DussInBoots

I have never been very good at keeping friends.

I was alone for much of my childhood, but I was never particularly lonely. I was perfectly content spending my days in my bedroom, immersed in films, TV shows and books. Even though I had a terrific group of friends at school, I didn’t really socialise much once I got home because I attended a different school from the kids in my neighbourhood. And I didn’t go out much anyway. I stayed home so much my neighbours would occasionally even think I was away at boarding school.

I relocated to a new city after finishing the tenth grade. I adored the new friends I made in my new city and for a while, I also maintained contact with friends from my former town. When I returned for Christmas, I would bring them presents and we would spend the holidays together. However, they gradually started to fade from my life.

When I transferred schools once more for the 12th grade, the same thing occurred. I guess it was inevitable. They moved on with their lives, and I moved on with mine. It is challenging to continue playing a significant role in someone’s daily life when you are no longer in daily contact.

Then I went to college, once again in a different state, a place with no familiar faces. However, I wasn’t particularly bothered by it. Like my mother, I have never really been the type of person who gets lonely or misses people a lot. I was always preoccupied with what was in front of me. When I think back on my past relationships, I don’t really recall missing them all that much after they ended either. I used to think that I might have ADHD  because if something or someone was out of sight, it was almost immediately out of mind. While my college roommates talked to their parents everyday, I talked to mine once every few weeks. And for a long time, I was proud of my independence.

Until lately.

I think I had become too independent. Independent enough that I never really built myself a village.

I do have a bunch of great friends. Friends who love and genuinely care about me. But they have their own lives and, more importantly, their own friendgroups. And lately I’ve realised how much I miss having my own circle of friends. Part of it is complicated by my past – painful memories related to friendgroups, including being sexually assaulted by someone who was a part of my old one. Since then,  I have found it incredibly difficult to become part of a group again. And although I make good friends with a lot of people, I tend to remain on the outside of their groups. For a long time, I didn’t mind. But now I do.

At the ripe old age of 25, there are days when I feel like I don’t have any friends. Perhaps it’s because I live thousands of kilometres away from my friends. Or maybe it’s because I’m focusing on my studies. Or it could be the fact that I’m in a long-distance relationship that takes time and work. I rarely, physically spend quality time with people anymore. My boyfriend and I spend the majority of our free time together, playing games, watching movies, or just talking, existing in the same little corner of the internet (Thank you, Discord!).

However, I have also realised something else: I cancel a lot of things.

I decline invitations. I decide I’m too exhausted to go. I tell myself I would rather stay home. I choose the comfort of my own room over the mild inconvenience of going somewhere, meeting people and making an effort. And when I think about it, I have been doing this for years. There is always a perfectly reasonable excuse. I’m tired. I have work to do. I don’t know many people there. I would rather stay home. I can always go next time. Except there isn’t always a next time. 

My boyfriend has a village. And the stark contrast between us, I’ve realised, is that I have extremely rigid boundaries while he sometimes seems to have none at all.

I also want to be careful here: there are individual differences in everything. Not everyone wants a big circle of friends, and not everyone needs a village in the same way. You do not have to fit into a particular social norm to live a fulfilling life. And you should always have the choice to opt out. If you genuinely prefer solitude, there is nothing wrong with that. Boundaries are important, and independence is not something we should be ashamed of.

But I do think there is a pattern here worth looking at.

There are things you start hearing so often online that they almost become clichés: the “male loneliness epidemic”, adults joking about having to schedule a night out with their friends three months in advance, people talking about how difficult it is to make friends after university, etc. I recently read a piece on Substack that gave me a rather pessimistic perspective on this. The author had examined the comment sections of some of Pornhub’s most popular categories, looking specifically at videos with active comment sections. Among the comments he examined, each had at least one man talking about their own depression and suicidal thoughts.

This was, of course, one person’s observation of a very particular corner of the internet, not scientific evidence. But I found it difficult to forget. Because perhaps what we are witnessing is a society full of people desperately trying to satisfy a need for connection in places that were never designed to provide it.

I don’t mean to say that individualism is inherently bad, especially when it can be liberation to many people. It can give the freedom to leave unhealthy families, establish boundaries, choose our careers, live alone, make our own decisions and build lives that look different from what society expects of us. But there is a difference between having the freedom to live independently and being taught that independence is the highest form of success.

Capitalism, particularly in its modern form, has a strange relationship with this. We are constantly encouraged to optimise our individual lives. Be productive. Build your career. Protect your time. Invest in yourself. Maintain your boundaries. Choose what works for you. Don’t settle. You don’t owe anyone anything.

When we examine individuality itself, we find some extremely intriguing information. In a study that examined five European countries, people who lived in cultures that were more collectivist were less likely to be lonely, while people who lived in cultures that were more independent had weaker social ties. There was a strong link between living in a more individualistic country and a higher risk of chronic loneliness, which was found in another big two-year study of 45,490 adults in Western countries.

Researchers have also studied the link between capitalism and loneliness. One study found that people who thought their society was more neoliberal were less happy, in part because they felt more alone and cut off from other people. Neoliberal ideas could also make people feel more alone, in part by making them feel like they were competing with one another.

Again, I am not saying that wanting privacy, freedom and independence is a bad thing. I value all three of those things. I need boundaries, and I think everyone should have the freedom to decide how much of themselves they are willing to give to other people. But I wonder, whether, in becoming so protective of our independence, we sometimes forget what we lose when we remove every inconvenience from our relationships.

Because community is, by definition, an intrusion into the perfectly self-contained life. It means that someone else’s needs occasionally become your problem. It means your plans sometimes have to change. It means being there when you would rather be somewhere else. It means tolerating people, accommodating them, making compromises and showing up even when it would be much easier not to.

And this is what I find most challenging: learning to distinguish between a healthy boundary and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced.

My boyfriend’s village inconveniences him. People will show up at his house unannounced while he is trying to rest. Friends will call him asking to be picked up. The other day, one of his friends woke him up to ask him to come to an event he had already decided not to attend. He had stayed up all night the night before and desperately wanted to sleep in. But they wanted him there, so he went.

If I had been in his position, there is absolutely no way anyone would have managed to get me out of bed.

I have talked to my boyfriend about how he needs to learn how to set healthy boundaries more than I could count. But at the same time, I also realised I need to be more open to a certain degree of inconvenience.

We often talk about community as though it is something entirely comforting: people who love you, people you can rely on, people who will be there when you need them. We rarely talk about the less romantic side of it. Community asks things of you.

I want the kind of community where someone would call me when they haven’t seen me in a few days. I want friends who would drag me out of my room because they want me at dinner. I want someone to show up at my house with food. I want people who know my favourite snacks, remember my birthday without some app reminding them, and notice when something is wrong before I say it.

But I also know that if I want those kinds of people, I have to become that person for someone else. I cannot expect people to inconvenience themselves for me while insisting that my own time, comfort and solitude are too precious to inconvenience myself for them.

Maybe that is what I have been missing.

Not friends, exactly.

A village.

And a village, by its very nature, is inconvenient.