Posted by Baz Luhrmann once said about friendships, “Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you’ll need the people you knew when you were young.”
I’ve been thinking alot lately about relationships and how they’re affected by time and distance. The interwebs provide us with so much opportunity to keep in touch with old friends and so with that much techmology, our friendship decisions are also highlighted and sharpened.
I recently realized that an old friend had cut me out. We hadn’t spoken for a while and I was unable to rekindle the communication. Emails, text messages, facebook wall posts. I even tried phone calls and if you know me, you know I’m not a huge fan of speaking on the phone. It’s a pretty strong indication of rejection not to hear from someone after using multiple communication channels.
It stands in marked contrast to the last two weddings I’ve attended this summer, in which I hadn’t actually seen the principals in several years. In each case, an occasional conversation was enough to sustain the friendship while distance intervened. And they picked up the phone (or answered texts).
While I’d maintain that it’s easier for men to sustain friendships, that’s not at issue in the aforementioned two, where one is a female. What it says is that we implicitly keep alive what we want, what matters to us, regardless of distance. It takes a pretty solid act of un-friendship to break those ones apart.
Friendships wax and wane with time but with the most important ones, I don’t think it takes more than a simple hello to get things going again, no matter how much time has elapsed. I supposed I just mis-read the friend person who cut me out.
