I’m just coming off a fortnight of anodyne friendship, a reunion of our college girl gang from way back in Chennai nee Madras.
Back then, we were a near inseparable trio. After the college years gave over, we kept in touch, sending congratulations and commiserations as we watched each other navigate the triumphs and troughs of personal and professional life.
Many decades later, here we were: a journalist, a lawyer, a Senior VP at one of the world’s leading tech companies… a line-up out of White Lotus, S3! We got together for a fortnight studded with fun. We lazed about, ate scarily vast quantities of food. We listened to Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Kiss, Led Zep, and Styx on loop. We put on sheet masks, lay back and murmured confidences about our life-glitches. And we caught up on all the years apart, caught up intensely, with concern, care, and compassion.
A celebration of anodyne friendship.
Now one of us is back in California, the other in her Himalayan hamlet, and I’m at my workstation, trying to make sense of a manuscript I’m editing. Every few hours, I’m refreshing my social media feeds and chatting cheerfully with my friends on there. One is travelling in Patagonia and I praise her cool snaps. Another is making mulled wine for the first time and I’m twitting her about doing so in the heat of summer. Yet another tells me she is quitting a music-making app. I say something non-committal; I don’t know her well enough to tell her she can’t carry a tune.
This then is a celebration of digital friendship.
Real-life friendships call for large-scale commitments. You don’t keep in touch, you aren’t there when the friend needs a shoulder to cry on, and all the years of shared history could wane. At times, you don’t have it in you to offer the right quantity of cheer, support, but you know you have to summon up all resources to step up to the plate.
Real-life friendships, apart from the effort required, also need planning, disposable income, shared tastes, for you and your friends to hang together. Do that once every six months, and it’s fine. Try to do that every month, and see where it gets you: declined invites, cribs about the choice of eatery or movie, an evening spent listing just why the city is not friend-friendly or hangout-friendly.
This is not the case with digital friendships. You can keep in touch at your convenience via a slew of shared posts that hit the spot: jokes, memes, videos, a clip from a K-drama or Hindi movie. You can pull away politely, and there will be no consequences. You can ghost them, and sooner or later they will back off sans recrimination.
Q: In today’s supersonic paced world, who really has time to nourish and nurture anodyne friendships? A: Everyone who is blessed to have a shared history with friends will go the extra length to keep those embers glowing. A Pew Research Centre survey found 61 per cent of adults in the US said close friendships of the anodyne kind are fuel to the engines of their lives.
People ready to work on real-life friendships reap the best rewards, apparently. Others don’t lose out, they happily settle for digital friends.
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