I've been thinking about friendship lately. I haven't made a new friend in a while. I'm here on this island without my husband, and there are friends I could make, and people I like, but I haven't reached out. Maybe part of it is that I'm doing a very public job, with an element of performance to it, and I'm happy to retreat to quiet time with the dogs in the evenings. But part of it is that I've lost my drive to make new friends. I think this is a good thing.
For the first ten years of my life I had a few good friends and thought popularity was forever out of my reach. I was on the defensive against being the outcast -- I had a small taste of social rejection in second grade and the summer after fifth grade, enough that I spent the next ten years being very observant. I learned how to read the social cues so I wouldn't misstep. I learned how to figure out the invisible rules that made the dividing lines between groups. I learned how to detect what people want, and what people are afraid of. Learning how to read those invisible signs is like learning how to make the invisible wind and current propel your boat forward. You learn the rules and you figure out how to make new friends. The third ten years of my life were spent relaxing from this vigil. I was no longer on the defensive and I'd gotten good at making friends. I could study the natives and get myself invited in. I liked that a whole lot. And I was still operating on a model of scarcity -- there aren't so many people who really qualify as friends, so if you find someone promising, hurrah! That's a keeper!
But now I know that the world is abundant. It is full of friends. It is already full of more friends, more people I already love and admire and enjoy, than I can really hope to spend enough time with. And then there are the people whose lovability I have only glimpsed, whose insightful depths I have not yet plumbed. There are so many of those people. There are all of your fabulous friends, for instance, who I have never even met. I will not be friends with all of them. I am learning that I do not need to be sad about this. I am learning, in fact, that I want a smaller life, fewer big parties and more lingering dinners with just a few folks.
This is why I do not understand Facebook. It seems like a brilliant tool for the decade I used to be in, the one that was dedicated to evaluating possible other kindred spirits, and showing myself back to them, and then connecting and pursuing and laughing together at all the wonderful ways we could have fun. But it makes explicit the fact that we are not, actually, friends, all these wonderful people I once knew and admire and enjoy but do not make time to play with in the current arrangement of our lives. That makes me uncomfortable, all these rituals of inviting and writing on walls and peeking in on people I know from years ago or work with or otherwise am only loosely connected to. I don't know what it really means. I'm sure I'll get to a point where I think of it just as a more dynamic version of a phone book or an alumni directory, holding a repository of people I might someday reconnect with. But my instinct is still to think of it as the beginning of an actual pursuit of friendship, a connection that both people expect to strengthen. Which makes me feel worse, not better, about the people who are my "friends" on Facebook. It feels like I am falling short of friendship with 90% of them. So I feel both a flattered excitement and a guilty dread each time someone makes me their Facebook friend, before realizing it doesn't mean either of those things, that it really doesn't mean anything. This woman captured that discomfort pretty well, I thought.