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<\/h3>\n7.9 billion human beings live on this planet, and you and I are two of them. How many will we meet? How many more will stick with us, whether in physical proximity or in memory, in a single moment or for the rest of our lives? Why does it matter? Through self reflection, empirical findings, and a general consideration of our own relationships, we explore the nature and importance of our ties with other people in our world.<\/p>\n
<\/h3>\nPhoto by NASA<\/span><\/a> on Unsplash<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n The girl who came up to me in an arcade in China when I was maybe six who stared at me for a few long seconds and opened her mouth and said, “You have REALLYYYY long eyelashes,” her face akin to ?, who then smiled and happily skipped away leaving me stunned on the game seat… This girl. She is a stranger I remember.<\/p>\n Who is a stranger you remember? The maker of this YouTube video<\/a>\u00a0asks this question to strangers on the street, and the answers are fascinating. Why do some people stick, even if you never see them again?<\/p>\n I think a key part is the emotional impact of the interaction. A random stranger by definition has no prior connection to you, no obligation to interact, no ulterior motive to be kind, or rude. So, when such a person does cross your path in a way that affects your mood or thoughts, the experience sticks out. There are studies that show how even brief or chance social interactions can lead to more happiness and wellbeing.<\/p>\n Back, Schmukle, and Egloff (2008) conducted a study on college students to test whether random physical nearness and random assignment of people to the same group during an initial encounter would influence the likelihood of further friendship. They found that indeed, being near somebody by chance in an initial interaction can promote the development of a meaningful friendship, suggesting that prior connection or intention to know someone are not as necessary as we may think in forming friendships.<\/p>\n Another study demonstrated how weak social ties, not just close friendships,\u00a0 are positively linked with social and emotional-being (Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014). The barista at your favorite coffee shop and the classmate on the street you wave to in passing are not your close friends, but such daily and repeated brief interactions are as important to our wellbeing as the deep relationships we treasure and maintain.<\/p>\n What if you are actively trying to make friends and form meaningful relationships? From what I have learned from my own experience and from reading and hearing others, the most essential thing is to be open<\/strong>\u00a0– open-minded, non-judgmental, leading with your true intention and letting the other person know.<\/p>\n Once you’ve started a friendship, how do you maintain it?<\/p>\n Maintaining friendships over extended periods of time can be a difficult feat. Two factors that have been demonstrated to lead to the formation of friendships \u2014 proximity and being part of the same group (Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, 2008) \u2014 can often go away as life takes people in different directions. In addition, jobs, family situations, significant others, health problems, physical distance, and more can all get in the way of stable, long-term friendships.<\/span><\/p>\n Photo by Timon Studler<\/span><\/a> on Unsplash<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n If situational factors like these are constantly subject to change, what is it that allows some friends to maintain close bonds over long periods of time? According to a longitudinal study of college friends, the two factors that best predicted whether or not a pair of best friends would remain close almost 2 decades later were 1) similarity between the friends and 2) previous investment of time in the friendship (Ledbetter, Griffin, & Sparks, 2007). Furthermore, when people are asked what constitutes closeness in a friendship, they commonly report that self-disclosure, support, shared interests, and explicit expression of the value of a relationship make friendships feel close (Parks & Floyd, 1996). If these things go away, the friendship is likely in trouble.<\/span><\/p>\n With this in mind, I would like to tell the story of my relationship with my best friend from middle school. It\u2019s an example of trying to maintain a friendship, failing, and ultimately coming to terms with the \u201ccommemorative\u201d place that a friend can hold in my life.<\/span><\/p>\n Our friendship began in 6th grade. At that time, it felt like we connected over everything. We went to school together, we lived a few blocks from each other, we played the same position on the same basketball team, we both loved the same goofy sitcoms, and we were both used to being the shortest kid in the class. For three years, we were largely inseparable, hanging out with each other most days after school and doing things together almost every weekend. As a result of how much time we spent together, our moms became best friends and our family units gradually integrated together. In short, our lives were deeply intertwined.<\/span><\/p>\n Then high school came. Each of us remained largely the same in terms of our personalities and our interests, but signs began to emerge that our paths were diverging. For one, we no longer went to the same school. This resulted in our social circles and our time commitments changing. In spite of these shifts, we remained fairly close and continued to bond over our shared interests, such as playing sports, following the NFL, and watching the sitcoms we both loved. But over time, every hang out began to require more planning and effort. It also became difficult for the two of us to spend time together in larger social groups, because we no longer knew the same people. Our friendship began to feel like a small island within the vast, churning sea of our broader lives.