Friendship in 2023 is a strange thing. I feel like there’s been a lot written about friendship and loneliness in recent years. Social media, COVID, etc. have caused a lot of strain in relationships and changes to how we think about our interaction with other human beings.
Recently, a friend passed away as a result of a collision with a car. At first, I felt shock and sadness. But then, I started thinking about what “right” I had to feel a sense of loss. Was she actually a “friend” or just an “acquaintance”? Does it matter?
Social media has done weird things with how we perceive our relationship with others. We see everything from the mundane to exceptional moments of people’s lives, even if we’ve never actually met some of these people in person. Social media makes us feel like we’re a part of someone’s life. While a purely online connection might make us feel like we know someone, I don’t think this constitutes actual friendship by any stretch of the imagination. But if being up-to-date with everything going on with someone’s life, how they’re feeling, what they believe, etc. isn’t friendship, then what is?
The people I’d probably consider my closest friends aren’t people I see regularly anymore. However, they’re people I used to spend almost every day with in close physical proximity. My college friend and roommate Charles is one of them. We occasionally text and talk on the phone but we only see each other every 5-10 years. But our significant time doing life together has established a relational foundation where every time we text or call, we don’t question the state of our friendship. I feel the same way with my friend Jen who was sort of the matriarch of a small friend group in Boston where we hung out multiple days a week, trying to navigate post-college life. I hadn’t talked to her for 10 years, but we recently connected and despite the passing of time, many significant life changes, it felt like we were picking up a conversation like we just talked yesterday.
There are also people I see, mostly in passing, at least once a week who I still don’t feel any depth in relationship with–people in my neighborhood, other parents whose kids are in the same youth soccer program as my kids, people I see at church every Sunday. Are they “friends”? Realistically, they’re probably mostly acquaintances. Are there opportunities to go beyond just being acquaintances? Yes, but it feels like there are so many barriers to going beyond acquaintance–fear of rejection, fear of them moving away in a few years, fear of being vulnerable–and this shared fear of going further makes us all lonelier.
I just spent a weekend with 45 other men at my church on a retreat with a theme of “spiritual friendship”. To be honest, I don’t remember much of the religious teaching from the week, but the thing that’s stuck with me is 1) the new and deepened relationships with people I barely knew or didn’t know at all that I can now build upon and 2) the experience of vulnerably sharing our fears about friendship.