Thursday, November 11, 2010

on friendship & the outdoors

My brother had just moved to New York City for the summer and I was on the subway to meet him for dinner (we ended up going to Cosi for some fine dining). As happens every so often, I was struck with a surge of 'emo' feelings that night, annoyed with my stable of friends, no doubt imagining some sort of alternate life in Berlin or Paris. After zoning out for a few moments, I took out my Blackberry and, naturally, crafted a list of the four qualities I value most in a friend.

This list has now been on my phone for about 18 months and I'll look at it every once in a while and just... roll my eyes. Three of the four bullet points – while signifying attributes most everyone would agree are perfectly nice qualities to have in a friend – are totally basic. They are the sort of things Charlotte on Sex and the City would probably list if she was asked "What are the qualities you most admire in your friends?" in some magazine questionnaire. But the fourth bullet - "knows me well enough to not invite me to an outdoor activity" - not only still rings true but has become something I think about a lot.

When I shared the list with my brother at Cosi, I spent a while explaining what I meant by this last trait. "It's a metaphor... sort of," I explained. "The absolute worst thing in the world is when you have this best friend and you think she knows you inside and out... and then she goes and suggests you go somewhere or do something - as if it's this great idea that she just assumes you will be totally into - and you have to find some awkward way to get out of it because it in fact sounds like the least desirable way to spend time you could ever imagine."

"But isn't it good for friends to force you to do things out of your comfort zone?" Sam asked (though I'm sure he said it in a much less stilted/weird way).

"No," I answered. "It's not that she suggested we do the ‘outdoor activity’ that's the problem. It's that she truly believed it would be something I'd enjoy."

I realize this metric sets a kind of high bar, with the built in expectation that your best friends have this deeply intuitive understanding of your desires. It's also arguably narcissistic ("I only wanna do things I wanna do!"). But there are really few things I find more depressing/distressing than when a friend asks me to go see a movie I clearly would never want to see, when a friend sends me a video with the subject line: "you will love this" that I find totally inane, or when a friend forwards me an e-mail about an outdoor music festival with the message "Immediately thought of you when I saw this! Let's go!"

1 comment:

sara allred said...

I just started reading you today and you really make me laugh. Thank you!