What Is Different?

A great friend moved away recently, and it gave me the opportunity to dissect our friendship a bit.

What makes someone a great friend? What do I value in a relationship?

There are the predictable qualities - honesty, loyalty, confidentiality, authenticity, among others - and a couple more that I am lately able to articulate.

One thing I realized I value greatly is the absence of pressure to have some extraordinary social experience. In this era of Facebook, many have recalibrated friendship expectations to value a great story over a real-life story. People plan the wording of their next status update even in the midst of the activity or moment they are experiencing. When we start thinking of life in terms of status updates, it might be time to take a step back from social media and just live life.

Sometimes it feels like telling others about life has become more important than living it. The pressure to write the script to impress others can be subtle and strong. I have turned many a playdate or school day or down time with my family into a photo shoot, prompting and posing everyone extensively for that artistic shot or to get everyone smiling at the camera at the same time. Since when are we people who are all smiling perfectly at the same time? What will my children remember from these moments? The perfect script I tried to write for them, or that they had fun bobbing in the surf until I made them pose for every wave until I got the right shot?

Sharing joyful moments with others is good, and the internet can be a powerful tool to that end. I feel a little hypocritical, posting this and then eagerly going to my friends' blogs, emails and Facebook pages to see how they're doing.

I'm not trying to be a wet blanket on sharing life with others. Just the opposite. I'm challenging myself and you to share life with others. The real life we live every day with successes and fears and failures and joys. What if, instead of spending so much time and energy trying to convince others what great lives we have, we spent that time and energy actually making our lives what we want them to be?

Here's the other item I realized I love about my friends: simply being together. With the friend who moved away recently, I found myself saving up topics I wanted to chat with her specifically about in between our visits. She is very wise and I value her ideas. But you know what? More often than not, when we were together, I just basked in her company. There was no pressure to fill the silence; it is actually quite enjoyable to sit with someone who fills in your unknowns with positives, and for whom you do the same.

Thanks, friends near and far, for making this life interesting and funny and truly enjoyable.