Modern Friendships Are Broken

We have to figure out how to fix them

Friendship isn’t supposed to be easy. Sure, it should be easy to be with your friends but maintaining those friendships takes work. And so, I believe, we need to start thinking of friendships like we think about money. 

When I was younger, complaining about friends and middle-school drama, my mother’s favourite saying was “invest in your friendships”. At the time, I rolled my eyes and ignored her, but, since coming to uni and entering what feels like the ‘adult friendship’ phase of my life, I think I’m starting to understand what she meant. 

For many of us, university is the first time in our lives that we live alongside our closest friends  — the people we see every day, and with whom we are each other's most important and closest people in our lives. Our friends replace parents and siblings as family, community, and north stars. But with that sense of geographic and emotional closeness, it’s easy to become complacent: dropping communication, or skipping plans because we’re all connected anyway, so why bother? 

But I think my mum was onto something. Like money, friendships flourish when we invest in them. And to make them grow, we need to put in the work — by showing up, communicating, and, sometimes, inconveniencing ourselves. Also, like money, sometimes we are rich in friendship, confident and surrounded, and sometimes we feel a little broke, making what we do have feel all the more valuable. 

Our generation has become far too comfortable with the idea of ‘protecting our peace’, and this has come at the cost of genuine friendships and empathy. You’ve been in the library all day working on an essay, so you don’t feel up to your friend's birthday dinner? Or play? Doesn’t matter — showing up for our friends and supporting them is the most important thing we can do for our relationships. Now, I’m not saying you need to drop everything and show up to every little event your friends have, but showing up whenever you can, and being present when you do, shows that not only do you care about them and their interests, goals, and accomplishments, but also, even more importantly, that you respect them. This ties back to the money metaphor — if you want to earn more money, to get a promotion, to build a portfolio that continues to grow on its own, you need to do the work, show up to your job, and invest the money you’ve earned so it continues to grow and thrive. 

This connects to communication as well. Somehow, not responding to messages has become a mark of “coolness,” as if being unreachable means being important. But we’re all constantly online — so really, ignoring people isn’t busyness; it’s indifference. So, maybe that’s why this ‘exclusivity’ has become a signifier of something greater. But I call BS. Like I’ve said, our friendships and relationships, whether with family, significant others, coworkers, or peers, are entirely built around and into the internet and the fact that we can be constantly in communication. We know where our friends are at any minute, unprompted, and what they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, what they’re reading and watching, and even when they go to the bathroom. 

Our lives, and therefore our friendships, are built around this constant connectivity, and communication in this world of ‘always-on’ is a form of respect. Even if responding to a text message takes two seconds, it shows care and attention that matters. It shows that, despite all this, you still care for the interpersonal part of your digital relationship, no matter how trivial, because you care about your friendship. If your bank sends you a notification, you wouldn’t wait two days to respond, right? Because your money is important, and your friends should be too. 

So, all this to say, that, in this phase of our lives, friendships and our friends are the most important and central relationships we currently have, and living in a digital world, we spend so much time superficially connected that we can fail to invest in the things that actually matter. I’ll admit that this is easier said than done — I’ve personally been folly to more than one missed message or birthday party in my day. But these friendships are important to every aspect of our lives, and as we move into the next phases, it’s important we care enough to maintain them.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons