Comment: On Social Interaction

I’ve noticed that in informal and casual acquaintanceships, I tend to exile myself to the sidelines; for fear being left out, I preemptively leave myself out. Or, possibly worse, I start yapping away, taking center stage when maybe I should just hush. (This never happens with close friends. I yap, but I know it’s okay.)

I watch my son in social situations and I see how desperately he needs to be invited into things. I remember that in myself as a child (and now, to a thankfully lesser extent); it wasn’t enough to just join the teeming mob of kids running amok on our safe suburban streets, I needed to be invited. I was high maintenance back then, too. Ah well.

So I see in him what I perceive to be universal—the desire to be included, the need to be invited, beckoned, enveloped in love from others, if you will. (And I will.)

And it kills me to see kids, especially, struggling with it. But if even I, a raging extrovert, find it hard sometimes to join in and feel comfortable around people I know only slightly, how hard must it be for shyer types?

For years I assumed that everyone around me knew each other better, was more comfortable and having a better time that me, but I don’t think that’s actually true. Aren’t we, underneath it all, seething lumps of insecurities and ego issues?

Friendship is harder to find when you’re following your children around. Gone are the halcyon days of college when you were surrounded by an ocean of your peers, free to pick from the vast array of possibilities. Social situations are plentiful but not usually deep. So how do you navigate these waters?

It also comes down to how you define your friends. My son is refreshingly candid about these things. He’ll say to me, “Albert isn’t my friend” and he bears young Albert no malice. What he means is that he doesn’t play with Albert. I’ve tried to teach him that it isn’t kind to tell someone you’re not his or her friend, but as my son sees it, if the shoe fits, you know…it’s simple. You play with your friends. Other people? You just know them. And sometimes that makes it hard to interact with them on a casual basis. I see it in my son at birthday parties, and I share his feelings. Sometimes you just don’t know where you fit.

What does that mean for adults and our ego-entrapped selves, all enigmas wrapped up in riddles wrapped up in grown-up clothes? We talk to people all day, but who among these are our friends?

The definition of friend has dogged me for years. It’s partly due to my obsessively semantically-accurate nature that I need to know what a friend is, and I need to know if the person I think is a friend IS in fact my friend, that is, they see me as a friend.

But grownups can’t go around asking each other “Are we friends?”, “How bout now?” Because we would lose further popularity for being so blazingly neurotic; we would be insufferable.

With Facebook, we have so many “friends”, but how many of them truly know you? And truly like you? I ponder these questions, because the word friend is used so casually nowadays. You can be friends with someone you’ve never met. I don’t know if I buy that, though. With the influx of Gen Xers to Facebook, I’ve been lucky enough to come back in contact with many old friends; and they are friends, because I hung out with them in my formative years and they were nice to me in spite of my flaws.

But ultimately,we have to have our own personal definition of friendship, I guess, and not sweat the rest. I know what a close friend is: I have a few of those. That’s easy—I can be myself around them and tell them anything and they don’t cringe or head for the hills.

I guess that’s really what a friend is—someone you can be yourself with. One hopes that said friend feels the same way around you, otherwise it’s a one-way friendship, and those are doomed.

The moms at school pick-up are not all my friends, but sometimes I talk to them. But they don’t know me. And that’s okay. I try to zero in on women I would like to be friends with, but it’s hard to develop a friendship in three minute increments every weekday. You just can’t get a whole lot of depth with these casual acquaintances. So how does one take the relationship to the next level? Ahh, that’s Mommy Dating ™, and that’s a subject for another day.

Just know this: if you know me, and you like me, and I act like a goof in front of you, I consider you my friend; and I hope you feel the same way.