Despite our friendships being some of the most enjoyable parts of our lives, what a friend is might be hard to define. How do you know you have a great friend? When does someone who was once a tight buddy get demoted into the acquaintance level? Can someone be a friend with someone who doesn’t return the favor?
If I was going to try to define what being a friend means, it would go something like this:
- A person you like spending time with, which you share some similar interests with, and you also have each other’s backs during both the high and low points in life.
How about acquaintance?
- A person who you share at least one interest and usually see while partaking in that interest. Also, a person you are on good terms with but do not run into often. Lastly, they could be a former close friend who one no longer spends much or any time with.
I have held a personal theory about friendship for a few decades now. My theory is to stay a tight friend with someone you need to see them at least once every two years. This would be weirder with someone living in the same town as you, but can still apply, but my theory really addressed when a great friend of yours moves to a different town, which happens so frequently in our lives.
I think if you don’t see someone you used to be friends with for over two years, it starts to get awkward because you are forced to spend so much time catching up and rediscovering the people you have both grown into. You also might not realize the person they have become. Maybe you have drifted apart culturally. I find two years works well, you have some new, funny stories to share, perhaps some drama, but then, with luck you can fall back into your older friendship without much issue. Have you ever hung out with an old friend who you haven’t seen for five years or ten? I’m sure I’m not the only one who can find this becoming strained.
I have a buddy who moved to Vegas. Sure, it is five hundred miles away, but I’ve made sure to visit him as much as I can and over the past twenty-three years, I’ve probably seen him in Nevada a dozen times, and he’s probably visited me almost as much. Yeah, we live in different states, but we keep in touch and know enough about each other’s lives when we meet, we can just pick up where we left off. Hell, there are people who are supposed to be my friends in the same town, I see less than him.
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One of the stranger things about friendship for me is understanding how the length of the original tight friendship can affect its durability. How many times in life, especially when we are younger, do we end up having fast and fun friendships where we grow close to an individual and they become an important part of our lives. We will often look back with fond memories in regard to these people, but then when we remember how long we really spent with them it seems surprising.
I have several friends I met as soon as I moved out of my parent’s house and whom I have been friends with for decades. We always help each other out and spend as much time together as possible. It is obvious they are true buddies. But how about those intense eighteen-month friends I had in my twenties? They seemed super important then, and I was tight with these people, but how good of a friendship do I really have with someone I only hung out with a year or so, twenty-five years ago?
This is the hard part. Sure, I was tight for a year, but now after two decades have passed, how good of friends are we? Are we still tight or was this person just a fun blip on my radar? Of course, Facebook and such things can change all this to some degree but I’ll get into that later.
Still, isn’t it strange to think of someone who meant so much to you but hasn’t been a part of your life for a long time. Are you still friends? I would think so. How close? I guess that would be up to both of you, but I think it is easy to understand my Two-Year rule when we dig down into subjects like this.
Facebook Friendship
I hate to say it, but discussion of friendship can’t happen these days without including Facebook. However, it often brings up more questions than answers. What happens with the Two-Year rule, I reviewed above? Do I need to see my more removed friends every two years when I know what their kids look like, and how they went to Mexico for their vacation? Does Facebook bridge the gap in our current world when at any given time 80% of our once tight friends are no longer in our direct lives?
I also noticed a strange phenomenon with Facebook. Before Facebook started, I used to think about some of my older friends. Maybe people I hadn’t seen or hung out with at all for a decade or two. What would I say to these people if we could speak again?
Then it suddenly happened. I could talk to the girl I dated my sophomore year in College. Or contact that weird guy I used to buy shrumes from. I’m not sure about the people reading this, but I mostly found these interactions unfulfilling. Either the conversation was awkward and underwhelming, or I felt a tinge of guilt, here is this person I always wanted to sit down and have a three-hour conversation with, but now I barely said hi when we were ‘friended.’
Another downside to Facebook, at least for me, is it seems to cheapen my probably unrealistic and romanticized memories. Sometimes you just want to remember things like how the girl you first kissed looked when you were both teenagers. At the risk of pissing someone off, I’m not as into seeing her as some overweight fifty something, with her bald husband and three kids, one of which is older than we were when we kissed.
Maybe some memories were meant to stay idealized and, yes, a bit fake, but those young years of our lives were intense. Often looking back on those wild times helps you when you are listening to cartoons while making dinner for your kids, or just staying home on a Saturday night. Maybe I don’t want to know that crazy guy I took acid with on Mount Lemmon is now celebrating his ninth year of sobriety. I really don’t want to know what that girl I was crushing on when I was twenty-five looks like now.
My personal, and incriminating, gripes aside is Facebook a positive or negative to friendship.
Positives:
- You can get in touch with forgotten friends
- Reunions and such happen with greater ease
- If your kid deletes all the numbers in your cell, you can still get them back
- It does add an aspect of life sharing which helps people stay in touch
Negatives:
- It cheapens memories
- You are forced to watch exciting people slowly become ever more boring
- Fun memories become watered down by mundania
- People change and you might be subjected to the current nonsense of someone you used to respect
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For most people, after family, friends are your next important treasure. Many might put friends first. Personally, last weekend, I finished a huge chapter in a 24-year-old Dungeons and Dragons campaign with friends I have known for 38 years. My friends helped me beyond all belief when I was down and started WildernessPunk. Frankly, without the assistance of Jeremy, Zano, Geff, Dave, Greg, Chris, and Tony I don’t know where I would be. And golly those are some white boy names, but what the hell, we deal with the cards we are dealt.
One last word of warning. If there was ever a red flag in a romantic, or any other type of relationship, it would be a lack of friends. Whether it is a would-be platonic buddy or a potential mate, if they don’t have a gaggle of friends, don’t just run, run fast, and make sure you use a fake name.
This is
Alex
Bone
Signing Out
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WildernessPunk 