Friendship

Who’s your best friend? That’s a game most kids have played. At some time or the other in our childhood, a kid asks another about it. It’s a test. If one responds with the other’s name, then that person reciprocates. If it’s someone else’s name, then also it’s reciprocated, with another name. That’s how it is in most cases. The game gets a little trickier when done with more than 2 people.

Adults also ask this question, to kids though, and not other adults. They think it’s fun to tease the kids this way. Somehow underneath all of this is a tacit understanding amongst people, that adults don’t ask other adults about this. It is like, this game is only for kids.

Why is that?

Is it because adults are uncomfortable with the answer? Could the ‘wrong’ answer create a rift in the relationship?

Do we get more insecure about friendships as we grow older?

It would be natural. With age, we have seen more pain, more struggles, lost money, lost health; and generally seen more bad things. And somethings are harder to recover than others. We can become more successful, make more wealth, even try to get healthier, albeit with a lot of effort. But friendship is trickier.

There is a general understanding that we cannot make friends as we get older. And herein lies a small truth about the aforementioned game. Somewhere, everyone knows that the answer to the question will be some childhood friend. It doesn’t matter if that friend is based in a different country, or if the friend is only in touch via a few text messages every few months, and the last time that we’ve hung out with them was 5 years back. But that friend sat on this throne when we were 10, and could never be unseated.

Making new friends becomes difficult as we grow older. This joke by Seinfeld has left a mark on me. It holds a deep truth, like so many from the show.

Sounds true, doesn’t it? Over time we start looking at so many things.

Making a new friend as an adult is looked at through the same lens as hiring or dating.

Is this person smart?

What’s their social status?

What will it say of me if I am seen with them?

What party do they support? They religious? They work in finance?

Our biases get stronger as we age. Rather more calcified. We are afraid to challenge our own worldviews.

And all that may be true. It is a great explanation. And humans love a neat expression more than anything else. We use them to create our own worldview, and share that with others. It’s the basis of our common understanding.

But this view breaks at the other end of our lives. We see old people - by old, I mean really old - become friends as simply as kids do. Does it mean they have lost those biases? Started looking beyond society, politics, religion, and all other things that mattered for the majority of their lives? One would be tempted to say yes, and that in their infinite wisdom, they realise what is really important.

But maybe there is something more common between kids and old people. Something that seems to be in abundance for both. And something that is of scarcity for the time in-between the two.

Time.

Time needed to build friendships. More specifically, no agenda time.

Friendships start because of a common interest. That could be a toy for a kid. The need of company for an old person. A hobby, a sport, a passion, a profession, for everyone else.

But friendships need no-agenda time to thrive.

This is time when people spend with each other to simply do nothing. That’s when they go beyond some common interest areas. They indulge in small talk. They share useless stuff. Some quirks, some inanities get revealed. Their true self comes out. They are not wearing masks, at least not masks meant for the broader population out there. They tend to get vulnerable.

And that’s what friendship needs. It needs those barriers to come down.

We are more comfortable sharing these things with that decades old friend, who we probably don’t share many views with, and one that we would not even consider being friends with were we to meet them afresh today. But we’re not comfortable sharing with someone who could be a perfect friend based on similarities and complementarities. Just because we haven’t spent enough time to bring those barriers down.

It’s also why people make, or become better friends, when they travel together. They get to spend not just time, but a lot of no-agenda time together.

And that’s for my money, a better explanation.