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I have lots of personal experience with long-lost friends. For one thing, I have always struggled with social anxiety, so finding real friendship isn't easy for me in the first place. I've always felt like I was different...not like other people. Indeed, I still don't share common interests with many people. When someone came along whom I identified with, I felt so relieved! When I was able to form a comfortable, honest friendship with someone, it was a rare and beautiful thing. It made me feel valuable and at peace. With the exception of my marriage and my family, though, this closeness never lasted long enough. I would form an intimate friendship, only to have it interrupted by graduation, a move, a job change, a church change, or the like.
As they left me (or as I left them), I knew that an annual coffee date or an occasional e-mail, or even a daily Facebook snippet would not be the same as a face-to-face, day-to-day friendship. I would go through a real period of sadness, even mourning, but I would tell myself it was better to love and lose than never to have loved at all. I would tell myself "That which does not kill you makes you stronger." I would tell myself how brave I had been, and how good it was that I valued my friend so much. Now I am cautious. No, it's worse than that. I have stopped forming close friendships with people I like because I know it won't last. Why would I want to put myself through that again? After a dozen times or so, I've learned to keep people at arm's length. As a result, I am a very lonely person. I'm used to it, true enough. I would be really uncomfortable if suddenly a friend asked me to go shopping with them or have dinner. I'm set in my ways, it seems. Still, I long for other people.
We live in an ever-shifting, ever-mobile, ever-restless culture which, I confess, I don't understand. This culture bothers me. I'm an old-fashioned girl, a home girl. I'm happiest when I'm in my hometown and near my family. While others revile the rosy, 1950's stereotype of a happy housewife in a happy home in a happy little town, I idealize this. I find myself daydreaming about how nice it would be to live in the same community with the same people my whole life, even if that meant living near people I don't care for. Wouldn't it be fun to live near the same nosy neighbor, the same stuck-up former classmate, even the same slack-jawed ex-boyfriend? They would become constants in your life, and I enjoy constancy. I like knowing what to expect.
I was born smack in between Generation X and Generation Y. My Generation X friends would be happy to strum their guitars with their buddies in their parents' basement for the rest of their lives, but eventually they had to grow up and get out of the house. It is my ambitious Gen Y friends who have lead the way to our society's disregard for the setting down of roots. These jet-setting young people are so connected, electronically speaking, and yet so detached. In their attempt to focus on everything, they end up becoming splintered. Trying to get and keep their attention is discouraging. They are so career-oriented, so set on promotions, graduate school, deadlines, and tenaciously chasing their dreams. They are friendly and eager, but their minds are always somewhere else. These folks don't seem to mind their portable lives. Was I the only one who longed for lasting attachments?
Perhaps my ideals were just a silly fancy. Perhaps I'd been watching too much "Anne of Green Gables." Perhaps what I needed was someone else's perspective. So I asked someone who has vast experience with this mobile culture...a college professor. As the head of a small, close-knit department, I decided he would be an expert on intimate-but-temporary friendships. I thought his attitude would be a casual one. I thought he would say, "Yes, it's rather sad to see the good ones move on, but since they are making their own way in the world, it's a happy time, too." Blah, blah, blah. But that's not what he said. I was surprised to find that, at least in some cases, the loss was excruciating.
My solution to living in this busy, fleet-footed society has been to cut myself off from it. Most people's solution is to care less. In this culture of celebrating the healthy and natural, neither is really a healthy or natural approach to dealing with other people. One shouldn't have to chose between becoming reclusive or becoming apathetic. Is there another way? Is it possible that the right choice is to forge close ties and risk them being broken? Can that actually be good for us? Is it really better to love and lose than never to have loved at all? It seems like a precarious way to lead one's life. But at the rate we are moving, it may be the only way.
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