a Look at a Book

Put Down Your Smartphone

I’m starting with a tough one! Stick with me, and it’ll be good. Honest 🙂

In Michelle Obama’s recent book The Light We Carry, she spends a portion of it talking about connection and relationships. She describes our phones as “small, rectangular shields.” How apt!

She says that she’d never have met one of her now-closest friends if she’d been using her phone at her hair salon. Since she wasn’t, she was able to notice a commonality with the person in the chair next to her, strike up a conversation, and the friendship grew from there.

This concept of avoiding conversations with people by using our technology is one that many authors and researchers have noticed (for example: Reclaiming Conversations by Sherry Turkle). I’ve noticed it too!

I was surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, when one of my Ecuadorian friends shared that he purposefully put in his headphones on the bus just so he could avoid talking to people. I know of plenty of people who do that sort of thing when walking somewhere or sitting in an airport.

I understand the comfort level that comes with staying in our own bubbles, but we avoid conversations with strangers at the cost of meeting people who have the potential to become friends.

Am I anti-phone and anti-technology?

It depends on the day, to be honest. Some days, I’d like to do away with it all. Other days, I appreciate the connection that technology gives me to my far-away family and friends.

But I think most people can agree that we use our smartphones/tech for much more than connecting with far-away loved ones, and it ends up hurting our chances of making friends with people who are physically close by.

I cannot remember exactly which book I read it in first, but I know Ms. Obama mentions it in her book, too: even a brief interaction with someone you don’t know boosts your sense of connection and belonging and mitigates loneliness.

Practical examples:

• saying hello to a neighbor as you walk the dog or get your mail. That’s just one word! and it makes a difference
• asking how a cashier’s day is going (aka choosing to checkout with a cashier rather than self-checkout! I don’t always, but I can be pleasantly surprised at the additional human interaction it provides)
• looking the curbside pick-up bearer of your groceries in the eye and saying thank you with a bright smile. Not just for the sake of human connection, but geez! They did all your shopping for you! The least we can do is give a heartfelt thank you, undistracted by our phones.
• waving hi to a fellow runner, walker, or bike rider

While not guaranteed to produce best friends by any means, these are such simple, basic interactions, and they do make a difference. In fact, any type of social interaction has been linked to living a longer life (also this article). And also . . . there is always the potential you could surprise yourself and make a new friend. 🙂

Get their number

At the risk of sounding like I’m contradicting myself, now I’m advising you to pull out your phone . . . in order to save a person’s contact info. Turns out that, in order to arrange a time to hangout, it’s quite helpful to have a way to get ahold of them when you’re not in per son.

. . . But am I the only one who sometimes wonders when is the right time to exchange numbers with someone? Do you have to wait until you see the person a certain number of times? Can you do so upon first meeting someone?

As with a lot of life, there’s not one right answer. Sometimes you wind up with a person’s number for a logical reason unrelated to hanging out. Other times, you just have to plain ask because you want to get together – maybe the first time, maybe after the tenth or twentieth time.

I have historically been hesitant to ask, which has cost me opportunities to build friendships. So I’m learning that if I’m interested in getting to know a potential friend better, I simply need to ask for their number.

Though it can often feel awkward to me to ask, and I might even be awkward when asking, it pays off.

For instance, if I hadn’t asked a new friend for her number right away, it would have been harder to invite her to the local library book sale. I’m glad I did, because she came along and enjoyed browsing the books as much as I did!

More recently, I asked a church acquaintance who I met through our choir ensemble for her number, and she was happy I asked!

That’s the funny thing: I tend to get all nervous about asking for someone’s phone number, but once I ask someone, they’re usually happy to give it.

Folks, other people are lonely too and want to make friends. We just need to be reaching out to each other more.

Set up a time outside of your typical context

To either grow a current friendship, or try out a potential friendship, ask that friend to do something outside of where you normally see them.

For example, invite a coworker you enjoy to your workout class/club. For someone you only see weekly at church, invite them to coffee midweek. Perhaps there’s someone you always see and have a brief interaction with when you drop your kid off at daycare/school that you’d like to get to know better. Ask them if they’d like to meet up for a walk.

A big reason to do this, as Nelson explains, is that if one context is the only time we see those people, then, no matter how much we appreciate them, the friendship will most likely dissipate if a life change happens. That is, it will likely dissipate until or unless we reach out and initiate a new way of knowing that person. It also will likely not grow into a deeper friendship even if life doesn’t change for a while.

It may feel a bit uncomfortable at first to suggest something outside of your normal window of interacting with that person. BUT if we never take any of those one-context friendships into another realm, then we likely won’t build the deeper friendships that we crave.

