I’ve been thinking about friends quite a bit these last few months.
Friends, I’m sure you’ll agree, are good things to have. Not much of a revelation there. But friendship, that magical bond between companions, is a curious matter, given that we all have very different kinds of friends.
We have close friends, hopefully, people we see and do things with on a regular basis. We like them a lot, they seem to like us a lot, we exchange favours, cook each other meals, and tell funny, sometimes embarrassing, stories about each other because we’ve shared some personal history. “Remember that time …” It’s all good.
At a first degree of separation, we have friends who used to be close. Maybe work or school or love has distanced us and that connection we once had has eroded; we’re now living different lives, we rarely see each other anymore, maybe we don’t even talk much, and if we did talk, might have little to talk about. Fortunately, I have some distant friends and, when we see each other, we pick up right where we left off. Amazing.
What I would call vacation friends constitute a curious category. You meet a group of people while on vacation, you’re tight for a few days or a week or two, then bingo, they’re gone and you’re gone. Some of these friendships might even have evolved very quickly into an intense romance. But how often do those last? You part, you promise to call, to write, to visit, maybe you do, you probably don’t. Ultimately, I think, absence makes the heart grow yonder.
There are rare exceptions. At a summer French-language school in the Loire Valley, I met a Swiss named Markus and we hit it off; that was 35 years ago. I visited his family when the course ended, we did a short bike tour in the Alps, his mom showed me how to make a proper Swiss fondue, we had a meal or a drink together whenever his Swissair flight stopped in Montreal. He no longer flies to Montreal, so I haven’t seen him in at least 20 years, but I spoke to him on WhatsApp a little while ago. It was like we hadn’t been apart. What a treat.
We can have seasonal friends, too, people we don’t see or hear from for months, then pick right up when golf season or curling season resumes. Suddenly, we’re spending a bunch of time together, sharing drinks, meals, laughs. Then the season ends and it’s “see ya’ next year.” That’s OK too.
It’s nice to be friends with your kids. It’s particularly nice, even essential, to be friends with your partner. Love is one thing, but I think like is just as important. I married the woman who had become my best friend, and I still think of her that way. I hope Dianne’s reading.
Regrettably, sometimes, we can lose track of friends. For some reason I can’t explain, I’ve drifted apart from a number of them. It’s not as if I didn’t like them anymore. I’m not one to dwell on the past, and guilt doesn’t quite capture the regret I feel; after all, they haven’t looked me up either. But once in a while I’ll Google someone I used to know, or search for them on Facebook, and I’m always astonished, and disappointed, that I can’t find them. It seems a shame somehow.
Then there’s the group of people we’re merely friendly with. We’re not friends exactly, in the sense that we don’t invite each other over for drinks or dinner, but we’re happy to see them and they seem pleased to see us. We chat a bit when our paths cross, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Facebook friends seem to cover a range of such relationships, giving the notion of “friend” a sense of the imprecision I’m talking about. Like you, maybe, I have a few Facebook friends I don’t even know. Typically, they’re friends of other Facebook friends, so it feels like there’s potential for a deeper kind of affinity there. Or at least a shared interest in our respective posts.
Some people, like my mother, have lots of friends of various categories, while others, like my father, gone now, are more selective; he was very close with a few friends, but he was liked by almost everyone who met him. At his crowded memorial service a few years ago, someone remarked that he’d died “rich in friends.”
I think that’s the best way to go.
