Situational Friends

Gather round kiddies, the term for the day is situational friends. I coined this term to describe the people who are your friends for a certain phase or phases of your life, but eventually disappear despite all the promises of keeping in touch. This phenomenon is a sad reality of our harried and overbooked culture and lifestyle. You can't really blame your situational friends when they fade from your life. It just happens sometimes. I know that I am more sensitive than many people and that I often take things too much to heart. Lately though, I have lost a large number of situational friends and it hurts me to think that they don't even have the time to exchange emails with me or give me a call. Some of these people were my "friends" for several years. I changed jobs back in December, which has led to this latest bout of situational friendism (yes I know that's not a word).

Let me describe the situational friend in a little more detail. It's a person who at some point in your life, you see and interact with often (at work, at school, at the gym, etc). From this frequent interaction, a friendship develops. Over time, you may grow closer to this person and really think of them as a genuine friend instead of as a situational friend. The true test of this friendship occurs when the situation that facilitates the friendship changes (e.g. you change jobs). If the person is a genuine friend, they will maintain some level of interaction with you. Granted, it may be less than before, but they'll make the effort to stay friendly with you. As an example, I haven't seen my roommate and very good friend from college for two years, but he still manages to email me once in a while despite being extremely busy. There is also the guitarist from my college band who was also one of my best friends in college. Even though I haven't seen him since my wedding nine years ago, he still calls and emails me every so often. These people are true friends - which I am finding out are rare treasures in life. Sadly, most of the people in our lives that we think of as our friends are really just situational friends. Don't believe me? Try changing jobs and see how many of your former coworkers will bother with you in six months. Once the situation that brought you close to them (in this case work) changes, it just becomes too much effort to stay friends. Instead of having a lunch or water cooler conversation with you about your weekend, they would need to shoot you an email or pick up a phone and they just don't have time for that. Or is it that they don't make time because they really don't value your friendship as much as you had thought?

I don't intend for this post to sound negative. Situational friends are just a tragic result of the pressures of modern existence. We always have so much to do that we often don't make time for our friends when it's no longer convenient to just stop by their desk and chat. I guess what saddens me is that over the years, I considered many of these people to be my friends, but they gradually faded from my life. I know the question that many people would probably ask: did you try calling or emailing them? The answer to that question is yes I did. When you email someone and get no response at all or two sentences followed by, "Gotta go, very busy," you quickly get the message. I often wait to see if they'll take the initiative to send me an email instead of just replying to me. After months go by and I haven't heard from them, I add them to my list of situational friends from the past and write them out of my life. The worst part of it is that the list grows ever longer with each passing year. I guess that is just the way that life goes. The one good thing that has come out of all this is that I have learned to really appreciate my true friends whose presence in my life persists in the face of all obstacles. True friends are rare treasures indeed.