Here’s an example from my own life: maintaining friendship with the family that I lived with my first year after moving back to the States. I barely ever see them now, except for the fact that T had convinced me to join her workout group well before I moved out of their house. Now I know that I’ll see her when I’m there, and we also have worked out just the two of us other times, too. Creating another context to see her really helped our friendship continue after I moved into my own place and didn’t see her every day.

Schedule another time before you say goodbye

“We should do this again.” <– That phrase right there is a golden opportunity. Whether you’re thinking it or the other person says it, snatch up the chance to schedule another time to get together right then and there!

Because if you don’t, by the time y’all get around to scheduling it, it could be weeks or months before another get-together happens. There goes momentum in friendship…

Try saying something like, “Want to put something on the calendar now?” before the conversation ends. Nelson’s recommendation is not to leave the other person until something is on the calendar. In my experience, that is not 100% feasible, but it’s possible more often than you might think.

Set a regular time to be together

I think a word people use here is “ritualize” it.

• Maybe you’re a stay at home mom whose kids are school age and you can meet up with another friend at the gym twice a week.
• Maybe you discover that some of your friends or coworkers enjoy game nights and you make it monthly. (Something I’d like to do with our friends!)
• Maybe you set a weekly time for people to come over and have dinner, and you just plan on it, unless someone is sick.
• Maybe you’re a college student and you meet up at the same place to study with a friend at the same time each week.

The possibilities are as endless as you let them be.

When we set up a regular time to talk and be with friends, it creates predictability, stability, and gives us the most important ingredient in deepening friendships: TIME.

One of the pieces of Shasta’s book that made SO MUCH SENSE to me was about the ingredient of time in friendships.

See, we all look back fondly on our school days when it was “so easy to make friends.” In childhood, we became friends with our classmates mainly because of proximity and the boatloads of time we spent with them (however willingly or unwillingly). But let’s be honest . . . would we even have been friends with the same people if we hadn’t been in the same class or sport as them? Maybe. Maybe not.

As adults, it’s a lot harder to find that amount of time to make friendships feel “easy” to form.

Perhaps the most obvious arena to “naturally” form friendships as a grownup is at work, since those are the people you see the most besides family. However, deepening friendship doesn’t always happen if we don’t spend time with coworkers outside of work (see the first suggestion above).

Beyond the people we work with every day, we have to be more intentional in getting solid amounts of time with others. Creating a regular event or routine to be with our friends provides us with a way to build in that elusive ingredient that fertilizes friendships best: time.

But what about . . . time?

You may have noticed that most of the suggestions here require time. When we’re feeling lonely, we want an instant fix – which simply isn’t possible. {sigh} How I wish it was!

But nope. The cure for loneliness happens slow and steady, like making bread from scratch. If you rush the process, it either doesn’t work, or you just don’t get a satisfying result.

I know, I know. Time is precious. And we often feel like we don’t have enough of it. Our culture pressures us to wear busyness like it’s a badge of honor, and we stuff our days full of who knows what in order to earn that badge. I mean, seriously, when was the last time you heard someone say, “Actually, life has been pretty open and chill lately”?

For many people, busyness seems to be the main reason they can’t get together with people: either they themselves are “too busy” or their friends are.

But time is so vital to friendships that the ideas in this post won’t help you unless you prioritize the time to make them happen consistently.

May I present you with a reflective exercise?

Okay, great. 🙂

Reflective Exercise

You can’t control the busyness of another person – obviously. But you do have control over your life and its busyness. No, we’re not fully in control of our lives. But we have more control than we often realize.

If you’re feeling dissatisfied with the level of connection you share with people, and, like me, are longing for deeper in-person friendships, consider:

• What are you currently prioritizing in your life? (hint: it’s usually what you spend the most time on)
• How might you rearrange your priorities to create room in your life for getting together with people? Because it’s not always that we don’t have time for something. It’s that we haven’t prioritized it (yet).
• Is busyness truly what’s stopping you or is something else stopping you – perhaps like having a pristinely clean house and all your errands done before you invite someone over? If you’re putting that kind of pressure on yourself (been there!), try the book Bread and Wine by Shauna Niequist for some examples of how you don’t have to have it all together before you open your home and heart.
• Have you over-committed yourself, your spouse, and/or your kids to too many activities? If so, how can you set limits? (i.e. one sport/extracurricular per kid per season or on X day of the week we will not schedule anything unless it’s with friends)

Yes, building friendships takes time and intentionality. You gotta go through it. There’s no way around it.

Also, yes, it can be exhausting and discouraging how much time it seems to take!

Maybe this will encourage you: One of my favorite people on the planet said to me in a note to my lonesome college-freshman self, “The beginning takes a long time, doesn’t it?”

Yes, it does.

It took me two years to feel like I had a solid community in Ecuador. It’s taking me even longer here, but I believe I have the foundations I need to build deeper friendships. Even if the “beginning” you’re facing is the start of some new friendships, just remember that it will probably take longer than you want it to. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing it “wrong.”