Time, Space, and the Friends We Make

I first came to know about Facebook in 2006. Our niece, Aadiba, was hooked to her desktop computer in their New York City apartment when I went to visit them from my Rutgers campus in New Jersey for a few days. She constantly leaned into the computer and sometimes ecstatically screamed, "Oh my God! Hahaha!" I immensely value others' privacy, with the hope that the other will do the same (though it does not always happen that way!). So I refrained from asking her anything. But she volunteered.

• Auntie - you know it's crazy! Facebook is hilarious!
• What is a Facebook?
• It is an online platform where you make friends - like my school friends are my friends on my Facebook, and you interact with them.
• But one can just pick up the phone and interact. And they are already your friends anyway. How does it make it exciting?

Little did I know that after a few years I would have a Facebook account too, and make friends again with my friends, relatives, and colleagues - this time, online. My spouse, whom I have known for the last 38 years, would be my online "friend," and we would interact with each other sitting side by side with a phone in our hands!

I am writing about Facebook because I want to write about "friends." The most exciting part of having a Facebook ID was reconnecting with my childhood friends, school friends, high school friends - whom I had left behind many years ago. I never thought we would reconnect, because we had parted ways without so much as each other's contact information. It felt surreal in the beginning. I felt excited. I became part of different messenger groups - Childhood Friends Chat group, College Friends group, University Friends group, Previous Work group, Professional group - the list is long.

Days passed, and the excitement began to fizzle out. Except for the current working group - especially with the childhood and school friend groups - there was a visible disconnect. With due respect to all my friends, the spark was lost somewhere, from my side. I most often hear this: your childhood friends are your best buddies, an association that lasts a lifetime. Is it really so? Am I an outlier, then? This is an interesting question, and I want to delve into it.

What is friendship, in simple terms? Someone with whom you share common interests, without being selfish. In friendship, one gives mostly without expecting a return. People on the same wavelength tend to become friends quickly. At a tender age, we become friends with our playmates and school friends because we share the same age bracket - an age when we have a very limited perspective on life, very little understanding of relationships, and no worldly responsibilities. We suddenly meet someone outside our familial relations, someone who does not live in our home but shares the same mindset as we do - an acquaintance in this big world outside my home. This novelty of a relationship, combined with the proximity of mindset, creates magic. My friend, whom I meet at school, play with, and share the same teachers with, becomes a cherished relationship beyond my day-to-day family ties. In friends, we confide our deepest thoughts, our untold fears, our first loves - things we most often try to hide from our own parents and siblings. It becomes a treasured bond. The question remains: for how long?

Like all things in life, friendship rests on three aspects - time, space, and context. And these three work in tandem. Friendship grows with time, under a particular context, in a specific space. The absence of one weakens the original link. Our childhood friendships grow out of being in close proximity - the same school, the same neighborhood, the same hours in the day. Take away any one of these three, and the thread starts to fray.

Looking back, I think Facebook solved only one of the three things a friendship needs. It collapsed space - suddenly geography meant nothing, and I was a click away from someone I had not spoken to in twenty years. But it could not restore time, and it could not restore context. Time had already changed both of us into different people. And the context that had made us friends in the first place - the same classroom, the same games, the same teacher scolding us both - no longer existed and could not be manufactured on a screen. A platform can shorten distance. It cannot reverse a clock, or recreate a room that no longer exists.

Is the romanticism about childhood friends overrated? To me, the answer is both yes and no. We romanticize what we have already passed through. We don't romanticize a living friendship, because that becomes a mundane part of life that we take for granted. We cross a certain age, we become busy, we hardly get time to look back. But when we do, we become nostalgic - about the time we left behind, about the relationships, and, more importantly, about myself. I realize I am aging, and there is no way to reverse it. Romanticizing my childhood friendships becomes a superficial emotional exit for me. So I indulge in this temporary "exit" exercise.

While childhood friendship begins and grows out of an apparently selfless, organic progression, friendship in adulthood becomes more designed and self-centric. The more we age, the more we choose our friends, rather than simply becoming friends with them.

This is where space enters as an important determinant of friendship. A childhood friend can very well remain your best buddy for a lifetime - if you grow up with that person. You live nearby geographically, and you interact in person regularly. But when you move out of your old place and settle in a new area, geographical distance puts a dent in it. You meet new people. You form new acquaintances. You move on. Friendship stands still - and, eventually, it doesn't move at all.

Space, though, isn't only about geography - it's also about convenience, and convenience is, in the end, an investment of time and energy. I can vouch for this from personal experience. I have built strong friendships with my coworkers; so has my husband. We each dedicate some of our time to our respective friends. And because my husband and I were batchmates, we share common friends too. It is easy to maneuver a friendship when both people are of the same age group and already share some common ground. Personal and professional friendships often take a back seat to the ones that are convenient - the ones that are easy to carry forward in terms of time management.

There is another kind of convenience too - social media, sitting right there in our hands, connecting us instantly with people who already think the way we do. Twitter Spaces, for instance, is a highly dynamic platform that pulls people together from all over the world, and it manufactures lasting friendships because these spaces mostly bring together people who already share an ideology or a political belief. It isn't trying to recreate an old time and place. It is simply the easiest place to find people already like you.

With time, people evolve. Friendship evolves. Our very concept of friendship changes. It is extremely important for a person to evolve. And when I say my childhood friends are no longer my close buddies, I mean I have evolved into a new persona - a natural progression - and they have become new people too. No guilt attached to it.

Recently, we spent a few whole-hearted, laughter-filled hours with some of our high school buddies. We met after years. We have our differences. But we still get along. The common point of reference is high school - the same teachers, the same compound, some very interesting memories we all cherish. That is one reason. But to me, the primary reason is that we have all moved out of Bangladesh and settled in the USA - we have matured, evolved, and we are aging together in a new context. We have formed an association of individuals because their company fulfills our emotional exit point. The friendship is more mature, and its interest is emotional fulfillment.

Friendship changes with age, and I no longer resist that. It centers around our own fulfillment - shaped, at every stage, by the time we are in, the space we occupy, and the context we share.

It may sound a bit selfish - but time drifts away the friends we once had, and time makes you choose your acquaintances as per your emotional fulfillment. All your acquaintances might not be your friends, or you don't call them friends by choice. But they fulfill you at some point, and that's all that matters in the end.