A good friend complained that I did not believe she was “being there for me”:
Note that there are various degrees of acquaintance, like:
- family of origin
- Family by marriage
- Significant other
- Best friends
- Work buddies
- Activity buddies
- Co-habitants
- Like-minded individuals
- Trustworthy individuals
- People with wealth and property
- Celebrities
- Disreputable folks
- Emotional vampires
So, i have different ideas about how to interact with people from different circles. Or, even, i May interact with a person differently when I’m working with them then when I’m at an activity with them. Now, Since some people can fall into multiple categories, friendship is not a linear scale, ranging from loved one to enemy.
I note that we have some ideas being sold to us by societal norms and media, saying that “true friends should act like _____” or “everyone should get married and have kids”. My complaint is that very few people live up to the cookie cutter molds that are trying to be sold, especially if you consider how they interact with **everyone** they encounter (and not just the people they favor). A common example is in families, where we have favorite childs, but also disowned relatives... Even though the media image wants a family to be fully functional, most families are a bit dysfunctional.
So, when I complain that I do not think people are being friendly enough with me, what I’m really complaining about is that people are pushing a media image of friendship, while not actually living it in our interactions. Yes, this is a broad generalization and I have seen various exceptions. And yes, I am quite guilty of not being the type of friend(s) that I want in my life.
At another level, for which I am partly responsible, when I consider all the types of acquaintances that I could maintain; I bemoan the fact that I am lacking some, like the family by marriage (or just the significant other)... I also try not to distrust anyone or shun anyone, yet there have been a handful of individuals who have done actions that justify that level of avoidance.
So, I am not saying that everyone has to be my significant other, behaving like the image of that, which we’re fed by various media. What I am saying is that I don’t have a significant other in my life - i don’t even feel like I have the Circle of Five for some circumstances. Like, I do not know who I could feel safe about asking for financial assistance, I do not have a good idea of who would be willing to help me move, I do not know who might be sexually attracted to me (or if it’s mutual), I do not know if anyone would serve as a caregiver... I can almost imagine one of those 20-question surveys that tries to scale a friendship or a Cosmo survey...
Although it’s distressing that I do not feel integrated into a strong community (and how much of that is based in my own fears, instead of reality?), “it’s not your job to take care of me”... (at least, that’s a takeaway from the “every man for himself” idea that we learn in capitalism, right?)
What concerns me, though, is that I’m probably not the only person who’s felt more and more isolated, as he’s aged through the stages of life. Also, without any community, how are people going to start treating each other? Without the love and respect built through community building, what are the chances that people will turn to crime, abuse, and violence? Or... scaling down... to dismissing each other, or cultivating stranger danger?
Yet, many would rather live in the fantastical stories touted by the media, instead of taking the time to honestly try to connect with their neighbors. When we make our neighbors invisible, then it’s easier for those neighbors to live counter to our ideals... or for us to paint them as doing so...
Another long text wall. Yay.
(There’s probably a whole other spinoff about taking care with the words I use, especially being much more specific instead of broad generalizations... but, these are not hard facts, just starting hypotheses)