A formula for friendship

My grandmother, as she sips on her 5 p.m. gin and tonic, frequently dispenses the following piece of wisdom: “If you have as many friends as you do fingers on one hand, you’re incredibly lucky.” This is a woman who has been happily married for 50 years now and has reached the melancholic, yet inevitable, stage of life when friends begin to pass away, leaving more empty seats at her dinner parties every year. If you want a well-rounded perspective on matters of friendship, she’s as good a source as there is.

I was slightly skeptical when I first processed her statement. Five seemed far too few. After all, 20 people "liked" my status on Facebook just yesterday, and I have hundreds of contacts online whose information I can access with a mere click of my finger. On campus, I smile, greet, chat and hang out with many more people than I could count on all my fingers and toes. Surely my grandmother’s limited concept of friendship was a product of never living on a campus, along with an Internet-less adulthood?

Friendship was never a topic I had really taken the time to clarify for myself, and one that has become complicated by our increasingly ever-connected world with hundreds of “friends” on Facebook and contacts on our phones. The word “friend” is incredibly vague, used by each of us in different ways to describe anything from soulmate to mere acquaintance. In my grandmother’s estimation, it is only possible to have five true friends throughout life. To me, this implies a level of commitment above just the good-natured conversation or greeting — friendship is a commitment determined by each of our individual capacities to invest both time and emotional energy, and it is a deeper unique connection that it is simply not possible to have with everyone.

In an effort to more clearly define the way I view friendship, I sat myself down and, in typical Type-A problem solving fashion, made a list of the qualities I would want in an ideal friendship. While this does, I admit, feel like a bizarre version of "Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul," I’d encourage you to try it before you scoff at me. The exercise revealed a lot — namely, the importance to me of qualities such as sense of humor, empathy and honesty. These qualities, I realized, were reflections of my own core values. When I then compared people in my life to that list, amazingly, a few possessed 80% or more of those qualities. It turned out to be around five people.

Our early 20s are a tricky time of life, socially speaking. Still maintaining ties with friends from high school while wading around the sea of college social life looking for the fated other fish I have been told are out there, I know I’ve struggled to figure out which people are actually important in my life. Taking time away from college last year was an interesting exercise, and it revealed a lot to me that I perhaps wasn’t willing to accept before. Primarily, it showed me that we really do only have so much energy — both emotional and physical — that we can give. Our attention and time are not infinite — a fact that becomes ever more apparent the busier or more stressed we feel, or when we suffer a setback, whether it be a health issue or tragedy. During these most trying times, we tend to reevaluate the people in our lives and reassess whom we trust. The year off also showed me that if we constantly extend ourselves to everyone we meet, we’ll end up spreading ourselves too thin, and we will never develop meaningful, satisfying connections.

I’ve reached a point now where I often prefer to spent time alone than with people I have to try too hard to get along with, whom I don’t feel I can truly be myself around and who don’t share some of my most important moral values. Perhaps I’m selfish, or too wrapped up in my own routine, and perhaps I’m more of a lone wolf than others, but it’s a truth about myself that I’ve decided to accept. I’ve changed schools and countries multiple times throughout my life, adapting to new environments like a chameleon, and have been, in the past, over-optimistic about how many close friends I had. But now I’m becoming more selective with how much of myself I want to give and to whom — being honest about whether friends are, as the old saying goes, for a reason, for a season or for a lifetime.

We always need to dedicate a certain portion of our energy to looking after ourselves — our own health and happiness — or we’re no use to anyone else, no matter our intentions. It’s a slightly sad truth to learn, but it can’t be denied. You’re never going to be friends, in the closest sense, with everyone. Of course, life is long and unexpected, and I want to continue meeting new people throughout that journey, and those short-lived acquaintances are still important for making our day-to-day lives more enjoyable and interesting. Staying open-minded and curious, I think, is one of the most important things for leading a fulfilling life. But applying the friendship formula from time to time can help you make sure your expectations are realistic and that you are giving your energy to the right people — the people whom you care about deeply and who care deeply about you.

Lauren Davis is a sophomore from North Hampton, NH. She can be reached at lhdavis@princeton.edu.