Last weekend, after an intense work week, I met an old friend for drinks at one of my favourite places where the food is crappy as jail but the vibe is as relaxing as it gets. We indulged in the usual banter, some work talk, some life talk and then we went on to discuss some common friends that we made in 2024 and had a fallout with. After indulging in some old lady-style gossip about them, he ended the conversation with a very simple statement which lingered in my thoughts for a long time afterwards. He said, “People drop friends these days so easily as if friendship meant nothing more than hanging around”.
I’m not from the Gen-Z generation whose attention span is 5 seconds and who value the virtual social popularity indicator over anything else. I come from a generation where people were not irreplaceable, where relationships didn’t end because you had a difference of opinion and where power of conversation and words was real.
There are no rules for friendship, friendships are tricky and honestly we aren’t taught how to maintain a friendship similar to family relationships or romantic partnerships. Friends are pieces of our life who just fall into places without us needing to make adjustments to fit them. Maybe that’s why, for me, friends have always held the highest pedestal of the relationship pyramid.
How do you make friends? Do you actively look for them on apps or scan the faces in a bar? No, friends just happen to come into your life seamlessly, as simple as saying hi to the person sitting on the same bench as you in your kindergarten class with whom you sometimes end up sharing your entire school years and become best friends. My best friend is the guy I met on my college bus 25 years ago and even today when we talk, it feels like we are back in college, as if the time never changed for us. I have often thought about why it’s so easy to talk to him when I struggle to open my personal life to other people now. I think it’s about having a comfort zone with him, friends allow us to be vulnerable with one another. They let us ask silly questions and give us the answers we need. They don’t gloat when you fail or try to make you feel worse. They give you the honest truth when you ask for it and do it gently when kid gloves are needed. Strong friendships are essential throughout life and can make or break our ability to manage all of the responsibilities we might carry—from career to community to relational to familial to parental roles. I occasionally call him when I just need someone to talk to since we live in different cities now, but for that 1 hour of conversation that we have, I forget the stress, I forget the daily churn, I just remember how it feels to talk to someone without having to put up a mask.
As you grow older and enter into a job or parenthood, there are significant changes that happen in your social relationships. For e.g. you end up making “social friends” based on your needs, like carpool friends, parent group friends, which end when these needs end. Friends you make in an office usually cease to exist when you switch jobs. These people are not usually friends, they are acquaintances that fall in your life due to situations and you start spending time with them because of life/work schedules. You just end up putting a cloak of friendship on these people because what else would you call them?
As I move further and further in the self-realization phase of life, I have learned to drop these acquaintances a lot more than what I would have done earlier. Being connected to the “right person” isn’t as important as being connected to people who are “right” for you. No one is perfect in this world, each one of us comes with a set of flaws and if you have the tolerance for imperfection of your friend then it’s a true friendship because imperfection is irrelevant to friendship.
