I would love to hear your thoughts or even a story, about what friendship has meant to you and what are some ways you have tried building, meaningful friendships. Leave a comment below.
The world has become a lonely place. With billions of people populating the earth and with technology bridging many gaps, loneliness has to the surprise of many become a pandemic. A shocking, but truthful revelation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people in various ways. What started as a biological enemy has reared its ugly head and mutated into other life forms, morphing to become monsters, each in its own league. Loneliness is one such monster.
Physical distancing and social isolation have affected the young and the old. According to a recent article in the Harvard Gazette, young adults have been the hardest hit by loneliness during this pandemic.
Talk to the old and aged who have been the slowest cohort to embrace technological changes, loneliness has hit them hard. Talk to the fatigued 15-year-old student who sits in her room from 8-3 pm attending a continuous stream of online classes daily and only sees a sea of blank and faceless screens. She feels lonely. Talk to the employee who attends online meetings and has constant work interruptions even during lunch and after office hours. He feels like an isolated automaton. And for those of us who live alone, the pain becomes even more acute.
When the floodgates of travel restrictions were lifted across the globe, we flocked to the comfort of our family and friends to satiate our long pent-up primordial needs for connection. Differences were willingly put aside. Arguments were happily forgotten. We readily donned on a new set of rose-colored lenses that allowed us to appreciate others and the world in a different light. After all, we had just come from the other side.
We learned that relationships are salient. I am hypothesizing here but would wager that those who had friends, and I mean those good, trustworthy, thick-and-thin friends would probably have fared better than the ones with surface-level friendship. Facebook and Instagram could never replicate the deep friendships that you develop over a cup of coffee/tea or in the crucible of life’s affliction.
In this article, we are going to look at five ways (in the tabs below) that could help us build deep and meaningful relationships, an investment with a sure return. Let’s dive in.
We have all heard the expression “the more the merrier”. It simply means that the more people or things there are, the better a situation will be. On the contrary, you have the proverbial “too
many cooks spoil the broth” to mean that if you have too many people involved in a task or activity, it will not be done well.
I would like to suggest that strength lies not in numbers but rather in depth of friendship. So, the first way to develop relationships is to pursue deep and meaningful relationships with just a handful of friends. Hence, what I would call the power of small.
Having a small number of good friends offers this main benefit – it gives you the space and time to go deep with a few without spreading yourself too thin. Too many and you just find yourself skimming the surface.
Finance people talk about diversifying your returns by holding several investment types in your basket. But even that has a limit. Take it too far and the returns cancel each other out and it becomes a zero-sum game. So, choose your 5 friends today and try staying with them.
How do I go about choosing my friends? There are no fast rules that I can offer. It is something that you have to trust yourself to do. I believe we are all created unique and there are a few people whom we are naturally drawn to. I have 3, and not actively looking to fill in the two vacancies anytime soon! They enrich my life in so many ways and I thoroughly enjoy their company. They each meet my needs in different ways. I learn so much from each of them that I can enrich my other friendships in new ways.
When you consider who your close friends are to be, you are also inevitably learning to create healthy boundaries for yourself and determining in advance what (or who) your priorities are. The next time a casual acquaintance calls you out for a drink, you may find yourself faced with an excellent opportunity to practice saying ‘No’!
Let me belabor this point. The power of small refers to your close friends, your bosom buddies. You will have friends that fall into various categories such as childhood, high school, or college friends, colleagues, neighbors, your cycling buddies, and friends from your other social and religious groups. Pick your 5 from this lot and this doesn’t at all mean that you burn bridges with the rest.
Let me give you an illustration. I love my neighbor. She is my go-to when I run out of eggs or onions. She looks after my house when I’m away. I WhatsApp her if I remember something while I’m 100 miles away from home. But is she my bosom buddy? No, and it’s ok. Our friendship works very well the way it is.
So, have friends at every tier. Your 5 are at the very top of your friendship pyramid. They are your greatest assets and it follows that they would call for your greatest investments.
Sometimes, the answers to questions we have are just right before our very eyes. But we miss them because of the titles we give them or because we are locked into a certain mindset. Think spouse, think best friend. Or think sister-in-law and think best friend. Do I see some eye-rolling and hear some gawking? Hocus-pocus? Myth?
Many years ago, I would have thought the same. I entered marriage with a mindset that a husband is a husband and a friend is a friend. Duty defines the former and fun, the latter. Both are different breeds and they just don’t mix. How could I possibly complain about my husband to my husband? Don’t all wives need to do that? After all, no one is perfect.
Some of us are immensely blessed with a kind, compassionate and understanding spouse. Our spouse would qualify hands-down as a bosom friend. And because we spend so much time with each other and there is so much potential to do so in the years to come, it just makes great cerebral sense to count on our spouse as one of our best friends.
For some of us, this may be wishful thinking. We are all aware of the harsh realities of life, and for some of us, the pain and experience are grave and fresh. Marriages do not work for many reasons. At times, the investment into a marriage is heavily one-sided and the pay-offs are never reaped.
For those of you who have a spouse, I would like to challenge your mindset – to allow yourself to see your spouse as your friend. Let’s go slow, we are not talking best friend, yet. Could you invest some time and effort into your relationship? Do you both have common interests? Are there some needs that you could meet? When was the last time you laughed together?
