Making friends

A Post a Day in May 24/31

The interview on the radio made me sad: An international student here in Winnipeg had posted to social media that he wanted to make friends, but his post was met with hateful, racist comments rather than open invitations to connect.

It reminded me of a not entirely dissimilar incident in my own life, from many years ago: It was a Sunday evening, when the phone rang. I was doing some prep for the French-language adult-ed class I was teaching at the local university, so it didn’t seem odd when, after I picked up, the man on the other end spoke to me in French. I listened and understood, but quickly said, “Non, merci" and hung up.

He had told me that he was new to Winnipeg and wanted to make friends. He had looked through the phone book (that’s how long ago this was) and was calling people with French surnames to try to make a connection. However, I was not prepared to take a leap into friendship with a stranger, a man, who called me at home. I terminated any potential connection. End of story. He did not call again.

It has me wondering just how, exactly, it is that we make friends. We all start out as strangers to each other, but, sometimes, something clicks and we go from not-knowing-anything to wanting-to-know-more about the other.

It takes at least one of the parties to make a move, to take the step that sounds something like, “Tell me more…” or “Where did you learn the language?” or “What’s your name?” It’s not much, really, is it, but it does open the door to more.

If we meet at a political gathering, chances are good that we share the same values, so we can talk about them. If it’s at a neighbourhood picnic, well, at least we know that we live in the same community and can talk about that. But even then it can be hard to make the first move. Why is that? It goes back to my posts last week about talking to strangers. Why should we? How can we? Why don’t we?

Two examples from my own life of how two long-term friendships began: 

• I would not have Jennie as a friend, if she hadn’t, way back in high school, struck up a conversation with me, the new kid just moved from England, in the hallway, as we both sorted through our lockers. 
• I would not have Lisa W as a friend, if one of us had not made a comment about how different university was from high school, as we sat in the front row of the enormous university lecture theatre for a history class in the first term of our under-grad days.

The point is that one of us made the first move and — crucially, the other responded, and then the conversation, the back and forth, got going. Until that first exchange, we had been strangers, without connection. But once that opening gambit was launched, the opportunity for more had been created, and the possibility of friendship was seeded. Not every gambit is successful, as the international student in Winnipeg discovered, to his great personal pain, but if no gambit is made, then strangers to each other we shall surely remain.

Good friends are quite literally made, over time; they do not land fully formed into our lap. And we find those friends by taking the risk of reaching out and saying, quite simply, "Hello. My name is Amanda. What’s yours?", and then listening and responding, and back and forth until there is enough known of the other that, while maybe not yet friends, that person is also no longer a stranger. A connection has been established, maybe only a gossamer-thin thread of a connection, but even the most vibrant piece of fabric begins with the weaving of that first thread. 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash