Well. that title is a bit of a mouthful. I have on many occasions within this blog talked about my thoughts regarding friends and friendships. In this post I Intend to consider how it is necessary to amend how those friendships are maintained both from the point of view of getting further through life and the perhaps more disruptive point of view of how technology has changed things.
In “the good old days” friendships were – whilst not necessarily straightforward, then at least manageable in as much as my friends were drawn from people that I spent a lot of time with. You may fall out with someone – but pretty soon the perceived slight is forgotten. Maintaining the relationship pretty much just consists of talking to them and playing with them.
Fast forward though life and, whilst the fundamental fact that your friends are drawn from the people with whom you spend time is still true, there is a much bigger population of such people and friendships are more ‘chosen’ than “fallen into”. There is also the ever increasing issue that people who were your friend spend less, or no, time with you any longer and slip out of your friendship zone. In order to “remain friends” some effort is required to keep in contact. Maintaining a friendship with someone you rarely or never see requires effort on the part of both people.
Technology over the last few decades has made this both more possible and more complicated – in many ways making the achievement of “staying in touch” easier whilst making the cumulative effort almost overwhelming.
I have no intention of making this post a description of all my friendships, but it is worth exploring some of the life situations that I have been in which impacted the way in which friendships developed. Note that I should caveat this all by saying that for much of this the detail would be different from one individual to another, so it is only the generalisations that are worth considering as transferrable between people. I myself am someone who (I think😉) is friendly to just about everyone I meet, but at the same time the number of people who actually get ‘close’ is very small. I should also say that, for the purposes of this post, I am consciously ignoring family as they are a quite specific group of “friends” who share huge parts of your life.
In my early years the people I was with came from two places – the Salvation Army at Govan and my primary school. The folks in the Army were an integral part of my life up until I moved south at the age of 23. The primary school link was broken much earlier when we moved from Govan to Penilee and I changed schools. Basically, at that age, I had no regrets about leaving behind my friends – but, on the other hand this gave me what was basically the first opportunity to make new friends as the “new boy” in the class.
When I moved from primary to Secondary school there was another “friendship rift” as I went to a different school to ALL of my primary friends – again without really maintaining the links. At Allan Glens there was a different dynamic as everyone was ‘new’ so there were no prior friendships – everyone had to work at linking up with some of their classmates.
The same thing happened when I left Secondary school and went to University – although because of the nature of uni life I didn’t really interact with anyone that frequently until the last year when there was only three of us doing the degree course. At the same time as this was happening my ‘community’ in the Army widened to include a lot of people from other Corps – not just across Glasgow but throughout Scotland – and beyond. I also found a new community within the Glasgow music scene thanks to my French Horn.
So – when I moved to Bournemouth there were an awful lot of people that I sort of left behind. Very few of whom remained in some sort of contact and some of that few slowly disappeared from my contacts. There was, of course, a sort of ready made community to join at Boscombe Salvation Army and I started also to grow a “professional” community through work and beyond.
Going to Vienna was another significant change – although I knew it was a temporary one and I was returning to Bournemouth quite frequently. Here I was in a new country where I knew no one and could barely speak the language. I discovered what it was like to be a “foreigner”.
That was very much a whistlestop tour to lay the groundwork. We now move on to the main part of this post which is with regard to technology.
The advent of personal computers, the www, mobile phones and more has changed things – basically people are, on the whole, more reachable. This is on the one hand a good thing, there are fewer reasons for “losing touch”, and on the other hand a complication, how do you find the time/effort to keep in touch with so many people. Looking back over the brief highlights of my life it is easy to see that there would be many people that I might have wanted to keep in touch with.
In a previous post I mentioned this in regard to my “70 for 70” exercise. I said there about how hard it would be to ‘properly’ keep in touch with any significant number of people.
These days you can go on Facebook (and I amusing that as an example I am well aware that there are other alternatives as well) and effectively keep ‘everyone’ up to date by broadcasting you daily life – and unfortunately some people do that – but that in itself doesn’t constitute keeping in touch. It may result in many “likes” but I would question what proportion of those are done with very little thought. Hitting the like button – or, for that matter any of the reactions, is in many respects too easy.
Having a large number of “friends” on FB is often seen as some sort of status symbol – for some people ‘collecting’ friends is almost an end in itself – whilst there are others who deliberately avoid being “friended” so that they can remain pretty much anonymous online.