What worked for me? Well, our young kids took a toll on our relationship in the early years. And for many years, we were just surviving and at times barely. As the kids grew older, that gave me more opportunities to relax and pursue my interests and gave us more time to spend with each other. It naturally worked for us, in time. Our relationship has improved by leaps and bounds, we have more common interest (in addition to car, coffee and cycling) and we have that mutual trust and dependency between a husband and a wife.
My sister-in-law is now one of my close friends. Five years ago, I would have thought that a crazy idea, but thankfully time and experience have proved me wrong, again. I didn’t realize that I had a fixed mindset about my relationships with in-laws. This mindset was holding me back from appreciating each one of them and seeing them for who they really were. After all, haven’t we all heard about how sticky and difficult those relationships can get?
So, your friend could be closer than you realize.
Next on the list is understanding the fluidity of friendship. Friends come and go, including bosom friends. I have mourned over lost friendships. I have lost friends to their boyfriends, I have lost friends when our paths were leading us down different roads, and I have lost friends who moved on to a different country. I remember crying buckets over a friend who left a few years ago to another country. I had never mourned a friendship as I did hers. I feared that I would never find one like her again.
Losing a friend can be painful. It’s easy to look back and stay stuck in the past, hoping that things would be the same again. But over the years I have learned to let go of them. I have discovered that letting go and moving on is important because it is then that I make space for a new one to blossom.
Coming back to point #1 about the power of small, you may find that as time progresses, the composition of that small group of friends will change over time. I have learned to expect it, I have learned to joyfully release my friends and I have learned to wait in hopeful anticipation of a new one. I have learned to celebrate the new friends that my parted friend is making. I have learned to pray that God would open new doors of wonderful friendship for them. My heart is full knowing that I was blessed to have her for a moment in time.
At times, it may seem like starting all over again and in a sense it is. But each friendship is a marvel of its own. No two friends are alike and no two friendships are the same. Enjoy what/who is in front of you. And enjoy the new journey that you are on with a new companion at your side. You may be in for an exhilarating ride.
In releasing my friends who have moved on, I have also come to realize that distance does affect friendship. Staying in touch over WhatsApp or Zoom could never replicate the real face-to-face communication and sharing that happens in real life. So much of life just cannot be condensed into the minutes or hours that are spent catching up over the phone.
But before you think that all is lost, it is not. You both share a deep past that no time can remove. I love catching up with an old friend. While it is different, it is yet the same. We both pick up from where we left off. So, don’t be afraid to release your bosom friends and be brave to anticipate new ones. You might just surprise yourself.
Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
Eleanor Roosevelt.
This is stating the obvious, but worth repeating. Spending time together. Relationships are built over time and nothing has been discovered that can circumvent this age-old method of gaining and keeping a friend. Modern advancements in technology fail dismally at this, try as they might.
In The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, you will find this quote, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” Applying this to our point, it is the time that you spend with a friend, that makes him/her so important.
Spending time together can take any form you like. This gives you the freedom to explore interests together like pursuing a common hobby. It could be something as rare but exciting like going on a holiday together. Or something commonplace as having a meal together. Or ‘using’ each other as a buddy or accountability partner to move you both closer to your goals. Be creative and adventurous.
I have found that KISS – keeping it simple, stupid! has been helpful. You don’t need to keep going somewhere new or doing something new all the time. Take walks, drink coffee, watch a movie together, it doesn’t have to be complicated and shouldn’t involve too much planning. Once in a while, do explore something new together. That helps to keep the relationship interesting.
So, go on, call your friend, arrange a date with your bestie.
I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.
Winnie The Pooh
Finally, make friends as a family. Friends don’t have to be one-to-one. It doesn’t have to be just mom’s friend or dad’s friend. Friendships can take the form of many-to-one or one-to-many or many-to-many. Friends can make up an entire family.
As I have moved on in the progression of life, from singlehood to being a couple and then on to marriage and having small kids to now teenage kids, my circle of friends has changed, adjusting to my stage in the lifecycle.
This requires a bit of explanation. When I was single, my friends were single too. Rarely did I have married friends or friends with children. When I got married I had married couples as
friends; two friends instead of one, both husband and wife. And my husband joined in to make a merry four.
And when we had children, I became friends with an entire family – mother, father, and children. And they all became friends with my husband and children. Get the picture? So, now we had so many relationships going on at the same time.
So, how does this help to build deep and meaningful relationships? It’s quite simple. Let me explain with an example.
When my kids set a playdate with their friend which happens to be a family friend, as a mom I get pulled into the entire execution – as chauffeur, as a cook, the works. Inevitably, I would also be spending time with their mom when I drop the kids off or when we all get into the car to head to the soccer field, you get the idea. Our lives begin to criss-cross more. Overlapping not just at playdates, but also at the movies or the ice-cream store or even at the hospital.
More opportunities begin to open up for you to connect. More opportunities might just be what you need to start building deeper and more meaningful relationships. So, get involved in your children and husband’s life.
Let me end this blog post with a summary of the points we have covered.
1. Keep it small
2. Think of those closest to you, give them a chance
3. Let old friends go and embrace new ones
4. Spend time together, and
5. Make family friends.
I wish you success in your journey of friendship.
If you enjoyed this post, share it… with your FRIENDS!
I would love to hear your thoughts or even a story, about what friendship has meant to you and what are some ways you have tried building, meaningful friendships. Leave a comment below.
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