Best Friends Forever :: Emotional and Mental Health

Best Friends Forever
by author Jenn Farrell

My daughter went to summer camp this year, and of course she had a terrific time and made lots of new pals. Talking with her about it took me back to my own childhood; I recalled the wonderful feeling I had then: that I could never make too many friends.

I also thought I’d be friends forever with those newly met people, no matter the restrictions of time and space.

Remember that feeling? You’d go to camp or meet other kids at some event, and all of you would exchange phone numbers and mailing addresses (in those crazy days before the Internet), convinced that every one of you would be best buddies for all time.

Maybe some of those people did become friends for life, but most drifted away after a letter or phone call or two, swallowed up by the ever-present here and now. Eventually you’d forget about those chums, until you heard their names mentioned or remembered a funny story about them, and felt a pang of guilt for not keeping in touch.

As adults, we realize–and even accept–that we can’t possibly become fast friends with every new person we like (despite what some Facebook profiles would suggest).

Years ago a friend told me that each of us only has room for 100 people in our lives. I can’t remember where she acquired this tidbit of information, but the gist of it is that our brains can’t handle processing more than 100 people in our day-to-day existence. That number includes everyone with whom we interact–our co-workers, our family, our kid’s teachers, our next-door neighbours, the fellow who works at the corner store. Imagine making a list of these people–how quickly we could near the 100-person mark before we even started counting our friends!

Whether the 100-person rule actually holds any water or not, making the list allows us to examine how our lives are balanced. If our list reveals that the majority of our social relationships are with co-workers and the kid who bags our groceries, could that be a sign to make more time for our pals? Obviously, we sometimes need to socialize with people we don’t get to choose; all the more reason to offset this time spent with acquaintances by making time for friends.

Friends aren’t about improving relations or touching base; they’re the people who make us laugh, who understand us, and who like us just the way we are. If you haven’t hung out with your true friends recently, it can be easy to forget how freeing it feels. Just because we’re all grown up doesn’t mean we can’t still rely on our best friends forever to give us that summer-camp feeling–a sense that life stretches out forever in front of us, and we are never too busy to have fun.

Jenn Farrell is a Vancouver writer who got to go to her own version of summer camp this year and canâ€™t wait to go back.

Source: alive #313, November 2008

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