So many “friends,” so little connection (S3 E1)

We have more access to each other than ever before thanks to the internet and social media. In this episode we discuss some important elements in our friendships we were so great at when we were kids. . .and may have lost sight of as adults.

I would love to hear from YOU! Sound off in the comments: What’s one action you can take today, right now, to actively communicate with a friend?

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Music by Alex_MakeMusic from Pixabay

The Loves to Chat Podcast is hosted by Keela Fowler.

Email me at lovestochat@gmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

My name is Katie Allen, and this is the Loves and Chat Podcast. On the Loves and Chat Podcast, we're gonna be talking about the hopes and dreams we have for our lives as kids, and how it'll turn about as adults in the lives we currently live today. There's a lot of unexpected things that happen. There's excitement, joy, confusion, grief, hardship, and fun. Then we're gonna talk about this room of life that we find ourselves in and how we can walk alongside each other and feel a little less alone. What change will be hopefully within our kids? Let's take the same. How many of the lives that we want? What the common challenges that we face. We'll find it all here together on this podcast. If you're ready to have some company as you go on the grocery run, wash the dishes, commute to work if you still do that. Wherever you find yourself, let's chat. It's been a while, but I'm back. I'm so excited to chat with you all again. I've been off social media for over two years, and it's given me some much-needed perspective on life. Specifically on my life. Ultimately, I'll probably chat more about the like overall experience in another episode, but there was a major takeaway that I wanted to dive into with y'all today. It started with me saying I was just taking a break from social media. I told my friends, I told my family, the amount of times I had to remind my best friend that if there was something she wanted me to see, she had to literally text it to me because I was not checking Instagram, and it was a lot of reminders at first that hey, I'm not on social, I'm not on social. I had to remind my nieces and my nephews, I'm not on social. But it started with I'm just taking a break. I wanted to break the constant scrolling and checking in to see what everybody else was doing. And at first it was hard, it was harder than I expected, and it was surprising to realize what a compulsion it had almost become to open Instagram at every bland moment of the day. But eventually, over time, the longer that I stayed away, the less interested that I was in returning. My break turned into I'm not on socials. Now, when somebody asks me about something on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, I just remind them if they already know about that, I'm not on socials. If they don't know, I just tell them I'm not on socials. Because here's what I gained in my absence from it all. Without the constant engagement with social media, I was able to quiet the noise so I could listen to my own intuition again. I learned that when I stripped away the daily comparisons and the minute-to-minute updates on how other people are living, I was left to ask myself, how did I want to live? What I knew for sure was that I wanted to be more engaged with my friends, more engaged with my family. And somewhere along the way, the expectation of relationships that I was in, that we're all in, there's been a shift. A shift from engage with me, be a part of my life, to witness me, observe my life. If you leave a like or a comment, that counts as being engaged in my life. When you actually stop observing someone's life, they have to then actually tell you what's been going on. You have nothing to go off of because you actually haven't been in touch. So you need to debrief. You need an update, you need to be filled in, spill the tea, tell me everything. The current state of things for me was updates from scrolling through Instagram and Facebook during commercial breaks between real housewives episodes. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed it at the moment. I enjoy not doing it so much more now. But these are the things that I would see. This person's daughter was born last week, that person went to Costa Rica for vacation, this person went to Olivia Dean to see her in concert, and then I'd go, oh dang it, I want to go see Olivia Dean in concert. Suddenly I'm looking up when Olivia Dean will be touring near me. Can I afford the tickets? How far would I need to travel? And just like that, I've moved on. I'm not actually hearing directly from my friend about their experience seeing Olivia Dean. I'm not thinking about my friend at all. I'm just thinking about me and what I want to be doing, and what I want to do, where I want to be. I'm now in the comparison game and looking at, oh, they're having something fun to do. I want to have something fun to do. Years of that being the main way of getting life updates from friends was suddenly gone when I got off social media, and I had to do something I'd been doing for some time, but not relying on quite so much. Trying. I had to try. I had to put forth a concerted effort to find out what was going on in my friends' lives. But that shouldn't have been a surprise to me. If anything, it was a return to our foundation of relationships. It was always this way, especially when we were kids. If someone stopped wanting to play with you or sit with you at lunch, you took it as a sign that the person might not be so into your friendship anymore. Was that always the case? No. But it was often an indication that something was awry. There was something that needed to be addressed, talked about, rectified. Even if that something was one person being sensitive, someone having hurt feelings, or someone simply wanting to change things up and expand their friend group. Either way, the way to resolve things was clear. Communication. You would talk about it. In choosing to return back to the podcast, I brainstormed some new ideas. I was really excited to open a fresh Google Doc and pour out every random idea that had previously come to mind that I never got to move on. And it also went back to my old notes to review topics I'd previously thought of but never recorded. And I found that in season two, episode six, Are You in a One-Sided Friendship? I spoke about this idea of when you realize you might care more about a friendship than the other person does. I talked about the need for reciprocity, but I didn't expand on the requirement for communication. Communication is essential. When I was a kid, it was a big freaking deal when someone moved away. It was devastating. If someone moved away in the 90s and earlier, it typically meant you were about to potentially never see each other again. Y'all know what I'm talking about. I want to be clear, this is not an exaggeration. If you thought it was hard to convince your mom to drive 20 minutes across town to take you and your friend to the movies on a Saturday afternoon, how hard do you think it is to convince your parents to plan your family vacation to wherever your friend just moved? An eight-hour drive or a two-hour plane ride away. It ain't happening. So this meant you had one of two ways to keep up communication. You were either writing letters or you were calling long distance. And again, both of those came with a lot of effort and an expense. But then we got cell phones, and then we got social media, we