When Did It Become So Hard to Make Plans With Friends?
· Time
I don’t expect anything of my friends that I don’t expect of myself.
Visit afsport.lat for more information.
But lately, I’ve found myself disproportionately annoyed by tiny breaches of friendship etiquette. If I ask a friend to dinner and they say they’re busy without suggesting another date, I feel slighted. If I introduce two friends and they start hanging out without me, I wonder why neither thought to include me. Then I wonder: am I holding my friends to an outdated social code?
Today, it is common to say “let’s catch up soon” without making plans, leave invitations unanswered, and allow one person to become the permanent initiator. My theory: Technology lets us remain constantly in touch while making the obligations of friendship increasingly ambiguous.
When you think about it, an invitation is more than a logistical question, says Dr. Jeff Katzman, a psychiatrist at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn., who extensively studies human relationships. It’s a small relational bid: something close to, “I’d like to spend time with you. Would you like to spend time with me?” When that second part is missing, we’re left with ambiguity, and we fill in the blanks.
“From an attachment perspective, we’re continually looking for signals about whether the people we care about are available and responsive,” says Katzman. “When I reach toward you, is somebody there? We also bring our own histories to these moments.”
Someone who has experienced rejection or exclusion may experience the same unanswered invitation quite differently from someone who has generally experienced other people as reliable. Katzman points out that we do our best to infer other people’s minds from very small pieces of behavior. “A text goes unanswered, and the human mind is remarkably good at writing the rest of the story: ‘She doesn't really care about me. He doesn’t want to see me. I’m always the one who tries,’” he explains.
I have lost a lot of sleep about the idea of social hygiene and the small acts of reciprocity that keep friendships healthy. I was quite surprised when two of my friends in Lisbon reached out to me on the exact same day when I had said to them separately a few months ago that I might be visiting Lisbon for work on that date. The fact that both of them remembered the exact date and reached out to check if I’m in Portugal is a great example of good social hygiene.
Whenever I make new friends now, I pay close attention. Do they regularly cancel plans at the last minute? Do they have the capacity for investing in a friendship and take on the logistical requirements of keeping an adult friendship alive? It takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from mere acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to go from that stage to simple friend status, and more than 200 hours before you can consider someone your close friend, according to a report published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Getting to know someone takes a real commitment of time.
I also think about rejection and what we reasonably owe our friends. “Reciprocity is extremely important, but I don't think reciprocity means symmetry,” says Katzman. Healthy friends don’t need to keep score. “I think of friendship a little like improvisational theater.” One person makes an offer, and the other person receives it and makes an offer back. The contributions don’t have to be identical. They’re building a scene together. One person might initiate more dinners; another might get curious a little more reliably. And at different stages of life—parenting, illness, caregiving, grief, work pressures—one person may carry more of the relationship for a while.
In good improvisation, both people help create the scene. Friendship is similar. We don’t have to say “Yes” to Tuesday night, but somehow, over time, we need to say “Yes” to the relationship. And it’s best if we can let our friends know that, in some way.
“A useful question might be: if I stopped doing all the work of maintaining this friendship, would a friendship still exist?,” asks Dr. Katzman. Sometimes, it may be worth stepping back a bit to see what happens.
When I have done that in the past, a lot of the friendships naturally dissipated, whereas when I look at all the close friendships I have now, it’s the result of mutual effort. It’s pretty similar to playing tennis, where one person hits the ball, and the other person hits it back. Sometimes, one of us drops the ball, but quickly enough it’s picked back up again to continue the game.
At the same time, we should have some humility about how many relationships any person can actively maintain. Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, in his book Together, describes concentric circles of connection: an intimate circle of close friends and confidantes, a larger relational circle of friends and companions, and a much larger collective circle of colleagues, acquaintances, and community. We need all of these kinds of connections, but we can’t maintain hundreds of relationships with the intensity of our closest friendships.
So I took a fountain pen and drew concentric circles in my journal and assigned a circle to every friend, be it close friends or acquaintances. It helped me understand that someone can genuinely value our relationship without having the bandwidth to place us in their innermost circle at a particular point in life. It also helped me assign how much energy I want to spend.
Ultimately, it helped me appreciate my friends for what they are.