Why I have no friends

Ok, I have lots of friends. But, none of them are here. Every weekend, it seems we are going somewhere. And then, we come home and we are alone in the great city of Portland. I think that, since moving back to Portland in March, we have been in Portland for a grand total of four complete weekends. And, most of those we have spent mostly alone and are glad to do so as we have had a very busy social calendar in just five short months. So, it feels like we have loads of friends, sometimes like we have too many and we’d just like some peace and quiet. But, what we don’t have is local friends to call up last minute and grab a drink or dinner on a Saturday night. One of the things that we had looked forward to getting out of the Navy and moving back to the US and especially choosing to live in town in Portland was to be part of a community where we could develop a local network and put down some roots and not worry about leaving in a couple of years. But, here we are. I realize that this is a bit premature as we haven’t even been here for six months, but it still feels funny.

We have loads of friends in the states of New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts, all within an afternoon’s drive from us. These are the people that we spend most of our time with. We travel to see each other – a kind of social commuting. Think of the cost of this. Sometimes I think I should start a “Friend Local” campaign to complement the “Buy Local” movement that has grown so popular. It would encourage people to cut down on their social carbon footprint and support local communities by making friends with their neighbors instead of driving to and fro all of the time. It really does seem silly how many people are essentially trading places on the weekends to see their friends in different places. But, we love them and no new friend can live up to the worn warmth of an old friend. It’s just that we don’t have any energy left to add in local friends to the mix and so we remain in this transient state - although we so much want to be part of a community, we just aren’t here enough because we are busy with friends elsewhere.

I would never give these friends up and I could never relegate them to simply being electronic friends because of the fantastic immeasurable value of physical human togetherness, though I have had to do this with many friends who are simply too far away to see on a regular basis, which brings up another challenge to making local friends.

I know they’re out there. Every day I see people who look jolly and adventurous – perfect “new friend material,” but then my cell phone rings and it is a friend from San Francisco and they’re gone. When I get home, I think, maybe I’ll walk up to the local coffee shop and hang out for a bit and see if I meet any interesting people. But, then I check my email and there’s a new note from a friend in Spain and I forget about getting coffee. And, here I am, blogging, to keep in touch with all of you rather than meeting the people who live next door. You get so good at distance communication and find ways to use emoticons and punctuation to show your emotions when you can’t literally show them, that you feel like you’re almost there with a person. It’s amazing how much someone’s own “voice” can come through in the tone of an email and how skilled we’ve become in getting that across when we can’t see each other face to face.

I have wonderful friends all over the country and I love that I can keep in touch with them when I can’t see them and that it is so easy to communicate with people so far away. Think about what it must have been like back in the days of letter writing when months would pass with no news from loved ones because the ship carrying the letter sank in a storm or maybe the letter was just lost. Now, in a matter of seconds, you can have an exchange with someone halfway around the world! And, knowing that you may only get one letter through every few months, think of the effort put into composing that letter. It would be no dashed off two line email to say you heard a song that reminded you of the time you were at summer camp together.

You would think that because communication is so much more efficient now, we would spend less time doing it. But, it seems to be just the opposite. It is so simple to call or text or email or Skype or chat or blog that you can hardly resist. And, other people can’t resist either, so that you’ve got to respond to all of these flitting thoughts all of the time. On one hand, I love to know when a distant friend is thinking of me, but on another, I feel compelled to immediately write back. As a result, it sometimes seems like I have a virtual secondary life, and I don’t even participate in online gaming or serious virtual worlding that is out there.

Between seeing not-so-local friends and keeping up with distant friends, I find that my social budget is pretty much used up both in hours and emotional supply and that there isn’t much left to make friends in my own neighborhood.

Enter the social inventions of “Facebook” and “Linked In” and the like. These sites attempt to reunite the floating lost souls who once hung out in college or at an old job and have since moved across the country and lost each other, as we have all become so ridiculously mobile that this is more the norm than the exception. The mere existence of such networking sites proves that quick communication is imperfect and that you can still lose touch with people and that there is a need for a way to reunite. Although, I have snobbishly never subscribed to these website because I figure that I am in touch with anyone that I would want to find and that I probably lost touch with those others for a reason. I do admit, however, that I have heard many stories of successful reunions and have also poached these reconnections from other people who have alerted me to old friends who now live nearby.

This brings up the concept of the friend swap. Every time I move to a new city or have a friend that is doing so, we swap contact lists of people who we think the other would enjoy. I recently had one of these experiences where I had a kind of friend “first date” with a friend of a friend. You talk about the friend in common, a bit about yourselves, suffer through a few pauses, and then evaluate whether you think you’ll actually ever hang out. While I have never had an unpleasant experience of this sort, it always feels a little forced; really, you have been set up on a blind date. Sometimes it works and sometimes you pleasantly part and go your separate ways.

So, what do we do about this? I really don’t know. I want to have it all – not-so-local friends, distant friends, AND local friends. I know it will require patience, for one, but also perhaps some creativity. Maybe I do need to join “Facebook” – who knows. Any ideas? I’d love to hear them. Commiserations are welcome too, of course.