Years ago, I had a best friend who lived next door, who, for the purpose of this article, we’ll call John. Instead of asking to come over, John would simply hop the shared fence into my backyard. I often look back and think to myself, “The fun always started once I saw his head pop over that fence!” I remember the adventures John and I got into back in the day: staying out late at the park, sneaking around the train yard, loading our slingshots with paintballs and terrorizing our neighbors. But we didn’t just get into trouble; we also talked about our lives. When we’d talk, trouble with parents, girlfriends, and school all melted away. Although John was a good friend to have, I’ve seriously beefed up the qualities that I look for in a friendship today.
Although friendships like John helped shape my identity, I think friends are a lot like sports – you root for your home team. If you’re born around Seattle, you likely root for the Seahawks. These people that you grow up around are by default the people that you will like, or will learn to like in time. But while you may continue to root for your home sports team when you move to a different city, I believe that your close friends don’t always have to be your close friends.
Have you ever heard the saying, “You’re the sum of your five closest friends?” I think that’s true, and a little frightening. But it gets especially scary when you realize you only know these five people because you live close to them. By default, you can only be friends with the people who are available to you, which is fine if these people are positive influences in your life, but problems can arise when the principal reason that you are close to them is that they’ve always been around. A friendship should thrive because of more than a physical proximity. I didn’t realize this before, but it’s really easy to continue on in hollow friendships out of habit. When you actually take a closer look at the people you know, you just might find that you’ve kept them around because their company is easy, and it’s easy because you keep them around. This is the conclusion I came to with John.
Simply put, my best pals growing up would be strangers had I been born in the next state. They were proximity friends. Proximity friends include the kids who sit next to you in homeroom, have a teacher in common as you ascend through grade school, and with time, the one next door who somehow doesn’t have to ask for permission to jump the fence into your backyard.
The innumerable combinations of actions and chances that led your family to live where they do have no obligation to make your small circle of peers special or productive people to know – and most of the time, they aren’t.
At first it didn’t matter that I only knew John because we lived next door -- I liked hanging out with him. We went on seemingly wild escapades, made memories, and talked through our troubles. Surely John wasn’t just a proximity friend! But as I began to take a harder look at what we did together, I realized that I could’ve done them with anyone. It wasn’t important so much that I was hanging out with John, but simply that I was spending time with another human being.
After I began realizing this, the conversation grew stagnant. We only talked about the old days. Reflecting back on these years, I notice that most of my buddies were like how John and I eventually became – only all the time, and I learned to get along with them because the alternative was isolation. Sometimes this can be OK for a while, though, as it was for my fence-hopping friend and me, but we eventually outgrew our friendship.
Is proximity what determines who is a friend? To be forced to cohabitate a cramped classroom year after year, to simply share the same general geographical location? I don’t think so.
When you think about why these people were your friends in the first place, keeping them around out of habit seems just as arbitrary.
Proximity friends serve a purpose at a certain time and place in your life, and when that time and place are no longer there, those people lose relevance to you. For me, they provided companionship during my formative years, but as I grow up, keeping these people around makes less and less sense.
So I started moving on from stagnant friendships with people like John who don't add anything to my life today.
And things only got better.
Now I know that getting rid of dead weight clears more room for new, more productive relationships. While these old relationships are the ones that taught me how to be a friend in the first place, they don’t need a place in my life now – I can think of them more fondly in my memory.
