The owner of a cafe I frequent for brunch recently asked me why I always eat there alone. I wasn't sure how to answer. He's a nice enough guy and I enjoy his restaurant, so I didn't want to be rude and just say "None of your business". But his curiosity got me thinking yet again about something that was on my mind a lot throughout 2018.
I'm not sure I know anymore what the word "friend" means, or whether I actually have any friends. Facebook has distorted the word with their whole "friend" list thing, whereby people collect "friends" like they collect stamps or records or butterflies and end up with whole lists of people that they can't possibly all even talk to. If you don't talk, if all you ever do are occasionally "like" each other's posts, how can you be friends? And even if you do talk through commenting and chatting, are you actually more than just acquaintances with most of those people? Communication over the internet in general, really, makes the determination of friendship quite ambiguous. I've had people that I really didn't know at all pour their guts out to me in surprising detail in private chats and then tell me "You're a good friend" when, really, what they meant was just that I'm a good listener. Is letting a relative stranger use you as a virtual shoulder to lean on actually friendship, or is it just a form of free, non-professional therapy? There's definitely something about the sharing we do over the internet that can deceive us into thinking we've made a real connection and formed a bond of friendship after only a handful of "deep" conversations, but how many of those conversations do you need to have before you know each other well enough to really become friends?
Even meeting people and spending time with them can be misleading. I've sometimes used the words "pal" and "buddy" to describe people that I would see repeatedly at events I traveled to because, even though we enjoyed so many mutual interests and seemed to really like spending time together, even though we shared an emotional response to the things we experienced, did that actually make us friends, or just acquaintances who'd had a helluva memorable time together? I thought for a while that many of these people might be friends, but in a lot of cases I wasn't sure. Even if I thought of them as more than just an acquaintance, how did they think of me? After the way this past year went, I really have no idea.
At what point do we transition from acquaintance to pal to friend? What does it take to have an actual, real friend, or to be an actual, real friend? Is it up to other people to say and do the things that establish that deeper connection, or is it up to me to reach out and say 'Hey, you, you're my friend!" and hope that person reciprocates?
No. Idea. And it doesn't help when so many of the people that I'd like to be friends with are far away on the other end of an internet connection, way too far to go to brunch with. So I dine alone.
And all this would probably be TMI for the guy who owns the cafe.
January 1, 2019
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"And all this would probably be TMI for the guy who owns the cafe. "
ReplyDeleteHaha...probably so. Kind of a bold (and obnoxious?) question for him to ask, though. You bring up some really good points on this issue. It's one that I've also thought a lot about in recent years. I can't say I've made an 'actual, real friend' in many years. But maybe, like you, I'm not sure what that even means anymore. I have a few old friends scattered around the country (and the world), most of whom I rarely correspond with anymore, but they are at least the type that when I do see and/or talk to them it's like no time has passed. It just happens so infrequently. The friends I made more recently since I moved to Baltimore are all gone from here now. Maybe part of it is getting older, as well as tending toward the reclusive, but I just haven't made much of an effort to attempt making new ones. But, yeah, the internet can be deceptive in the 'friend' regard. I'm wary of the whole concept of virtual friendship. But there are still many days when I interact more with people online than I do offline, so who knows.