got the internet, and specifically social media introduced ease for free. Now you can fulfill the summer yearbook promise to keep in touch. Get a new job, keep in touch, move to a new town, keep in touch, start worshiping at a new church, keep in touch. Stop going to family functions, keep in touch. But in the endless scrolling and life updates, we've lost something. We've stopped communicating and we've defaulted to observing each other. If you stop and think about how many people in your life whose life updates you're aware of without actually speaking to them, you'd realize how outrageous this is. When I was still on Instagram and Facebook, I used to be keenly aware of an influencer's kid graduating from college, the name of someone from high school's new dog, and that former colleague that had gotten divorced, remarried, and now had a baby with a new partner. I haven't even spoken to them since 2020. Why do I know that? I promise you, it's not because I spoke to them. It's not because I met up with them for lunch, it's not because I offered emotional support as they transitioned out of their marriage or gave them reassurance that they could put themselves back out there and meet someone new. It cost me nothing for that life update. But for me, that's not true connection. I didn't want to simply witness the lives of everyone I've ever known in my life. And that's what social media had become for me. When I stopped being on social media, one of the goals was to be more connected to my own life. To the people in my actual life. And here's what I was reminded of. When you care deeply about the people in your actual life and you clear the noise of people you happen to know, you get to be active and intentional in your relationships again. I'll say it again. When you lock in on the people in your actual life and clear the noise of people you happen to know, you get to be active and intentional in your relationships again. Because think about it, your real friends, tried and true. There's probably an invisible contract that you've collectively written, revised, and reaffirmed that holds your friendships together. It might sound something like this. Number one, caring about what I care about. Ask about that annoying work project, that thing we couldn't believe my in-laws said last Thanksgiving, the end of year party I foolishly signed up to lead for my seniors' high school class. You need to care about what I care about, and I need to care about what you care about. It's part of our contract. Second thing, know my people. You may not have or want kids, but you should know mine by name. Your relationship with your parents may be great, but you know to only ask about how my dad's doing twice a year. Know my people. I know your people, you know my people. Number three, intentionally communicate. It's not enough to be an observer of my life. You have to be a part of it. We talk in some way in cadence that works for the both of us. Some friends you email with every few months with an update, then you see them twice a year. Some friends you do a two to three hour phone call, catch up every week. Some friends you see weekly at church, some friends you make plans with every two to four weeks to go to dinner with or have a movie or just sit and hang. There are some friends you co-work with on Zoom every couple of days. You have friends that you call and stop by their house every time that you're in town and you catch up for a few hours. There's a wide range of what this looks like, but whatever the cadence may be, it isn't passive. It's active and intentional. You communicate. Because for me, I think that's what friendship is about. Being active and intentional. And we're so overloaded and burnt out from the constant life updates from people we happen to know that we've kicked back and resorted to less action and more observation. Don't get me wrong, I've missed a lot of updates in real time. I've lost track of the amount of times that my friends or family have said, Oh, that's right, you're not on social media anymore, when referring to something that they previously posted. My niece came home from college and said, I have so much to catch you up on. It was glorious. We had the best chat. Every time I talk to my best friend who happens to be living around the country in her RV right now, I have to ask her, Where are you now? And then get a full update on the people that she's met, the community she's become a part of, what she's seen, what the terrain is, the nature she's gotten to witness. It's incredible. Just a few months back, a dear friend that I used to work with and therefore see every day shared their cancer diagnosis and the updates on the treatments they've been going through. I didn't even know that they were sick. We just simply hadn't had one of our chats in a while. But they'd been documenting it on social media, so when we got to talk, they were like, oh, that's right. You're not on social, you don't know. But I was so thankful to get to actually talk to them about it, to hear the intricacies of their emotions and their feelings and what they've been going through, and then to have a real connection about how I can be a support to them in my actual life, not by leaving a like or a comment on their Facebook post. We've all learned that if my friends want to know something about me or I want to know something about them, we need to talk. That is the only way that it works. There's no peeking into a social media window to get an update on what's happening in the other person's life. Because I'm not leaving any updates, and they aren't, I mean, they may be posting them, but I'm not the one who's seeing them. We both need to be active and intentional in order for our friendship to be maintained, in order for it to progress, to thrive, to still be in connection. And the result is beautiful. I feel more connected in my friendships because I know that they're actually reciprocal. We're both trying. And it can still be easy and it can still be free. We don't have to buy stamps to mail a letter off, and we don't have to pay long distance fees to call each other. We don't even have to wait for someone else to wrap up their conversation on the house phone. We can just call, we can text, we can email, we can show up for each other and meet the standards that we once beautifully displayed when we were like 10 years old. Oh, you like what I like, we're friends. Oh, you like to eat what I like to eat, we're friends. You like soccer, I like soccer, we're friends. When you're sad, I show up for you. When I'm sad, you show up for me, we're friends. So now I ask you, what's one action you can take today, right now, to actively communicate with a friend? Is there someone you have a phone call to? Is there a text message that you can send? Maybe you've already drafted it and forgot to hit send. Can you use social media to actually communicate again? Is there a DM that you can whip up real quick and get off to a friend of yours? Even if it's just a simple, I wanted to let you know I'm thinking of you, and I hope we can catch up soon. It all matters. I'll chat with y'all in the next one. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening to the Loves to Chat podcast. Make sure you share this with your friends, your family, via social media, or word of mouth. Either way, I appreciate you sharing this out, listening every week, and leaving me your comments. You can listen to Loves to Chat on whatever podcast player you prefer, and you can reach out to me at lovestochat at gmail.com. I'll see you in the next one.