2020, a year for the ages.
For our family, it was meant to be 6 months travelling with our children around the States. Having rented out our family home and then being forced to cancel our trip, we ended up moving to a secluded beach town. If you must be stuck anywhere, we found the place to be.
We were living the dream, entirely by accident. Living with a beach view, running a flexible consulting business, warm weather (as it gets in NZ), no commute and a flexible lifestyle. Our shift turned into a year of changes — work, city, school, pace, lifestyle and … inevitably our friendships. Through it, we started to see just how fragile friendships can be. In a nutshell, we started to feel lonely.
It's hard to argue that social connection isn't important. Research gives us all the reasons: people with stronger social connections enjoy less stress, have healthier immune systems, enjoy more happiness and it can lead to better mental and physical health. Similarly, whether it's a couple breaking up, a friendship that's turned sour, or the loss of a loved one, the negative impacts of grief, isolation and increasingly complicated social dynamics are self-evident.
For us, 2020 helped us realise that the relationships we had were incredibly valuable. Naturally they were going to have to change, because we now lived in different cities, but we were learning not to take them for granted. However, for many others it seemed that 2020 was the year the pattern of division and disconnection started to ramp up — whether through the practical implications of lockdowns or the increasingly divisive nature of opinions and the public forums in which they're shared.
Really, there is a gap that exists between all of us. We call it 'stranger' or 'friend', 'enemy' or 'ally', 'partner' or 'competition', 'lover', 'colleague', 'acquaintance', 'spouse', 'family' and everything in between. Whatever label we place on any of these gaps at any point in time, we're trying to articulate what this thing is between us — and to a certain extent how valuable it is.
However, it's so easy to skip over the connection between us and instead only place value on the utility that a relationship gives us. The benefit of having a work colleague is they produce work with me; my friends bring me joy; my spouse gives me love. If the output of the relationship is where we place the value, then the moment we are no longer the recipient of it we don't value the relationship.
The problem with this is that the moment, for example, one of my friendships doesn't bring me joy because we're often arguing about political differences, I'm willing to end the friendship because it's no longer adding value to me. The same logic would see us disposing of a vehicle because it no longer starts. Perhaps all it needs is a new battery and a tune up — or a new way of looking at the relationship.
The self-evident challenge here is that this short-term, almost consumeristic approach can lead to unfriending or just plain ending relationships. When we place importance on the value rather than the connection, we miss the fact that we've spent hours, days, months, maybe even years investing in a relationship. That investment and history has value in and of itself.
Now don't get me wrong, there are relationships which need to end — perhaps they've run their course, they're abusive, or there can be many other reasons. However, it seems to me that if we allow consumerism to come into the way we view relationships, we can end some of them simply because we don't place value on the connection itself. We might uphold agreement with our political opinion, or living in line with our worldview, or benefiting us — as being more valuable than the relationship.
The next series of thoughts will explore how to make relationships more resilient to the ebb and flow of political opinions, societal changes, career moves, and life changes. But it's important to start with this central pillar: it's not what you do for me that makes this valuable, but rather the intangible connection that exists between us — the thing we've invested time in together. That's the motivation for maintaining some connection.
