How do we grow bonds of friendship and affection?

Most of us have probably experienced a particularly numbing style of friendship maintenance, the coffee catch up purgatory. When lifestyles are sufficiently mutually exclusive to drive a logistical wedge between you from seeing one another, this maintenance pattern emerges when enough time passes between you but there are still bonds of affection that keep you modestly committed to one another. You reminisce about memories of the past and learn what's new — but not much for future planning or co-creation enters the equation.

Shared novel and challenging experiences are on the farther end of this spectrum — it is at the opposite end of deterioration, past the medium of maintenance, and onto the end of the spectrum where growth is active. I am no neuroscientist, but I understand the brain to pay closer attention to new experiences — time seems to expand the more new experiences we have. Our brain compresses our experiences if they are largely the same — when we follow a routine day in and day out for an extended period, it's funny how quickly the time seems to pass. And yet a single week or two traveling to a new place packed with experiences may register as a lengthy period of time. Associating our friendships with new experiences carves out space for them in our brains.

There is another aspect to growing our bonds of affection and attachment — the overcoming of challenging circumstances together. When you go through something difficult together with a friend, you will feel much closer to them. Not necessarily a conflict between you two, but a challenging enterprise. Some of my closest friendships have emerged from producing an album of music — there are so many challenges, choices, restrictions, opportunities for collaboration that allows friends to work together towards a mutual objective.

The pandemic has made this sort of bonding more evasive. Many of us have blinked and 2022 has emerged before us. Staying mostly at home has worn us down, shrunk our experience of the world, and kept us more separate from our friends.

It's certainly not impossible to get back to this kind of bonding. I know many friends who are doing it. I have found it challenging for myself — I relied on a social infrastructure where institutions and networks would consistently keep me in the loop of events. Now with so many of these venues closed partially or permanently and so many friends moved on to other places, the responsibility lays on me to take the initiative to find or create new experiences.

I am finding my world smaller when I spend more time at home being “efficient” or “productive”. I am searching for more ways to share and expand in physical space, with others. It's all out there.