What Is A Friend?

I'm feeling very sad today as I sit and contemplate the status of my friendships. Who are my friends? What does friendship mean? I do not get these 'blue' periods very often but when I do usually dwell on them and let them fester. Today I choose a different route and try to exorcise these demons.

It begins with a simple 'social networking' site, Facebook. On it you try to find 'friends'. It seems to be a bit of a competition to have the most 'friends' and there are people with hundreds, even thousands of 'friends'. I find this hard to believe, under my definitions of friendship, and I doubt that many of them are even more than passing acquaintances. But I have found the site to be quite interesting in connecting me to people I haven't thought about in years.

Now I don't believe that a friend, even a truly great friend, is someone you have to talk to even frequently. In fact, I have one friend, a dear and close friend, that I only speak to perhaps a couple of times a year. But I know that if I called her tomorrow because, say, I needed help burying a body, she would be there in no time, shovel in hand. I don't think that a great friend even has to be someone you've had a long, close acquaintance with. Two very good friends, who I mention here frequently, I 'met' over the Internet only about eighteen months ago. But they have become my greatest cheerleaders and supporters and I hope that we will always maintain that friendship even though one I have never seen in person.

When I quit work a little over a year ago, I expected certain people to still be a profound presence in my life. I was, however, realistic in that I know people will forget me (out of sight out of mind, so to speak) but there were a few that I thought would truly be solidly a part of my life. It hurts me greatly that even though I send emails and repeated requests to get together, I have been pretty much forgotten and largely ignored. It is easy to move on for others it seems and while I hoped that I at least was different, it seems that I am not.

I have a friend that I was so close too that it seemed we shared a brain. He too is distant, never responding when I ask to get together, never answering my emails with much more than terse answers and minimum verbiage. Does this treatment now negate the years of joy and shared experiences? No, of course not, but still it saddens me. I miss the connection that we once had.

Being the kind of person who always assumes that the blame for such things rests squarely on her shoulders, I feel this burden and doubt most acutely. But perhaps it is just that life brings you the people that you need into your life when you need them and that it doesn't have to be forever. Perhaps friendships have expiration dates, like canned goods that are best consumed by a certain date. As we evolve as people, perhaps the friends in our lives, following their own evolution, move on as well. Our bonds may not be meant to be permanent. It does not lesson the depth of feeling we once felt nor the contribution that these friendships have brought to our lives. But I still envy those people who seem to still be friends with people they have known since infancy.

So what started this bought of self-indulgent melancholia? Someone I considered to be a good friend 'turning down' my friend request on Facebook. How's that for pathos? A place where some of my 'friends' are people I haven't seen in twenty years and wasn't particularly close to even then. Where games of "Mafia Wars", "poking" people and taking quizzes that mostly amount to a steaming pile of meaningless drivel is supposed to equal actual social interaction. And I take this personally? Well of course I do, that's who I am, I take everything personally.

So while this seems silly to many of you Loyal Readers, I'm sure, to me it is why I am a writer and why I choose comedy and romance as my genres of choice. Because like the character in the novel who ties her every bit of correspondence with a satin ribbon which grows tattered over the years because she takes them out an re-reads every line, I have cherished the friends I have made and what they brought into my life. And I mourn when they are no more. Only it's definitely not as poetic when that old woman unties the tattered ribbon from her iPhone and bemoans the low friend count on Facebook.