Ode to Friendship

Our individual lives are constrained in many ways – by work rules, by social conventions, by family expectations. One area of relative freedom is our selection of friends. We don’t have to be friends with certain people, nor they with us.
Friendship, which probably shares its roots with the word free, is marked by the uncoerced willingness with which two people develop a relationship. A common activity, a shared goal – something very simple brings two people into contact, and they recognize in each other something they can trust.
That’s really what friendship is – trust. Friends can confide in each other, can reveal weaknesses or divulge aspirations, can judge and be judged, without fear of being hurt. In contrast, most of our other relationships limit our willingness to be vulnerable, for rejection in those relationships would be traumatic, and may have long-lasting consequences. Not so in a friendship, which can wax and wane as circumstances change, without impacting job, or social standing, or family.
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Why do we offer this salute to friendship? Because we, as a society, seem to be losing that important part of our lives. Here are some relevant statistics from a survey reported in the American Sociological Review:
• In 1985, 10 percent said they had no close friends; that number rose to 25 percent in 2004.
• In 1985, 80 percent had a confidant outside their family; that number dropped to 57 percent in 2004.
Not that the exact numbers are critical, but they support the feeling we have had, that something is happening, something not positive.
Certainly, opportunities for communication have not diminished. They have, in fact, exploded in the last 20 years, with a cell-phone in every pocket, e-mail replacing letters, digital photo exchanges following events, and instant-messaging a huge craze. The irony is that every one of these advances is less personal, less likely to encourage the interaction from which friendship develops.
We’ve heard another statistic, that 50 percent of Americans live within 50 miles of where they grew up. When the national economy was mostly agrarian, that was probably true. And it’s likely still true in Texas or Georgia, but Sonoma? People are moving to our community, which continues to grow a few percent a year, and they leave their friends behind to come here.
Do we still have friends from grade school? High school? College provides wonderful opportunities, but it can take young adults away from their hometowns. When they graduate, when they marry, or when they take a new job, that often means a relocation to another new city, where they start over developing friendships.
Many people date this problem to the 1950s, when television sets started to become common. Television is a passive medium; watching tends to involve little interaction among viewers. That blue light in dark rooms may be the flickering out of friendships as a central part of our lives.
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Does this mean we should all pull the plugs on our electronic gadgets, go to college nearby, marry our high school sweethearts, and farm? No, it simply means that we should, at the least, recognize and cherish the close friends we do have. We should enjoy the sense of place that the Sonoma Valley community offers. We should seek opportunities to have personal communications. Above all, we should ourselves be good friends to others.