Reflections on Friendship

Someone posed an interesting question at work today:

What is a friend?

I mean, the answer seems obvious at first— so obvious that you might not even be able to give a verbal definition because you can’t believe it’s the kind of thing you’d have to explain. But when you think about it, the idea of what constitutes a “friend” (instead of, say, an acquaintance, or a colleague, or “the guy who makes my daily latte and usually talks to me about interesting things while he’s making it”) isn’t all that simple, especially today.

If I were a character in a Jane Austen novel, I’d know exactly what a “friend” is. Back then, friends were people with whom you visited, with whom you attended parties, whom you would invite to dinner at your house. Being friends with a person wouldn’t be that hard— you would meet, you would enjoy one another’s company, and then you might make plans to meet again. As a result, people didn't have many friends— or if they did, their friends were all in the same social circle, and they rarely befriended people who lived differently than they did.

But since then, things have changed. In the era of constant contact via Twitter and Facebook and cell phones and AIM and email and voicemail— who are your friends?

It’s not so simple to figure that out, sometimes.

I mean, no definition of friendship today can reasonably attempt to introduce the subject of face time. The world has gotten smaller; we make friends in one part of the world, and then before we know it, we’re living in a new part. I went to boarding school with people from 88 different countries, and while some of those people moved to America after they graduated, plenty more did not. Of those who did move to America, most didn’t move to my neck of the woods in Ohio. I can’t see those friends on a regular basis; I haven’t seen my dearest friend from UWC, Margarita, since my wedding nine months ago (and I NEED to call her, because I’ve been meaning to do that for weeks now…). None of my Vassar friends live in Ohio, with the exception of Erin— who lives just far enough away from me that frequent visits aren’t possible. But I still consider those people I loved in college to be my friends, even if I haven’t seen them since graduation.

More and more, I find myself trying to invent new titles for people I would like to consider friends: “This guy I know” or “someone I met in film class” or “Linda, who sits two desks down from mine at work.” The girl I mentioned in my sexy brides post, the one I knew in high school, the one to whom I haven’t spoken in perhaps four years— I still think I’d like to be her friend, if it were at all possible. I’m her Facebook friend, anyway, and I see from her profile that she’s become a skilled, interesting, and erudite young woman with whom I’m sure I could have a large number of stimulating conversations. From her photos, I know she’s also still fun and humorous, and I think we’d have a good time if we got together and talked about old times.

But there’s that distance there— you know, that gap that opens up after you haven’t spoken to someone in a long time. You don’t want that gap to keep getting wider, because the wider it gets, the less able you’ll be to rekindle the friendship. And yet, because the gap exists, you don’t know whether or not it can be crossed.

What would happen if I wrote on her Facebook wall? What would happen if I sent her an email? What would happen if I asked a mutual friend, a friend with whom we are both still in contact, if I could have her number, and called her on the phone?

We’d probably hit it off again. We’d probably talk for a while, and enjoy the shared memories. We’d probably make plans to meet and talk in person. We’d probably drift apart again, after a few years, but we might make some sort of effort to keep a comfortable, distant correspondence going.

But the possibility will always exist that she won’t write back, that she’ll ignore the post, that there will be silence on the line, followed by a loud click. And my pride won’t let me risk it. Or maybe it’s not my pride— maybe it’s something a little more sentimental and silly than that. Maybe I don’t want to confront the very real possibility that I let a friend become a stranger simply because I was lazy and busy and not really acting the way a good friend would act.

And I’m wondering if that’s not really a lot of what's so appealing about Facebook. With social networking applications and websites, we never have to admit to ourselves that our friendships have died. Even if we haven’t spoken to someone in years, even if we haven’t invited them to our weddings or parties or even over to our houses, even if we don’t know the names of their now-husbands or faceless children— we can still comfort ourselves with that slender Facebook connection: we’re still friends on the internet. Even if we don’t talk, even if we don’t share secrets, even if we’ve become completely different, even irreconcilable, types of people in the months or years or even decades we’ve been apart— we can still see each other’s faces, in the form of profile pictures, every day. We can still click on a link and see inside our “friend’s” apartment in Chelsea, and learn that our “friend” is working at IBM, and know that our “friend” voted for John McCain or Barack Obama or Ralph Nader.

It’s a sense of false intimacy, really. If all I know about you is your name and what you look like, or what you used to look like, then we couldn’t really be friends. But if I know you’ve joined a group dedicated to environmentalism, and I can see pictures of you bathing your one-year-old son in the kitchen sink, and I know what you’re doing ever moment of every day, even the mundane nuances of your humdrum existence— “Philosophy is having dinner,” “Philosophy is missing her husband!” “Philosophy loves watching TV”— then how could we ever be strangers?

Even if we barely remember what it was like to hear one another’s voices, how can we claim to be indifferent to one another, knowing and experiencing the things we do?