You've got a friend

Someone recently made the remark to me that I took things personally even when they had nothing to do with me.  The implication was that this was a regular or normal occurrence.  You might assume that this came from someone who knew me well and had seen regular evidence of this and was trying to help me tackle a problem that could get me in trouble.  But you would have been wrong.  I got this gem from someone via a Facebook message.  And this is someone I have never met, have had mostly periphery involvement with, and who has never really engaged me in any meaningful dialog.  And I don’t think she said it to help me solve a problem.  I suppose I should be grateful that she didn’t choose to call me out on this problem of mine in the post on her wall.  But it begs the question of how do we develop friendships in this day and age of Facebook and Twitter and electronic chat boards?  And do these people really know us, to the extent that they can tell us what our faults are?

Friendships have changed over the years.  In the old days we met our friends in school or on playgrounds or at Scouts or choir practice or swim team practice.  We played at each other’s houses or met at the pool or played sports together and developed those connections over shared experiences.  As we got older, we rode in cars together or ate lunch together at school or had spend-the-night parties with a bunch of friends or talked on the phone for hours.  As young adults, we went bar hopping or hung out at coffee shops or went shopping.  But now there’s a whole different way of meeting people.  Through online chat boards and Facebook and LinkedIn.  It used to be that your best friend was someone that you had done all of the things I mentioned with; today your best friend might be someone on the other side of the computer screen that you have never met or that lives far enough away that you only rarely see her.  And these people you’ve never met or have only met a time or two think they know you well enough based upon things you write online to tell you what you need to correct to be a better person.  They are willing to tell employers that this person would make a great employee even though they’ve never worked together or had any type of professional interaction at all!

It’s amazing that less than 10 years ago, the most popular show on TV was about 6 friends.  Three women and three men, who were best friends.  Some of them were roommates, some developed romantic relationships.  But their friendship existed in the real world, not on a computer or via text message.  When they gently chastised each other, it was because they really knew each other.  They didn’t base it on a flat screen kind of relationship with no context or ability to see the subtleties of tone and facial expression.  Those shows still exist, but how often do people have those kinds of relationships anymore.

 

All of this made me think about friendships, particularly among women, and how they’ve evolved over time.  I considered how different things were in my mother’s day and how strange all of this would seem to her.

 

I didn’t very often wonder about my mother’s friends.  But she always had at least one really good friend everywhere we lived.  There was our next door neighbor Eleanor Anderson in Charlotte.  We all liked Eleanor.  She was a “cool mom”, which sometimes made me wonder why she was friends with my mother, a woman who could never be described as “cool”.  Then there was Dolores Rucci, the across the street neighbor in New Jersey.  Now my mother despised New Jersey with her whole being, but she made friends with Mrs. Rucci so she at least had someone to talk to.  And finally there was Dolly Snyder, our next door neighbor in Atlanta, who later also hired my mother to work with her at the high school cafeteria.  Mrs. Snyder was probably my mother’s greatest friend.

 

There were also the women who were some of my mother’s oldest friends – Miriam Jackson and Pat May.  I don’t really know how my mother knew Miriam but it seemed she knew her forever.  And Pat was her college roommate and later married one of my mother’s cousins.  Pat was the one that always surprised me.  I always thought of Pat as very sophisticated.  She was dark complexioned and had black or very dark brown hair that was always pulled back into a smooth bun.  She smoked and wore pedal pushers.  She had one of those whiskey soaked Lauren Bacall voices.  She had a great rich laugh and I remember her laughing often.  She was exotic.  I thought Pat May was all that and a bag of chips.  She could not have been more opposite of my mother.  And when I was a little girl I wanted to be Pat May when I grew up.

 
And then there were my mother’s sisters and her cousin, who also would be considered her friends.  Amelia Ann and Sara were my mother’s younger sisters, but whenever the three of them got together, except for the fact that they had a physical resemblance to each other, you would have mistaken them for just the tightest of friends.  And their cousin Helen was the perfect fourth to their “gang of four”.  They had their own way of relating to each other that just reinforced how much they loved and liked each other. 
 

My mother would often talk about her friends back in the days when she was young.  She seemed to have a large group of friends, both male and female.  I never thought about it much, since of course I couldn’t imagine my mother as a real person with friends and boyfriends and ups and downs and any kind of a life.  When I read her diary I was often struck by the wide circle of friends she seemed to have.  I don’t know if they were all connected to the Army, but many, if not all, of them must have been.  She had friends to travel with, friends to party with, friends to have dinner with and friends to just hang out with.

