Trust, tests and the vanishing art of friendship
In a tumultuous time, are we building connections or pushing people away?
By: J.A. Aleman
Friendship in today’s world seems to be different from when I was a young adult. It seems to have certain criteria for what it means to be a friend and people need to fit the mold or they get sent packing.
I remember the moments when if a friend crossed you the wrong way, you would fight and then the friendship would evolve or end. There was nothing left to be said.
I’ve heard the phrase, “haters gonna hate” a few times, but what surprised me recently was a meme I saw stating someone was waiting for their friend who’s been testing their loyalty to become a millionaire so that life can get a bit easier.
At first, like with all memes I laughed, but then I thought for a bit about it because I couldn’t get it out of my mind. If this was a joke, then let’s move on. Then I started seeing the meme circulate, coming up on my feed often in different ways. I had to find out if there was any truth in this and if people actually go around testing the loyalty of the people in their lives on purpose.
Despite the fact that friendship is vital to our existence socially, the U.S. Surgeon General announced an epidemic of loneliness and isolation in 2023. While the American Survey Center (ASC) revealed that both men and women in America were suffering from a disconnection because of the pandemic. Friendship is a very important thing in everyone’s life. This is true even if we have many friends or if we only have one.
I can attest to this because I lost contact with people who live nearby but gained only one close friend who lives on the East Coast. We reconnected after a long time, but all my other friends who I saw often before the pandemic, I rarely heard from anymore.
The ASC reported that 36 percent of young men, ages 18 to 29 relied more on their parents for support, while 37 percent of the young women relied on a partner or spouse. Only 16 percent of Americans said they’d rely on a friend for support.
There could be many factors such as living situations, distance and different schedules during the pandemic that affected this, but what I see is that close friends are difficult to come by.
“We’ve seen a decline in lots of traditional institutions including the family, areas like religion, in some cases the labor market, and what that means is there’s more of a need for people to have social relationships, connections outside of those institutions,” Author and Social Scientist Richard Reeves said as a guest on the Big Think.
Some studies suggest that being lonely and not having a close friend is as unhealthy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to Reeves.
The biggest reason for this decline may be the phenomenon of testing to see if you have fake friends. In my research, I found many videos from influencers instructing their viewers on how to test their friends’ loyalty. One of these influencers is Emma Grace known as TheEmmaGrace on social media.
Influencer Emma Grace explaining how to find fake friends. Source: Youtube- @TheEmmaGrace
The way it is presented is very blasé, as if we can just test people and their emotions. Social trends cannot dictate our relationships. This doesn’t take into consideration people’s humanity. Imagine a world where this is all everyone did. Ask yourself, have you tried it to see if you have a fake friend?
Meeting someone and hitting it off could mean either a great lifelong friendship or a tragic story of how we used to be friends, and that we never really know until it happens.
However, the problem is, if we enter a friendship believing the person means to do us harm, then everything we do will be only to gauge their reaction. Any favor or act of goodwill is seen as ingenuine and comes from a place that isn’t loving. Looking closer, that makes us a bad friend.
The answer to this might be to see what type of friend we are in our circle, and I found a fun way to figure this out. Below is a simple personality test, which helps point out some character traits we could have and provide to our friend group. It’s not perfect, but we can discover something about ourselves.
All you do is answer some multiple-choice questions and tally up your answers to see if you’re the mom, cool rebel, peacemaker, clown or the baby in your group of friends. When I took the test, I landed on two archetypes and when I told my friends, they all agreed it was true.
A study on friendship done by the National Library of Medicine, showed that the importance and impact of such relationships are worth talking about with much deeper reverence. With a survey, the study asked three questions.
The first question was, how satisfied are you with your life at present? The next question had to do with the frequency in which those surveyed saw friends and if they were satisfied with that relationship. This would determine the role friends play in an individual’s overall satisfaction in their life.
If anything, finding ways to deepen connections with our friends is by far the best way to interact with them, rather than seeing if we can catch them in a lie by testing their loyalty, as that only works in mafia movies. I know my mafia movies and believe me; they never really end well for those involved.
