Earlier today I wrote an e-mail to a friend. We try to write each other daily, but sometimes can go weeks where one's too busy at work to write back. Since his last e-mail somewhat finished the subject we had been discussing back and forth, I started another tangent conversation. I'm posting an excerpt containing this portion purely because I haven't written anything even mildly thoughtful here in what seems to be months. I had wanted to touch upon this topic in depth for some time now, but just haven't felt in the mood to do so. Even now, I find myself too exhausted and instead cheat by tossing in text that was used for something else and only scratches upon the surface-level questions of a topic I would like to explore further. Perhaps a few more e-mails with my friend will yield conclusions less obvious.
Something I've been mulling over recently… what types of roles do your friends play in your life / what do you expect out of someone to consider them a friend (versus just as an acquaintance or co-worker/collaborator, etc.)? Perhaps I'm trying to be too rigid in my definitions instead of just accepting my relationships with people as they come and go. Or perhaps I'm becoming too demanding of people that aren't meeting my tacit expectations (which is such a stereotypical female fault that I can't help but cringe whenever I do catch myself acting so). I'm not sure what in particular instigated this sentiment, but I find myself incredibly disappointed lately in my relationships with other people. Everybody seems so busy within their own lives (myself included of course) that they hardly ever seem to have time to connect with one another. I meet up with my one girl friend maybe about once a month nowadays and we spend so much of our conversations just playing catch up on tedious enumerations of what's been going on in our lives since we last met up that genuine discourse (and thereby connection) never actually occurs. My least favorite question: what's new? It drives me nuts to be asked this by friends and I'm not completely sure why. Perhaps because underlining that question is just how disconnected we've become - that conversation no longer flows out naturally but has to be forced out through a vague request. And why does there have to be anything new? It irritates me so much that I've started purposely withholding information from her as if to say (again, tacitly), what right do you have to know what's going on in my life if you choose not to make yourself a part of it? But then, how much of an effort have I made to maintain our friendship since she moved in with her boyfriend? I'll stereotype some more and admit that I've consistently avoided befriending girls that seek marriage and children as key components to their future happiness because I've noticed how much everything (and everyone) else becomes a far lower priority, i.e. used to fill in the down time or to break up the routine. (More accurately though, I have a tendency of avoiding interaction with females in general for reasons that go beyond the present topic.) I see a number of my friendships disintegrating in a similar fashion: lunch dates, dinner dates, tag voicemails, all initiated upon the temporal excuse that it's been so long since we've caught up! (Ergh, did I use "temporal" correctly? I'm too lazy to decide myself.) I've never been one to have acquaintances (part of my excessive all or nothing, perfectionist nature), but as we all get older and more involved within our little, separated worlds that's what our interactions are resolving into. Even the new people I've met in recent months, and within the past couple of years, seem to desire nothing more than going out to dinner or going to a concert or anything so long as we're doing something, where conversation about our thoughts or our emotions are reserved for the down time after we've already exhausted talking about how our week was. Are relationships (of the bf/gf variety) the only form of intimacy (of the emotional variety) adults desire to achieve? Again, I'm probably misdirecting my frustration, accusing human interaction itself instead of my own inability to bring up such topics at random if they truly are what I want to talk about, but such topics can't really be brought up at random without sounding awkward or forced, no? If we still lived in the same city and didn't interact so primarily through e-mail, would our friendship have dissolved similarly? Would your being now married have actually had affect (effect?) on our friendship in that case as well? (As I don't think it has changed anything here.) Maybe I just need to convert all my in-person friendships into asynchronous text-based interactions as the solution. ;-)
This is another quote, related in my own thoughts though maybe not so readily with what's given here, that I meant to elaborate upon but didn't trust myself to do so level-headed, but perhaps it speaks for itself: "To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune." (This is taken from Chaplin's autobiography actually.)
It feels kind of like this:
Maybe I've hesitated on these subjects because I suspect my own thoughts to be so considerably skewed. Maybe that is why I instead look for insights from others.
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