 

As my mother’s child, I could never figure out why people liked my mother so much.  She could talk to anyone – and did, much to my dismay – and she was always nice to people, polite and smiling.  Which she tried to teach me to do, but since I was not inclined to follow my mother’s lead on much, I suppose I worked hard to be the opposite.  I thought people would not like my mother because she was fat or because she was plain and wore no makeup or because she was often opinionated.  But as I look back, that doesn’t seem to have had any impact on my mother’s ability to have friends and be a friend.

I think about this now because I was never one to have a lot of friends.  And people never seemed to gravitate to me.  I wanted to have lots of friends and I tried hard to have lots of friends – too hard.  I was always exaggerating things, hoping that if I appeared cool and worldly I would have lots of friends.  That never ended well, of course.  So I ended up with just a few very close friends.  I don’t trust people implicitly and, while I try to make friends, they usually are just like moths to a flame and quickly I seem to repel them or burn them up with too much neediness.  Too bad I didn’t want to learn from my mother….

 
In the past 10 years or so, there seems to be a tsunami of online forums and bulletin boards, for every interest in the world.  Mom boards, biking boards, sports boards, boards about singing groups like the Allman Brothers or the Eagles.  I found out when I had my hysterectomy that there was a hysterectomy board.  And then boards for professions.  I discovered the SHRM boards – originally an awkward form of communication to ask questions about all things human resources.  Most of the time you could get answers, but I noticed that personalities started to form and there were some that were very helpful and some that were not.  Some that were kind and some that were overbearing or overly critical of some poor soul who deigned to ask an elementary question or a question that had been asked more than once before.  But it was through this crude, early bulletin board that I got involved in the oftentimes whack world of online friendships.
 

The first board I got involved with was an offshoot of the SHRM board.  People developed their personas and, it seemed, often used the mostly anonymous nature of a board to create the kind of person they wanted to be.  Some were the ones that were always trying to talk about fluff topics and just have fun.  Some were more serious and wanted to talk HR.  And then there were the political types who wanted to debate and, more often, try to impose their perspectives on others.  It was an interesting group of people.  People became “friends” online, which led to gatherings both locally and nationally.  Some people actually became friends IRL, which was a cool phenomenon.  One of my best friends came from my association with that board and I recommended her for a job with my company so we were coworkers for a while as well.  It was fun to travel to other cities and be able to get together for dinner with these “friends” who sometimes became real friends.

But the board became more political and there was fall out for not agreeing with the ones in charge.  There was name calling and meanness and eventually people left and then the board imploded altogether.  I found other boards with their own personalities and quirks.  There are cliques and popular people on boards just as in life, although sometimes they are not the same.  The interesting thing is that they typically form between people who have never actually met each other.  But there will always be strong personalities and people who are just naturals at leading the way.  It’s interesting to watch the evolution of these online communities.  These are the places to tell people that you’ve never met about your baby drama, your child drama, your ex-spouse or boyfriend drama and then to virtually talk about the most intimate details of your life.  I know that if I knew my mother talked with her friends like these people talk with each other, I’d be mortified beyond belief.  It’s a new world.

 

It makes me wonder when we quit making friends the old fashioned way.  At school and work and in the neighborhood and through other real life friends.  When did we start thinking these people on the other side of a computer screen were our bosom buddies and the people we wanted to share our darkest secrets with?  You can share a lot online and, sometimes, share too much, in my opinion, with people you have never really had a flesh and blood relationship with.  And even when you do meet someone “in real life”, you still don’t have that day-in, day-out kind of friendship because you only see them once in a while or maybe even just once.  I know you can make friends with people that you “meet” online, because I have, but you still need that face-to-face to make them truly come alive.  Otherwise, you’re just “friends” with someone’s persona.

 

I look back at my mother and her wide circle of friends and they were all the living, breathing people she could call on the phone and meet at the pool or in the neighborhood or over the backyard fence.  My best friend is kind of a throwback to those days.  She has a wide circle of friends that started from a small group she met at work.  That has expanded over the years to include their friends and even a couple that one other couple met at a bar!  But they’re like a family and they get together at holidays for parties and to talk.  They get together for each other’s birthdays.  And they create special bonds with a few that they meet for lunch and go to movies with or just call to chat.

 
Somehow I missed most of that.  I spent too much time trying to be what I thought other people wanted me to be.  I had no confidence that people would like me for me.  Instead of just being myself, I tried to be someone else and failed.  I look at the life my mother had, full and rich and lined with friends she could have fun with.  And instead of thinking she was dowdy and fat and not worth the trouble, she was nice and sweet and talked to people and listened and she was always smiling.  And she had a boatload of friends and wonderful memories.