<\/span><\/p>\n When college came, this island sank under the waves. We initially bonded as freshmen over the shared newness and excitement of college, but as we began to find ourselves in completely different worlds, both socially and geographically, we invested less and less in the friendship.<\/span><\/p>\n Today, I\u2019d consider us mere acquaintances; he\u2019s no more than a weak tie.<\/span><\/p>\n Does the fact that we drifted apart mean that we failed to maintain an important friendship? Maybe. It\u2019s possible that if each of us had invested more in the relationship, as the Ledbetter et al. study suggests, that we\u2019d still be best friends, as inseparable as we were in middle school. But when I really think about it, I don\u2019t believe that\u2019s true. I think that the very same similarities and shared situational factors that brought us together in 6th grade are what drove us apart. We simply no longer have much in common, beyond a set of good memories.<\/span><\/p>\n A quote from a 2015 Atlantic article about friendships in adulthood succinctly sums up the way I feel about him. In the article, Julie Beck wrote,<\/span> \u201cA commemorative friend is not someone you expect to hear from, or see, maybe ever again. But they were important to you at an earlier time in your life, and you think of them fondly for that reason, and still consider them a friend.\u201d <\/span><\/i>(Beck, 2015)<\/span><\/p>\n Just as Beck wrote, I will always consider him a friend and have made peace with the commemorative place he holds in my life.<\/span><\/p>\n Texting and social media seem to have improved the ease with which you can find, develop, and maintain relationships. While there is a lot of research discussing the mental health consequences of social media I will be focusing on social media\u2019s impact on friendships.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Photo by camilo jimenez<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n According to an article on Forge by friendship expert Lydia Denworth (2020), the more media platforms we use to maintain a relationship, the stronger that bond is likely to be, and people who are more active on social media are less likely to be lonely than those who aren\u2019t<\/span>.\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n While I\u2019m not active on many social media platforms, my personal experience in group chats and facebook groups is in line with this. Digital mediums have certainly improved some of my friendships and helped me form some meaningful new connections.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One of my primary concerns with texting and social media is that it can easily lead to miscommunication. Communication is 55% body language, 38% vocal, and only 7% words (Mehrabian, 1967) so texts present us much less information than we are used to to extrapolate meaning from. Especially with weak ties who you don\u2019t share much interpersonal mindfulness with. On top of this, texting involves delayed responses, which can cause uncertainty and upset expectations. Pair both of these now with the fact that there is also more at stake — because digital interactions are easier to share and harder to erase — and texting seems like a recipe for more frequent and more damaging miscommunications between friends. I would guess that current adolescents and young adults cycle through more friends now than they did twenty years ago because so much more communication is through text and social media now.<\/span><\/p>\n In addition to being a worse form of communication I also dislike texting because it tends to drain me of energy, in line with an Atlantic article sharing that emotional satisfaction is the main thing we lose from maintaining relationships online (Beck, 2015). On several occasions I\u2019ve felt overwhelmed with messages I need to respond to, which begs the question: at what point might too much digital interaction with friends have a negative — rather than positive — impact on our friendships? A lack of separation between work and home during the pandemic led to many burning out — can an inability to distance oneself from friends given that we always have our phones on us lead to a similar burn out or degradation of friendships? I think so, even if most of the messages are from strong ties. Because texting lacks the emotional satisfaction that phone calls or in-person interactions do, I feel like responding to texts is more akin to email than socializing. I much prefer calling people on the phone but social norms for college-age people today seem to favor text exchanges, especially between acquaintances.<\/span><\/p>\n Overall, texting and social media have the potential to have significantly positive impacts on our friendships and acquaintances. That being said, there are communicative and emotional sacrifices that need to be navigated effectively in order to maximize net benefits of utilizing these tools.<\/span><\/p>\n Strangers, Ride or Dies, and All the Ones in between 7.9 billion human beings live on this planet, and you and I are two of them. How many will we meet? How many more will stick with us, whether in physical proximity or in memory, in a single moment or for the rest of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10557"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Forming Bonds, Starting with Strangers (Olivia)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Maintaining Friendships (Spencer)<\/b><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nTexting and the Role of Social Media in Friendships (Lane)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nReferences:<\/h4>\n
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