Finding your tribe: The joy of FFN (Friends for now)

In previous blogs I’ve spoken about the changing nature of friendships. In this one I am going to look at how we decide who to give our time to. More than one friend has said that they are “editing” their friends list as part of a greater stock take of their lives.

Over the years I have learnt to not have expectations of others for a myriad of reasons. If I don’t expect anything from others, then I cannot be disappointed if they don’t deliver. I also don’t run the risk of overburdening them. As some-one who in their younger life did make the mistake of being too much and being too needy, learning not to over-stretch a friendship has been an important life lesson. But can it be equally damaging to have no expectations? I have prided myself on becoming a “low-maintenance” friend. That person who is easy-going and no trouble, believing that my friendships will last better if I don’t impose in any way. It was a blog that I read, author not noted (my bad), this week on the swipe right on my phone that really got me thinking about how being low-maintenance can have its issues too. Of course asking and expecting too much can make the relationship too heavy for the other person to carry and therefore unsustainable. But can expecting too little can make the friendship too thin, and ourselves and our needs of little importance or consequence? Real connections are sometimes messy, as both participants do have needs and feelings, and sometimes we do have to address issues and negotiate. And real connections do require effort.

After a conversation with another friend on the topic I got thinking about the types of connections that we have. The enduring connections, the circumstantial ones and the dysfunctional ones.

The enduring connections are easy. These are the friendships where we can be our unedited selves, and even if we go for long periods without contact we somehow never become strangers. It always feels as if we saw one another yesterday. But people we enjoy this connection with aren’t necessarily available on a day-to-day basis. They might live a distance away, or life commitments might preclude more regular catch ups. Which means they alone might not be able to meet all our social needs. And strange as it may seem now, it took me a while to understand that as a human it was alright to need others, more than alright, it was an essential part of my (and all other humans) being. Amazing as it is to have a friend you catch up with after years with no strangeness, what do you do in those intervening years?

One friend, the same one who was having the friends edit, did say that she had come to feel that meeting up every 2-3 months with some-one didn’t constitute an emotionally supportive connection. Some-one needed to be more present than that. That’s not to say those that I see infrequently can’t be emotionally supportive. Some of those friends (and me to them) have been the ones I’ve called in a dark moment when I’ve needed the counsel of a trusted friend, but I get what my friend meant. It’s that, perhaps lower-level but consistent, emotional presence that comes with seeing some-one more regularly.

Enter our circumstantial connections. People we are friends with because circumstances are conducive. We live close by, we have similar interests, we are at similar stages in our lives, we have mutual friends, and so on. When our circumstances change so will these friendships, but they are every bit as precious as the lifelong enduring connections even if they are just for a season in our lives, if they enrich that season. These are the people we can see more regularly, because circumstances support that. Maybe counterintuitively, these are the ones that will be the support network at a given time, even if they don’t become lifelong and enduring connections. In doing my own life audit, rather than thinking about who to drop, it’s about who is there, and who can be there. And where can I show up and be there?

For each of us this will look different, but to get started I looked at where I spend most of my time, and where I can attend regularly enough to be able to be present for meaningful, even if transient over the longer term, connections. My big answer was work, as someone who works 5 days a week, my colleagues are the people I see by far and away the most often. That has settled something big in my mind. All these posts about a colleague can’t be a friend that circulate are taking away something really important. When we spend so much time in a place, we damn well do need friends there, people we can share with and trust. They are the people that are there every day, just as our classmates were in the past. Of course not all colleagues will be friends, there are bullies in the workplace just as there were bullies in the playground, but some can and will be friends. Yes, at times there may be conflicts, and it might get tricky, but there is no such thing as the frictionless friendship (as the blogger, whose name I didn’t get, noted). All real and authentic connections will sometimes bump a bit. Outside of work, where can I show up regularly and become part of the group? For me I think it is the walking group I joined years ago, but have got a bit intermittent with. I could make the decision to go more often, and by doing so become more part of the group again. I might not see people there outside of the group but seeing them each week (or fortnight) still allows connections to form. And maybe it doesn’t matter if these aren’t all lifelong friendships (the joy of FFN) if they are mutually supportive in the here and now. And who knows what is up ahead anyway or how things will pan out. Now is actually all we have.

The final note is the dysfunctional connections. A dysfunctional connection can take many forms. It could be that they sap our energy, make us anxious or feel that we are less than in some way. Maybe there are double standards, or they disrespect boundaries or habitually put us down or let us down. Healthy friendships, however long or short, are bidirectional and mutually supportive. Or it could be a circumstantial connection that has passed its time. I have made the mistake in the past of holding onto friendships that have lost their energy and are no longer working. Sometimes it is just time to move on. Or it can be incompatible needs or lives, someone needs or wants more than I can give or vice-versa, or maybe our lives have become too different for there to be common ground. Perhaps these are the ones to recognise as needing to be pruned. Either cut back or removed altogether.

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