I'll Be There For You

What is your priority when it comes to friendships? How do you construct your web of people that you care about, that you include in your life, that have a place in your safety net? Who makes the cut? More importantly, who is worth the effort?

In high school, I was not Dr. Popular. I wasn’t Mr. Popular, Sir Popular, or even kind of popular. I was the epitome of what I haven’t been able to escape in years: stuck in the middle. Not quite one side or the other. Not quite a jock, not quite a nerd. Not quite an A student, but not quite a B student (I actually used to get A-/B+ grades on essays; my college GPA was 3.5, exactly between A and B). Not quite popular, but not friendless. So on. So forth. I had a slew of people that I would have called friends, and fell in and out of seemingly everlasting bonds that haven’t quite stood the test of time. These days, Facebook literally counts the number of friends you have, which I’m sure I tried to do at some point, staring at a yearbook, wondering how many more people I could get to sign it to show that people cared about me.

This somewhere between sad and not so bad story of my high school life almost directly influences the way I treat my current social relationships. I assume my lack of ever truly fitting in has led me to attempt maintaining, reviving, restarting, repairing, and evolving most of my friendships, hoping that, as I move forward with my life, the surrounding cloud of companions, ranging from knowing every detail of my day to day activities (and I apologize to those people) to just being okay with catching up a few times a year, will be able to do everything that you could come to expect from people that care about you: protect you, make you laugh, make you love, encourage you, straighten you out, guide you, help you, kiss your ass and kick your ass, ya know, that kind of stuff. That is, to say, that I’m ‘making up for lost time’ by building the biggest personal entourage with the most people so I never feel even the slightest bit alone or abandoned. Okay, there’s probably a little truth in that.

But besides the fact that the ‘effort’ required to keep a friendship afloat has dwindled to nearly nothing (fb > click name > write ‘We should totally catch up soon’ > never catch up), I do this for a different reason. Not only has my high school (and grade school and Jr. High for that matter) sparked my desire to grow from my past, but the experiences I had in high school and throughout college shaped who I am today, which is, someone who genuinely cares about the people around him, would take the pain to spare another, and sees the benefit in friendships not as a positive addition to my life, but as a positive addition to the life of someone else.

If you’ve never watched the move ‘Pay It Forward,’ I’ll save you the time. Not the greatest movie in the world, but the lesson learned rings true. The idea is that someone does something nice for you, for no reason at all, and you must do three good deeds for three other people. The exponential math leads to world peace, or something, and the world is a better place. Far-fetched, for sure, but let’s think of it small scale. How many times have you approached a door, had the person in front of you make an extra effort to hold it open for you, and in return, you wait an extra few seconds to hold the door for the person behind you. Then the next time you approach a building, the person clearly in ‘wait, hold that door’ range, sheepishly lets the door close, with no regard to the existence of another, immediately spawning a sour mood, causing no chance you hold the door for anyone behind you, two paces or twenty. This microcosm of ‘pay it forward,’ without the exponential growth, shows how quickly the act of others impacts our own. What if the act was bigger?

I’m not saying we should be buying each other cars, but think of how small the act of reaching out to a friend is. Think how, in 2011, there are more ways to communicate with anyone you’ve met in the last 10 years than there are seasons of The Simpsons, but there is no cause for concern as ties and bonds disintegrate quietly, no longer strong enough or long enough to bridge the gap between two people. My selfish side wants to do this so I don’t have to feel like I’m walking the halls of my high school, but that side of me is small, naïve, and fading fast. The rest of me not only cherishes the friendships I do have, from the close knit circle I see frequently to the ones on the fringe that I think about more than I talk to, but hopes that my consistent and at times relentless attempts to refuse the decay of a relationship inspires those around me to do the same, ultimately creating less strangers, and more people that I’m happy to run into on the street, being able to say more than ‘hey, we should catch up.’