I’m staring at the photo: Four women, all of us in my kitchen preparing extraordinary delicacies. It was going to be a great meal. We had taken a cooking class together the prior week, walked away with great recipes, and couldn’t wait to savor and share what we’d learned to create. We felt close to each other in that moment. We were friends. Or were we?
That meal was almost ten years ago.
We were part of a loose collection of couples brought together by our interest in sampling fine wines and preparing delicious food, which we shared with each other in our homes at regularly scheduled dinners. From my perspective, after a while the conversations became a bit stale. There are only so many times I can discuss the perfection of a particular dish, the state of fishing on the river near us, or the slumping real estate market in our community. I think these are great topics to chat about occasionally. And then they get old. Over the years, those relationships began to dwindle and fade without any well-defined closure.
In retrospect, I understand that they weren’t true friendships. This was a collection of acquaintances with a mutual interest in food, wine and a particular style of conversation. Ed and I tried to progress a bit toward deeper topics with several of the couples. After all, without trying we never know what might be possible. But our efforts led to moments of awkward discomfort, and we soon realized that this wasn’t going anywhere.
Mark Granovetter, a sociologist and professor at Stanford University, is best known for his work on strong and weak ties in social networks. He argued that in our networks of relationships, we have different links — or ties — to other people. Strong ties are characterized by deep affinity; he calls them friends. Weak ties, by contrast, might be acquaintances with few, if any, deep linkages.
Collections of acquaintances with weak ties are significant pieces of all of our lives. Ed and I interact regularly with people who share a common interest in entertainment, literature, or the care of our community, for example. These are important connections in our day-to-day lives.
But the distinction between strong and weak ties is an important one, because they fill very different needs. While we know that collections of weak ties promote the enjoyment of common interests, research suggests that deep friendships can actually help fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow the aging process and prolong our lives.
According to Wikipedia, “Friendship is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association.” Most of us already know this. The more interesting question has to do with the reason for the strength of the bond.
For me, there are at least three distinguishing characteristics of strong versus weak ties between friends.
1. Authentic
The ties between the three women and me in my kitchen ten years ago were weak. Obviously. But why? We rarely talked about the real stuff. We could talk recipes all day. But not the messy stuff. The stuff that makes us who we are on the inside.
The bond that connects true friends is strong because the ties are authentic. Friends like this are not only honest about themselves and about what’s going on in their lives; they are also honest about me. They’re willing to have difficult conversations with me, even about things that sometimes I may not be eager to hear.
2. Missed-if-Absent
There’s a second characteristic that fundamentally distinguishes true friends from weak linkages in my life. For lack of a better term, I’m calling it “missed-if-absent.” Maybe you, my reader, can suggest a better descriptor. True friends are the ones I really miss when I haven’t connected with them for a while.
As just one example, Ed and I have a close friendship with a couple we met in Denver decades ago. We live in different cities. We all have full lives. It’s not easy to find the time to speak with or to see one another. But when a few months go by without connecting with one or both of them, I feel the emptiness. I feel the loss.
3. Not replaceable
I can connect with any number of acquaintances around common interests like tai chi or writing or grand parenting. And if any one of them drops out of my network, I can just as easily connect with others who come along. It’s the common interest that binds us, rather than anything unique about any of us as human beings.
If our Denver friends dropped out of my life today, there would be no replacement. Period.
Oh, and about the photo of the four of us in my kitchen ten years? I still had the old email addresses of the three other women and sent the photo to them last week in a moment of warm reminiscing. The lack of response simply confirms what I already suspected. There were very few authentic, missed-if-absent, or irreplaceable ties between us.
And even strong ties, the real friends, do sometimes move on. Maybe they marry someone new who pulls them in a new direction or just move away breaking up the old easy bonding patterns. And they are truly missed.
So true!
As we age, this distinction becomes even more apparent! Some “old friends” just fade away — but then again, they weren’t really “friends.” Others, whom we rarely see face to face, remain in our hearts & good feelings can be rekindled at a moment’s notice, just with a text or email message.
H, I’ve been wondering about that. The distinction is more apparent to me too as I age. Is that simply because I’m more aware of it? Because the time I have left seems more finite and I’m pickier about whom I want to share it with? Or??
I’ve become very aware of the “time I have left.” But not in a fearful way — in fact, I feel accepting that fact helps me sort out the important from unimportant in my daily life. And recognize the importance of good friends.
Yup. Could not have said it any better.
Yes, the deep friendships in our lives foster our growth and development, enrich us. I endorse your three features, especially “authentic,” really the prerequisite. The honest, intimate communication that validates our selves and the other is at the heart. For some this comes easily, for others it takes years to develop that kind of trust. We have friends we connected with over 40 years ago, first through raising children and our liberal faith community. We’ve stayed connected, even now, through our shared values and history. I do want to add something that promotes deep friendship is sharing of some action together–a project, a cause, a crisis, creating something together, travel. . . We did have neighbor friends we enjoyed then realized that all we were doing was “dinner and a movie.” We shared social values, but there has to be more, a lot more for that heartfelt friendship.
I’m reminded of that little aphorism that goes something like, “Friends are like family, except you choose them.”
Pat, thank you so much for that. Yes, I love what you added. Sharing something that somehow expands us beyond ourselves – or at least beyond our current understanding of ourselves – is a magical ingredient to add to the mix.