The media of friendship

My high school friends and I liked to go to the movie theater every once in a while. To tell the truth, going to the movies was never my first choice. I have never been big on the whole Marvel universe, but I sat through Thor: Love and Thunder because it meant spending time with the guys. After the movie, we would go to the Cold Stone on the other side of the theater parking lot. I remember once my friend Nick fought to finish an enormous waffle cone. He won, but his stomach was wounded for the rest of the night. To me, enjoying ice cream should never have been a battle in the first place; our thin wallets were wounded enough. But now it is a fond memory and something to laugh about. 

College has taught me that I am not one for friend groups. Maybe because I am not so interested in doing stuff with friends, but more so in just talking to them and getting to know them. I am more interested in people than events. Deep down, aren’t we all?

So isn’t it funny that often what organizes and motivates time spent with friends is some event or happening, and it is only through this that the friendships grow? I’d hesitate to ask a friend to just sit and talk somewhere on a Wednesday afternoon, but I’d readily schedule lunch with him at noon at NDH. Isn’t this odd, given that the main thing is not the food, but the conversation and the person? Always good to kill two birds with one stone, but one bird is much bigger than the other. Even so, I sometimes kill neither, just because I can’t figure out a way to kill the smaller one. That is, when I can’t muster up a ‘reason’ for getting together with someone, I don’t get together at all. A shame. 

I have come to accept that our relationships with each other usually grow through some thing — a shared interest, a shared meal, a common experience. These are our true social media — the fibers that link, tie and tighten our relationships. All our idiosyncrasies are loose strings that flail about lonesomely until, if we are lucky, another string of the same odd color and material happens to loop around it. We quickly sense when we have met someone who shares some aspect of ourselves we can’t exactly name or express. But, strictly speaking, this sense is not immediate. Rather, this sense relies on conversation — i.e., the transmission of a recognized sound of a shared language from vibrating vocal cords onto vibrating air into vibrating ear drums, then along an electrical impulse into the neurons of the brain. 

If we are very lucky, the loop between the similar strings fastens into a knot, without other strings interfering and entangling, without the distance apart exceeding the length of the strings, without muck from the surroundings getting on the strings and making them too slippery.

Sometimes, a link, a friendship, can be spoiled by other conflicting interests, by moving (physically) apart or by miscellaneous external factors. Once a knot has been tightly tied, our other strings may latch onto similar strings hanging off our friend. These subsequent strings may not be quite identical in color and material, and the knots may be more forced, but the force with which we tie them is not the force of our own stubborn selfishness, but the force of love. 

True friends, having found that one seed of similarity, rush to the hose to water it and search for other seeds to grow in this new, fertile garden. True friendships begin, as all do, with something in common, but grow into a relationship with the whole person, or as much of the person as possible. Over time, true friends become free from these social media: it no longer matters whether there is something in common or not; the care and interest in the other person overpowers such concerns. The filial love between them is what is in common. The theologian takes it one step further and says that their communion in Christ unites them, and that a kind of trinity is formed between self, friend and God. 

I think it is partly in our human nature to need some social medium to relate to somebody else — to need something to talk about and joke about, to need something to do together and a time and a place to do it. I think it is partly a quaint feature of life that often the deepest bonds between semi-divine creatures grow from the most ordinary, shallow things.

But I also think that there are things we can do to respect and recognize the sheer weight of every moment of life and every person we encounter, especially those we call our friends. We can be more intentionally attentive to the people we are with, rather than the things we are doing with them. We can try to find things to do which are good at facilitating conversation. I, for one, have found meals, puzzles, walks, cooking and car rides to be especially fruitful social media.