When I left Glasgow for the deep south my options for “keeping in touch” were fairly limited. I could phone – but the reality was that I didn’t know many people’s number. I could write – I probably knew even fewer addresses. With most people it was simply a case that whenever I popped back ‘home’ I would get the chance to meet up at some event or other – not exactly maintaining proper contact.
All of these options also had the downside of limited “information exchange” – I wasn’t experiencing their life in the same way as when we were ‘together’ geographically and information could be obtained by other means. I guess that it could be summed up as “you didn’t know what you didn’t know” – which is never an ideal situation.
The technology now makes all of that easier – but crucially it is still very limited, primarily by what the individual chooses to share. (and what you actually receive if it is not directly addressed to you!) Without being careful it is easy to assume that you are more “in touch” than you actually are.
This leads on to a related – and oft overlooked – issue with these types of ‘connection’. They are rarely, if ever, at the same level of importance for both parties. It is almost inevitable that one person ‘needs’ the connection more than the other.
So – how do you “stay in touch”? How often do you need to communicate in order to maintain the friendship?
Of course, the answer to those has got to be “it depends”. I think that I need another caveat here – I think that, in general, if I consider “how often do I contact my friends” the answer is always going to be “not often enough”. However, in most cases I think that there is an acceptable frequency that has developed over time – different for each individual – which whilst still being not enough is at least a pace that can be maintained. For some people that might be once a year, for others every day or so. Depends on the circumstances.
The difficulty arises because there is no longer a habitual getting together – like every day at school, or every Sunday at the Army, or every day at work. With all those community ties being broken it relies on each party to keep things going. Something that I think we all are less than adequate at doing. There are always the day to day tasks which get in the way of putting aside time to ‘talk’ to someone in another town/country. Without the non-verbal cues there is also going to be a slight reluctance about overdoing it.
So – what is the right communication rate? I don’t think there is one. Even between people who communicate with each other frequently the precise rate will vary. For those who have a less frequent exchange the rate will, probably, vary even more. A further factor to be added to the equation is the individual’s expectation. Too frequent and they think “am I overdoing it?” and not frequent enough and they are forever apologising for not “talking”. A sort of no win situation if ever there was one.
Bringing it back to the personal I only rarely think “why have I not heard from them?” and that is usually because there is some other background knowledge that makes me think that a lack of communication is a bad sign. One friend goes quiet when there is too much going on their life. Another goes quiet when feeling down. Only in those type of situations do I perhaps feel inclined to “check up” on them. Otherwise I am happy to receive communication at whatever frequency it happens – in some cases it is a very short time, in others it can be over a year. (although I do usually wish those that I am sufficiently close to a Happy New Year – so that limits the ‘quiet’ time😂)
Interestingly (to me at least) in an age where we generally interact less with people it has become more important to understand the background stories. I would contend that nowadays most of our “friendships” are with people who are not interacting with us physically on a frequent basis – I mean those who have many hundreds of friends on FB cannot possible find time to actually hold a sensible conversation with them regularly. The result is, inevitably, that with few exceptions we know very little about our ‘friends’ – I touched a bit on this in a previous post.
This lack of depth of knowledge will in turn inevitably result in misunderstandings and an inability to really communicate in a meaningful way. Certainly from my own experience the vast majority of people that I am connected to online are in many ways strangers – I may know quite a bit about some aspects of their lives, but other aspects remain a complete mystery. In turn this means that the level of trust that you can have is limited and it becomes something that must be built over time. Again, the absence of non-verbal clues exacerbates this as when you are messaging someone there is no way to be sure how they receive that message.
Are they really pleased to hear from you? Did they only skim read what you sent because they were pressed for time? Was their reaction more of a “not another message”. You cannot know – unless the reaction is confirmed in some way in a response. If someone replies “I intended to message you earlier, but it slipped my mind” that could be taken in quite a few different ways.
With most of my online ‘chats’ I find that I am the one who initiates things – and yes, in some cases I think “why do I bother” 😂 – and this also gives rise to the thought “am I being a pest by messaging”. That said, I think that it is more common for me to not communicate enough than to do so too often.
This post was triggered by my thinking about how difficult it is to have “real” friendships in this current age. It is too easy to take people for granted – only talk to them when we want or need something and fail to properly connect with their thoughts and feelings – problems and achievements – all the things that you would be much more aware if you live your life physically alongside them rather than virtually separated.
Food for thought – I am sure there are people researching this sort of thing – but I am unaware of any guidance on how best to approach virtual friendships in a more productive and empathetic way. I am thinking this may be another subject I will return to.