A Friend Indeed
As a writer, I do occasionally get concerned when words appear to change their meaning, or if the same word seems to mean different things to different people. One word which looks as though it has fallen into both these categories is the word ‘friend.’ It seems to be used to mean ‘social media contact,’ or, for some people, it is equivalent to ‘this person whom I’ve just met.’ For me, the word means something closer than what is implied by either of those two explanations. Something closer, deeper, and longer-lasting.
I was reading a book recently (an occupational hazard for a writer), and the reader was taken on a train journey – and, by the end of that train journey, the protagonist claimed they had made not one, but, two, ‘friends.’ As far as I could tell, there was no further contact between these new friends and our hero for the whole of the rest of the tale. Which made me pause: if I had met someone (or some-two) on a train journey and struck up conversation, would I really claim ‘friendship’ by the end of that journey?
I need to be honest here. If I were the passenger, it would more likely be the case that they had struck up a conversation with me. I am not the sort to be bothered by silence, so don’t feel the need to fill every moment with chatter. What I am saying is that, unless there is a pressing need to talk, I am quite happy to read, to write, or even just to gaze out of the window at the passing countryside. I might be English, born and bred, but do we really need to discuss the weather, with everyone, all the time? Even if you’ve never met them before?
If you can’t be bothered to look out of the window to see whether it’s cloudy/sunny/rainy/snowy, there are plenty of apps on your phone to tell you what is happening out there, or what is likely to happen in the next hours or days. Weather chat, like all so-called small talk, too often comes across to me as mere noise. Anything to fill in a silence, even a half-second’s pause seems too long for some. What is so wrong with quiet, with being alone with your thoughts? However, thoughts – at least my thoughts – often stray onto deeper topics than the weather, but ‘big talk’ is frowned on in most social circles – religion and politics being the biggest ‘no, nos’ of all.
Maybe it’s because I am (I have been told) an introvert. Not someone who needs the constant validation of noise, the company of others, the babble of chatter, to feel all right – someone who is content being on their own. When I was at Bible College, back in the 1990s, I used to welcome the termly quiet days, when the usual relentless babble was stilled and a person could, literally, just mind their own business for a whole, blissful twenty-four hours. On the other hand, there were others who couldn’t stand it, and fled the campus for as much of that day as they could. These would be the extraverts, those who (according to my Concise Oxford Dictionary) were ‘predominantly concerned with external things …’, who – from my point of view, anyway – seemed unable to cope without surrounding themselves with talk, talk, talk: the subject matter being completely irrelevant, provided there was some sort of party, some social pizzazz, going on somewhere near them, and including them.
To me, it feels like we live in a very extravert world. We are now so fearful of being out of touch that it is all but compulsory to sleep with our mobile phones, lest we miss a ‘ping’ of a message, or a notification from social media. However, I also struggle with the concept of ‘Facebook friends.’ Apparently, just with a couple of clicks, you become ‘friends’ with some person you have never met, and are never likely to meet. Then the algorithm sends you details of theirfriends, ‘because you liked a post by x.’ Usually, I just give up – not least because any posts by anyone I would want to follow, I have to scroll down, and down, and down, in order to find them – only to be told they posted this information five days ago (and life has moved on, so, other than clicking ‘like,’ it’s not worth doing anything about).
For me, friendship takes time in the real world. Friendship is something that needs thought, consideration, and care. It may be that I could meet someone on a train journey (to continue with the analogy I started this piece with), but it would need much more investment in the way of time and effort by all parties, before I would say the word ‘friend,’ and apply it to these new acquaintances.
Friends are the people you put yourself out for – taking them to the station, doing some shopping for them when you know they’re not well; even (as has happened to me), allowing them to stay for a while when a crisis hits. Yes, often it is reciprocal: you know they’d do the same for you if the situation was reversed. But that isn’t the thought uppermost in my mind if I offer a supporting hand to a friend. A friend: someone I know, and have known for some time – with whom our talk has gone beyond, way beyond, the weather, the state of the world, or what we’re doing with our day.
But it is, forgive me, not something I would do just because we might be linked via our ‘posts’ on social media. Nor is it how I would necessarily behave because we happened to share a laugh and a conversation on the train that one time; and you went back into your world and I into mine. For me, friendship is something precious. Something to be nurtured with care. And not a word to be bandied about when all that has occurred is a casual, brief, acquaintanceship – here today and gone tomorrow. Friends are the people who, perhaps, you would tell if you weren’t feeling great, that life is not exactly brilliant just now, and that, if you said something like that, they would sympathise. That is definitely not how the internet, and social media, appear to be operating these days. On there, everything is carefully curated to give the best impression: a showcase, not a reality. And, above all, not really that friendly.