Management has found herself in the unenviable position of watching the gulf between herself and her childhood friend widen to a point where, at times, it seems uncrossable. There is no single cause or reason that can be identified, the first cracks appeared shortly after they graduated high school and became very noticeable about the time we got married. She’s not alone.
My best friend from high school was my best man and I for his wedding and the bonds that we forged as children and the sharing of those milestones were not enough to moor each other together. We grew apart because of the paths we headed down: he abroad to continual higher education and myself leaping out of college into the working world. The physical and temporal distance made the gap easier to accept as each time we caught up it had grown much further than I remembered making the awkwardness easier to rationalize away. Management and her friend, however, have had their friendship grow apart like the slow peeling of a bandage since neither has lived more than a few miles apart from the other.
Management’s struggle with the friendship as the pregnancy progresses made me stop to think about the study just published which concluded that Americans, on whole, have less real-space confidants than they did some twenty years ago. I’ve touched upon this study on two separate occasions and in both cases took the stance that the researchers were overlooking the possible role of the Internet as a tool for facilitating and extending relationships beyond the constraints of place and time that in the reality of now asynchronous communication is a necessity for the cultivation and maintenance of friendships. Reflecting on my own experience and Management’s I’m now left with the feeling that the core of the study is on target but the conclusion that technology is to blame still seems naive and more than faintly Luddite. Color me biased.
Narrow would be an apt description for the focus of any given day. From sun up to sun down, Monday through Friday, it is about work and managing the house. Precious little time is left for anything beyond reading a chapter in a book, sitting through half a movie, or replying to a handful of emails and IMs, this all before the baby arrives. Over-scheduled, we grind our way through the week and what pocketful of time remains is given over to our families. Are we missing out? Possibly. We have both watched two long term friendships evaporate and seen our social live retreat into a mere glimmer of what it once was. Are we bothered by the trend? That’s an extremely tough question to answer.
I’m ambivalent but that could be from sheer exhaustion or a mixture of resignation and satisficing but that could be me rationalizing. The simple fact is that never in my life had I partook in those vast social webs described in the study and portrayed in on TV and the movies. My circles have always been small enough to count on two hands with some fingers left over. So for myself the constriction of our social life has not been so great that my online network of acquaintances cannot offset it. For my wife, however, it has been more difficult as she had a much wider circle of real-space friends that occupied her time and she is far more extroverted than myself.
Neither of us has given thought to what impact Gabriella will have on our social lives. The friendships that are fading or have disappeared will likely remain so but certainly she will encompass our time to such an extent that I may not give thought to this notion of shrinking social circles, though, there is the chance that the process of raising her will bring us out into the world more that we are currently. If anything, the child will likely keep my existential angst posting to a minimum.
