. People with whom you could share something without first having to decide whether it was safe to do so. People who knew the version of you that existed before you became particularly good at presenting yourself to the world. Then we grew up. College changed the landscape. Work changed it again. Suddenly there were hundreds of people around us who we had not grown up with. People from different cities, different families, different backgrounds and with entirely different ideas about life. Some entered our lives like a breeze on a hot summer afternoon. Pleasant. Refreshing. And then they were gone; because there was no effort on either side to keep in touch. Others arrived like a storm. They stayed for days, months, sometimes years. They disturbed things. They changed things. They left things behind. Looking back, I am grateful for both.

There is something rather strange about the way we classify these relationships. We have a word for people we barely know: acquaintances. We have another for people who are closer: friends. Then perhaps close friends. Best friends. Intimate friends. But what do we call the person who was genuinely important to us for five years and then disappeared from our lives? What do we call the person with whom we shared a particular chapter of our lives, knowing that neither of us would necessarily be part of the next one?

"Acquaintance" seems far too cold. "Friend" sometimes seems inadequate. Maybe there should be a word for temporary friends. Not temporary in the sense that the friendship wasn't real. Quite the opposite. Some relationships are completely genuine precisely because of the period in which they exist. They belong to a particular version of ourselves.

The person we were at twenty may have needed a completely different kind of friend from the person we became at thirty-five. And perhaps that is why some friendships naturally fade. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody betrayed anybody. We simply changed, and the intersection of our lives became smaller and smaller until one day there was no longer an intersection at all. It doesn't make what existed before any less real. If anything, I think I have come to appreciate these relationships more as I have grown older.

Every person we allow into our lives teaches us something. Sometimes they teach us by being wonderful. Sometimes by being difficult. Sometimes by showing us exactly what we want to become. And sometimes, perhaps more usefully, by showing us what we don't want to become. There is also something else that seems to change with age. When we are young, we count friends. As we get older, we count people we can trust. The distinction is enormous.

I suppose if one were to draw a hierarchy, it might look something like this:

Acquaintances.

Casual friends.

Close friends.

Intimate friends.

And somewhere above all of these, perhaps, are the very few people with whom we no longer need a category at all. The interesting thing is that the boundaries aren't really determined by how often we meet. They are determined by trust. You can see someone every day for ten years and never tell them anything that really matters. You can meet someone once a year and somehow continue exactly where you left off. Distance is not necessarily the measure of closeness. Frequency isn't either. Trust is.

Perhaps friendship is ultimately the answer to a very simple question: How much of yourself are you willing to leave in this person's hands? The things you don't tell the rest of the world because you don't yet know what they will think of you. And perhaps the greatest test of friendship is not whether someone knows these things about you. It is whether you can trust them with them.

Which brings me, inevitably, to social media. Social media seems to have taken that little child who counted how many people knew his name and given him a device. Connections, Followers, Friends Likes, Comments . Everything is a number and statistics. Along the way we lost track of the difference in known by many and known by someone. They are not the same thing. A few thousand may know your name and what put on social media. Maybe a 100 might know exactly what you do and a small number may know what you genuinely like. And then a handful know what worries you and what you are afraid of.  We were never designed to have thousands of intimate relationships. Human beings have always lived in groups, but the number of people with whom we can maintain meaningful relationships is necessarily limited. Yet social media encourages us to behave as though everyone we have ever encountered belongs in the same enormous bucket called "friends."

What an extraordinary dilution of a word. I sometimes wonder whether we have confused reach and network with relationship. Those are very different things. The irony is that the larger our digital circle becomes, the more valuable the small circle seems to me. I value my old friendships because they are not just a relationship with another person but a relationship with my own history. An old friend sometimes remembers a version of us that we have almost forgotten. They can say, "You used to do that all the time," and suddenly a twenty-year-old version of yourself walks into the room. There is something deeply comforting about that.

Perhaps, then, the objective was never to have a lot of friends. Maybe it was to have a lot of people pass through our lives, learn something from each of them, give something of ourselves in return, and be fortunate enough that a few stay.

C