Is Losing Friends Really Such a Bad Thing?
Balancing quantity and quality…but also quandaries and qualms
Even before the pandemic befell our society, I’d been mulling the role of friendship in my life. As a person with autism, my ability to have useful interactions with others, in person, has always been an obstacle. I’d managed to forge some friendships with real-time peers throughout my college and young adult years. But many of my most meaningful friendships are ones I’ve developed online.
“Online friends?!?!” — you ask? Oh, they’re not real. They’re superficial. “Those people” don’t actually care about you, Eichy! Just consider how quickly they might “ghost” you, from behind those keyboards or computer monitors…
I can understand how social butterflies might view it in that way. Even socially-awkward folks who prefer interpersonal connections may process my words with skepticism. But, unavoidably, COVID-19 ravaged our world. Zooming and Skyping became a necessity rather than a luxury. We were forced to physically separate ourselves, for months on end, from the ones whom we’d most want to hug or backslap.
Amidst this new reality, I forced myself to reconsider the value of racking up high numerical quantities of friend-like contacts. Increasingly, I had to reckon with the matter of how many…
