My musings this weekend

Do you actively engage with your friends and family or do you view their social networking profiles and update yourself on their lives? Are you a passive correspondent, sending round robins and hastily scrawled Xmas cards rather than selecting funny greetings cards or nice paper to write a proper, personalised letter to people you know and love? The facebook generation have hundreds of ‘friends’ but we all know full well that the term is used very, very loosely and the fact is they probably still only spend a small amount of time with the handful that they do truly know.

We aren’t about to return to living cheek to jowl with our closest relatives and school yard chums, thus obliterating the need for facebook, because the transitory nature of our relationships these days is irreversible; we can leave home at 18 and never return and if we want to move abroad for even more distance, we can! That’s why facebook matters to me. I truly enjoy being kept informed of my cousins in Canada and my friends in Europe from my au-pairing days. I can view photos and read updates and know more about them than I ever could before. Sure, I probably won’t visit them any time soon (but I rarely did before social networking came on the scene) but I am in touch and up to date which is an improvement. We may live far apart but there is no longer a need to become strangers and when anyone is in a position to visit, I am far more inclined to make the effort than if I hadn’t seen or heard from them in years.

As for all the others on my profile, my close friends aren’t necessarily on there at all! Some haven’t signed up and of those that have, we communicate far more off facebook than on. I have old school and uni friends, former flatmates and old colleagues, of which only a handful matter to me now. The rest I accepted as it was rude not to (still can’t drop the politesse I was brought up with –as if saying no to a random kid from the year below at junior school was going to keep me awake at night!!!) but every time I check their updates I feel like a voyeur. I rarely update myself for the precise reason that I don’t want these nobodys to be reading my choice titbits. I don’t care to share with them where I am going tonight, what I had for breakfast and other such crap, yet I gleefully scroll through theirs, tutting and laughing at the banality.

The beauty of not having to stick with the same people for your entire life, or risk being lonely, is that you can pick people to whom you may be better suited than those forced on you by virtue of blood or neighbourhood. So how much do we select our kith and kin and how many of them are in our lives through obligation or disinterested networking? I’ve been thinking a lot about this one of late, not least because of my familial issues! It extended beyond them, though, because the way people reacted to what was happening with my parents affected how I continued to view them.

I am reassured that my true friends, the ones I hoped I could depend on when they came pulled out all the stops. All gave me non-judgemental support and a shoulder to cry on. Many surprised me with kindnesses and I have a solid network that I have tested and can be assured still works! Some who passed judgement or were incredulous have fallen by the wayside. Anyone I couldn’t tell (because I didn’t wish to share this with them as I knew they would revel in my problems rather than being supportive) is no longer in my life. I wasn’t brutal, I just slowly dropped them from my diary. Sure, I am only talking about two people, but knowing I no longer have to endure either of them for dinner, drinks or shopping any more is a relief in itself. The issues with my parents made me finally face up to the fact that these people associated with me in order to up themselves and put me down. I haven’t missed either and I have made sure that on meeting new people now, I don’t embrace them in such a way that I find myself with friends further down the line whom I neither like nor respect.

It’s a fine balancing act between seeing people because you want to (truly) and have to. There will always be an element of obligation in life. Anyone who totally avoids it is utterly selfish and it’s swings and roundabouts. If I make the effort to see someone one evening when I am not necessarily as up for it as I want to be, chance is they will do likewise for me one eve when the roles are reserved. It’s all about give and take and the ones I have lost along the way never got that. I have tried to convince myself that some folk aren’t selfish, just ignorant, but the older I get the more I realise that the people out there willing to make sacrifices for someone else are few and far between. I have found a fair few though and plan to hang on to them for life; if they’ll have me!