The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life's whims in a way other relationships aren't
In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children—all these come first.
Friendships are unique relationships because unlike family relationships, we choose to enter into them. And unlike other voluntary bonds, like marriages and romantic relationships, they lack a formal structure. You wouldn’t go months without speaking to or seeing your significant other (hopefully), but you might go that long without contacting a friend but you know the friend is there always for you.
Still, experience shows how important people’s friends are to their happiness. And though friendships tend to change as people age, there is some consistency in what people want from them.
Let me tell you about my friends (Amina, Lotty, Poonama and me - Parsan) - four young girls in their teens who joined ICI (India) Pvt. Ltd. some time between 1968 and 1970 (Lotty and Poonama carried on working but then they had to take pre retirement as ICI Head Office shifted to Gurgaon some time after I left in 1981 to be with my children) in different Departments. But one of them Amina (she did not take pre retirement even though the Company transferred her to Rishra to work in the office based there for at least for a year till she retired. She says she enjoyed that phase too (she is one who never gives up and fights her way through). When we first met in the office premises not knowing each other, there were vibes which pulled us close to each other without realising that this friendship will carry on till date. Friendship grew during those working years so much so that we just could not think of not being friends anymore. Even now when either of us feels low we make it a point to speak to each other and talking of our old days makes us feel good.
During Office timings we would make sure we met each other, may it be during lunch break or in the restroom taking a break from work, laughing and joking and teasing. Whenever either of us had any difficulty with our work and / or if we were not sure of it we would just pick up the intercom and ask each other how to go about it. If one friend was not able to help we would turn to the next one. There are a lot of memories we have that just can’t be forgotten even now and when I sit back and think, I say to myself those were the old good days.
I’ve listened to someone as young as 14 and someone as old as 100 talk about their close friends, and [there are] three expectations of a close friend that I hear people describing and valuing across the entire life course. Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy. These expectations remain the same, but the circumstances under which they’re accomplished change.
The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life’s whims in a way more formal relationships aren’t. In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit. You’re stuck with your family, and you’ll prioritize your spouse. But where once you could run over to your friend’s house at a moment’s notice and see if we could spend a couple hours to be together over the evening or maybe over the weekend.
The beautiful, special thing about friendship, that friends are friends because they want to be, that they choose each other, is like “a double agent, because we can choose to get in, and we can choose to get out.”
Throughout life, from grade school to the retirement home, friendship continues to confer health benefits, both mental and physical. But as life accelerates, people’s priorities and responsibilities shift, and friendships are affected, for better, or often, sadly, for worse but our friendship is still carrying on. It is not a must that we have to meet or talk to each other everyday but yes we know we are there for each other always. As for me when I took time off from work there was communication gap for a couple of years but my friends knew I was just a call away whenever required and I too knew they were there for me. There are so many memories stored in our minds that now when we meet or talk over phone we go back on those moments.
I think young adulthood people are usually a little more secure in themselves, more likely to seek out friends who share their values on the important things, and let the little things be. It is also the golden age for forming friendships as it becomes more complex and meaningful. Especially for people who have the privilege and the blessing of being able to go to make career for themselves.
We aren’t obligated to our friends the way we are to our romantic partners, our jobs, and our families. We’ll be sad to go, but go we will. This is one of the inherent tensions of friendships, “the freedom to be independent and the freedom to be dependent.”
“You’re free to go. Go there, do that, but if you need me I’ll be here for you.”
As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it’s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid’s play or an important business trip. The ideal of people’s expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their lives.
In times now “The real bittersweet aspect is young adulthood begins with all this time for friendship, and friendship just having this exuberant, profound importance for figuring out who you are and what’s next, now you don’t have time for the very people who helped you make all these decisions.”
But if you plot busyness across the life course, it makes a parabola. The tasks that take up our time taper down in old age. Once people retire and their kids have grown up, there seems to be more time for the shared living kind of friendship again. People tend to reconnect with old friends they’ve lost touch with. And it seems more urgent to spend time with them—according to socioemotional selectivity theory, toward the end of life, people begin prioritizing experiences that will make them happiest in the moment, including spending time with close friends. And some people do manage to stay friends for life, (like us) or at least for a sizable chunk of life. But what predicts who will last through the maelstrom of middle age and be there for the silver age of friendship?
Hanging out with a set of lifelong best friends can be annoying, because the years of inside jokes and references often make their communication unintelligible to outsiders. But this sort of shared language is part of what makes friendships last.
“Such communication skill and mutual understanding may help friends successfully transition through life changes that threaten friendship stability,” the study reads. Friends don’t necessarily need to communicate often, or intricately, just similarly.
But now the social media makes it possible to maintain more friendships, but more shallowly. And it can also keep relationships on life support that would (and maybe should) otherwise have died out and it dilutes the magic of the memory a little to try to attempt a pale imitation at what you had.
A commemorative friend is not someone you expect to hear from, or see, maybe ever again. But they were important to you at an earlier time in your life, and you think of them fondly for that reason, and still consider them a friend. One of our friends, Lotty passed away a couple of years back (the saddest thing is both Amina and myself went to see her and after a couple of hours later we got the news that she is no more) it was the saddest moment in our lives and we miss her a lot even now. May God rest her soul in peace.
Poonama has gone back to her hometown Kerala (but very much in touch). We enjoy talking to Poonama as she is one who loves to laugh and always sounds happy even if she is disturbed sometimes but her laughter covers it all up and we miss that. Amina enjoys telling us naughty jokes even now, she has not changed and I hope she never does. Many a times we used to tell her to stop being naughty. But we enjoyed it also. We can never forget our days together and when we talk over the phone we tend to say “those were the good old days”. We really miss those days. At least now I have Amina here in Calcutta and whenever possible we make it a point to meet. She has always been a “Tower of Strength”.
Facebook makes things weird by keeping these friends continually in your peripheral vision. It violates what I’ll call the camp-friend rule of commemorative friendships: Because your camp self is not your school self, The same goes for friends you only see online. If you never see your friends in person, you’re not really sharing experiences so much as just keeping each other updated on your separate lives. It becomes a relationship based on storytelling rather than shared living—not bad, just not the same. The same is with WhatsApp.
Perhaps friends are more willing to forgive long lapses in communication because they’re feeling life’s velocity acutely too. It’s sad, sure, that we stop relying on our friends as much when we grow up, but it allows for a different kind of relationship, based on a mutual understanding of each other’s human limitations. It’s not ideal, but it’s real. Friendship is a relationship with no strings attached except the ones you choose to tie, one that’s just about being there, as best as you can.
“Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life–and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.” – Dean Koontz
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