I happened upon the above article by chance but it’s something that’s weighed on me for a while. What are the factors to how we gauge friendships. While the study suggested that there’s certainly some milestones in terms of interaction hours I tend to question how effective that is at framing a friendship.
The crux of the article focused some baseline such as 50 hours of interaction in moving from acquaintance to friend. While close friends were those whom people interacted with for 200 hours or more. While I would find those numbers plausible it sort of misses out on another factor which is the affect of time and lack of interaction. That idea has wrestled in my mind for some time.
Following my divorce I knew I had to change how I interacted with people. In my view there were friends who were established through the marriage and my ex, there were friends that I considered neutral, best friends, close friends, casual friends and acquaintances. The vast majority of my friendships were really now more acquaintances or casual than meaningful friends. I used to use a basic metric, if I have had several meals with you, or better yet if I’ve cooked for you, you can at least be thought of as a friend. The changes in dynamics with most of the friends who overlapped with my ex made me realize that there’s definitely a negative counter on friendships as well. Like any living thing, failing to nurture friendships will over time take its toll. I had to play a dangerous and painful game of understanding where my mental and emotional efforts would have to be put to survive. Some past friends has to be culled. Not because of who they were, but because of the circumstances of the divorce. Interacting with them on any level was draining and would often cause me to go into a spiral that I found no good way out of. This pruning has gone on for the last two years and admittedly while those people whom I still communicate with are certainly locked into a ‘friend’ status with me, I realize the majority have fallen by the way-side due to neglect, either intentional or through happenstance.
Quantitative analysis is all fine and good but I also realize that there’s a far less tangible qualitative aspect that cannot be readily pinned down which affects how our friendships are nurtured, grow or wither. For me I’d like to think that the closest rung of my friends have now seen me through good and bad and are able to weather both my moods and life circumstances. There is a trust there that I won’t try to be something I’m not. To those friends who are now casual or even bumped back down to simply acquaintances, these are people while I may want to keep in contact with, I realize probably won’t see much of me beyond a cultivated image. Good or bad it’s how I have to compartmentalize relationships in my life. Take the article with a grain of salt and just remember that friendships take effort. Sometimes it can be trying, you may not get to keep all the friends you want to, but make that effort.
