How To Have Friends Somewhere Other Than Facebook
When I look around Facebook, I have many “friends” I haven’t actually seen in the last several years. These are what we call “loose ties.” These are the people in the periphery of my social life — these are not people I see every day, not people I’d invite to my birthday party, but people I might say hi to if I ran into them at Starbucks. But I wouldn’t actually make plans to meet them at Starbucks, because they’re not that good of a friend. They’re just a kindasortofmaybe friend.
Facebook did something for the very first time in history — it helped us easily capture and maintain all those loose social ties we have in our life. Loose ties can include everyone from that high school classmate you haven’t seen in 20 years, to that woman from bootcamp you rarely see, to that former coworker from five years ago. Loose ties are the relationships we don’t actively invest in, but can passively monitor from the convenience of Facebook. Without Facebook, we’d never maintain 400 loose ties.
Strong ties are the people you don’t need Facebook for. Strong ties are the people you live with, you see every day or every week, the people whose birthday you still remember even without the Facebook reminders. The people you actually buy birthday presents for. Strong ties are the people you KNOW you can count on to help out, you could call them and they’d pick you up at the airport or bring you ice cream when you’re sick in bed. Strong ties don’t need Facebook to know what’s going on in your life, because they already know. Because they actually talk to you on a regular basis.
My loose ties include a long list of running partners. Tucson is a great community for running and if I want a running partner for Saturday morning, I could reach out to several dozen Facebook friends and find someone to go run.
Which is what I did several weeks ago. Except I didn’t reach out to everyone, I reached out to three specific coworkers I knew would make for good running company. All three of these guys juggle families and work commitments, so when it actually worked out for the four of us to meet at the same location on the same day at the same time, I was ecstatic. It was a scheduling miracle.
Almost but not exactly. Turns out, two of us wanted to run trails and two of us wanted to run the road. This is what’s called a first world problem, it’s absolutely not a problem, rather an annoying inconvenience that just needs to get sorted out. Which we did. We decided to run in Sabino Canyon, which has dozens of trails, as well as one long paved road up the center of the canyon. This location provided us an excellent compromise: two of us would start out at 7:00 am and run a steep and hilly trail. The other two would start out later and run the hilly paved road. Then sometime around 8:30-ish, our paths would cross when the trail dumped out at the paved road. Our plan was brilliant!
And even stranger still, the plan actually worked! I met Doug at 7:00 am and we started out running on the hilly trail called Phoneline. John and Mark met up sometime before 8:00 and started out on the paved road. Both routes were consistently uphill, and right around 8:30 when Phoneline dropped down onto the paved road, Mark and John arrived at the same spot. We literally arrived at the same point within two minutes of each other. We all high-fived, congratulated ourselves on our excellent timing, gulped down some water and then turned around to start the 3.7 mile descent to the parking lot.
As the four of us ran alongside each other, and at least two of us turned off our iPods to chat, I was struck by how much I loved, LOVED, this sudden camaraderie. Here we were on a beautiful spring Saturday morning, all of us healthy and motivated enough to comfortably cruise through an eight mile run. We were all catching up on work and life, commiserating and offering sympathy and humor. I don’t want to overstate the value of a simple morning run, but sometimes when everything is in sync, it’s just all in sync. And that is a beautiful thing.
Until it’s not.
It was a beautiful thing until my knee decided to start behaving badly and my stamina faded and we encountered YET ANOTHER HILL to climb. At that point, it wasn’t a beautiful thing. The pain in my left knee was the exact opposite of a beautiful thing.
With one mile left in our beautiful run, and one more steep hill to climb, I got dropped by the guys. I got dropped by three guys who are all at least twelve years OLDER than me. OK fine, my ego isn’t that big, I’m perfectly fine with getting dropped.As I was climbing the last big hill, I had slowed to a near walk and I could see the three guys up ahead of me. They were all still together, and were just reaching the top of the hill. I watched as they reached the summit of the hill.
But then a strange thing happened. As soon as Doug and John reached the top of the hill, they immediately turned around and ran back down the hill to where I was still climbing.
And this is the part where I tell you that John and Doug are both military veterans of the Army and Air Force Special Operations. And all I could think of when they came back to “get me” on the hill, was that the military doesn’t leave their people behind. They always come back for you.
Now this story is absolutely not a knock on Mark. Mark did what I would expect ALL my other friends to do — he stopped and waited for me at the top of the hill. That is what I do when I’m running with friends when I get out ahead, I stop and wait. In my world, my people stop and wait for everyone to catch up. That’s just standard operating procedure.
But in John and Doug’s world, you don’t just stop and wait. In their world, you go back and help. You do more than what’s reasonable. You go back and you get your people and you hang out with them and distract them from the misery of climbing the last few yards of the hill. In their world, you do whatever it takes to help your people make it through.
Together with John and Doug on either side of me, we reached the top of the hill. Me for the first time, them for the second time. And then the four of us, shoulder to shoulder, cruised down the last half mile to the parking lot.
My fatigue and knee pain had left me then and I felt like I could have run another eight miles. I think that had to do with the fact that I now had people who had my back. I had people who did more than waited for me—I had people who came back for me. I had people.
I remembered that John’s wife Karen was known for the phrase “We lift each other up.” And I felt emotionally lifted up on that run, because of the simple camaraderie and support we showed each other. We all finished the run together, and immediately departed back to our busy and separate lives. But for the rest of the day I felt enriched because of our companionship, our shared adventure.
Several weeks later, I still remember the joy of that run and I am reminded there is always the potential for our loose ties to become strong ties.
Just because we don’t see someone regularly doesn’t mean they can’t turn into an extraordinary friend and a valuable connection. Some of our loose ties might be people who won’t answer the phone when we call, or people we’d never call in the first place.
But some of our loose ties might be people who would turn around and come back for us, even if they had to carry us on their back up a hill. In the pouring rain and barefoot.
I know sometimes it’s hard to tell who those extraordinary friends might be. I know sometimes it might feel like the awesome friends are hiding out in the shadows and we can’t always see who they are. Sometimes it might feel like we just don’t have enough strong ties to lift us up when we need it.
But I’m starting to think that some of our loose ties might actually be saints and angels, just waiting for the opportunity to be transformed into strong ties.
So I’m going to start looking for more opportunities to convert loose ties into strong ties. I’m going to be on the lookout for whoever might be hiding out in the shadows, just waiting for the opportunity to help out. I’m going to start giving everyone the opportunity to lift me up and be lifted up.
Because at the end of the day, we all need people, and not just people on Facebook. We all need people who are out there climbing hills beside us.
