I was in the middle of drafting a
blog post about the only thing I missed about university: my friends. I was
thinking about how much I miss parts of the girls' hostel I lived in. How I
could waltz in and out of my friends' rooms for silly gist and laughs, or just
sit down and do nothing together. We could study, goof around, eat, complain
about life, discuss our grand plans for the future or simply exist in the same
room. There was something so effortless about it. Then my brain started doing
the weird thing she does to make me start questioning things I think I already
know.
Does that mean I miss my friends, though?
Who exactly are my friends?
What even is friendship?
Is proximity and access exaggerating acquaintances?
Would the people I think I miss call me their friend
too?
I typically give a side-eye to
people who speak about any form of friendship in a negative light, so that is
not what I am trying to do. I am simply doing an open internal interrogation.
<Or introspection, wo, any one, hehehe>.
I know there are people who are
clearly acquaintances and people who are clearly friends-friends but then there
is this strange middle ground of people who are too close to be called
acquaintances but like, not close enough to be called friends.
I think that is what The New York
Times article “The Vexing Problem of the Medium Friend” was trying
to express because honestly, what do we call these people? I can't exactly go
around saying, “xyz is my medium-friend.” Because wetin be that?
If I am being honest, there are people I genuinely like, whose lives I care
about and I am always happy to see but at the same time, there is perhaps this
reciprocal unspoken:
I love you, but please don't expect me to go to the ends of the earth
for you.
Although even that gets complicated because I don't think willingness to go
out of your way for someone is necessarily a good measure of friendship because
I would probably help somebody I simply liked if I could. So what actually
makes someone a friend? Is it emotional intimacy? History? How much you know
about each other? How often you speak? How much you can rely on each other? How
much you enjoy each other's company?
I got curious and, naturally, spiraled down the rabbit hole of friendship
psychology.
I found a Dartmouth study that discovered that people who were friends
tended to have more similar neural responses to the same videos than people who
were farther apart socially. Apparently, our brains can have a surprisingly
similar way of responding to the world around us.
I also discovered Dunbar's number. It is the idea that humans can maintain roughly
150 stable relationships in varying levels of closeness. I found it comforting
because it kind of explains how we really can't all hold the same weight in
each other's lives even if we are all friends in an academia way. Apparently we
typically have the ability to have less than 5 friends in our inner circle,
about 15 close friends, 50 people in our wider network that could be made up of
people we genuinely like but are not close to, then acquaintances and in my
very-not-humble opinion, none of those categories diminish the relationship.
I think the problem comes when the
categories don't match? For example, when you regard someone as a close friend
and they regard you as part of their wider social network. That difference can
be heartbreaking but ultimately, perhaps the only thing to do is adjust your
expectations and act accordingly.
Contrary to popular opinion and in the
absence of a more expansive vocabulary in the English Language, I actually
think “friend” is the one label we should be most comfortable using loosely.
The gap between acquaintance and the sort of deep, reciprocal
friendship we imagine when we hear the word friend is just too wide.
There has to be something in between. Maybe medium-friend is not such a
terrible description after all? Or saying stuff like, “oh yeah that is my
hello,hello hi,hi friend”? that is my “surface level friend?” or just a plain “that
is my coworker/classmate/hostel mate that I’m cordial with”? then for our
actual friends-friends, we can say things like, “that is my guy/babe?”, “that
is my ski”, “That is my good friend”, “That is my close friend” etc etc you
know?
Anyway, my brain needs to chill. I
still think I miss my friends from uni in all the varying degrees they offer me
friendship. I miss my powerpuff girls. I miss our sleepovers and how we turned
Havida’s room to the in-hostel vacation spot. I miss annoying Efa whom I have
very lovingly bestowed upon the very endearing nickname, “my little rat”, hehe.
I miss the sweet girls in my graduating class that I got to hang out with from
time to time. I miss my seatmates in class, especially Asmau my
favourite<Clarence is a close second>.
The
world has become a global village thanks to technology and my friends are only
a few calls or texts away but it is not the same. I miss the access. How meeting
up did not require a lot of planning and strategy to find ways to pull out of
our very far apart and busy lives.
I
will get over it eventually but tonight, right now? I think I really miss my
friends.
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