What has happened to friendship? An awfully repeated question, almost a normalized one, nowadays. I don’t want to go on a rant about the ideals of friendship and how it used to be in the golden old days compared to our current moment, but I do have to admit that it is a question that I find myself pondering about at least once a week. Have we romanticized the idea of friendship through watching movies and reading novels or have we created an almost ideal social imaginary of what it entails so we can hold on to something in a world where everything is in a constant state of move and change? I have no idea. What I do know and could perhaps reflect upon is how fast paced, competitive, need-driven our world has become, hence leaving little or no space to those idealistic romanticized imaginations of bonds and the so called flowery term of “friendship.”
First of all, let me clarify what I mean by referring to friendship. Obviously we all have different definitions, expectations, and imaginations of friendship; ones that are based on what we hold upon ourselves and hope others would hold upon us. For the sake of this semi rant, here’s what I would define as the friendship meal by outlining its basic ingredients: It is the act of sharing, caring, an attempt to exchange unconditional love, understanding, investment of time and effort and one that does not have space for jealousy and contains a larger than life container of tolerance and acceptance. Who am I kidding? Maybe my standards are too high!
Let’s look closely at the first two components: sharing and caring. My best friend and I live on opposite ends of Cairo, with at least a two hour drive between us. She wakes up at 6 a.m. and ends her day of work and domestic responsibilities at around 10 p.m. on a good day! My day starts at 5:30 a.m. and between my studies, work, and exercise; I end my day at around 10 p.m. as well on a very good day. We end up texting one another once or twice throughout the day, a simple good morning to at least make sure that we are alive and a simple good night at the end of the day to make sure that we have survived the day. At the end of every week, we try to exchange via texts our detailed schedules on hopes that we would be able to meet for a drink or a bite. Our friendship has been reduced to communication behind a screen with goofy emoticons expressing whatever sharing and caring notions we have for one another. It is indeed a fast paced world.
Let’s move on to the second set of ingredients: time and effort. Well, as I have displayed above we obviously have no time to meet or talk. But come on, we can always make time, no? Well, on my way home from work, I do pass by for an hour to have a chat with a friend I had just met months ago. I need to see people and relax! I need to unwind after a long day, I owe it to myself! My best friend, on the other hand, has finished work and decided she does not feel like going to bed early so she invites some colleagues and neighbours over for a few drinks and nibbles. Again, this is not a daily routine but she is tired and feels like sharing good company! It’s only fair! We don’t necessarily share those moments in our morning messages. But we do share a lot of “I miss you”, “what’s your latest news?” or “give me headlines till we meet.” Do we both invest time and effort, hmmmm that’s debatable!
Now on to our third ingredient: no space for jealousy. Luckily my best friend and I don’t have any space for jealousy. It is just the nature of our relationship! I don’t get bothered at all when I see pictures of her dining out with other friends and colleagues while I have been waiting for weeks to see her. She does not get upset when she finds out I went shopping with other people who live close by when we always used to go shopping together. None of that at all! Hmmmmm. Well, at least we don’t play the ‘over protective of our men’ card which apparently seeps into friendship nowadays.
Finally, to the last ingredients: tolerance and acceptance. I can’t personalize that one to make a point; I will instead resort to general complaints I have been hearing a lot. I often hear of how friends get bored of listening to one another complain about their lives, of how they choose not to go out with them because they don’t like how they conduct themselves publicly anymore, and most of all how they find their friends not as fun and enjoyable as company to hang around with. Those are all very valid reasons and people often have different ways of handling interactions.
However, coming to think of it, if our major communication channels are reduced to screens and text messages, how much meaning can come out of such interactions? How could tolerance and acceptance be even part of the friendship pot if the basics to any human and humane interaction such as compassion and love which are often manifested through body language and eye contact no longer exist? Are people to blame or is it the world we now inhabit, one that is premised on a very fast paced competitively driven machine that turns us into robots lacking the spices which breathe life into any encounter? And I ponder….
Marwa Sabah
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
