When did we stop having friends and start having acquaintances?

I have always been something of a loner.

I am quite comfortable with my own company, which probably has something to do with being an only child.

But even an only child needs friends.

When I was very young, my father was a self-employed lawyer and my mother stayed at home, partly because of illness but also because that was far more common at the time. Getting a place in kindergarten was by no means automatic if there was a parent at home.

Eventually, however, I was allowed to go.

By then I had apparently become slightly strange and had started talking to imaginary friends.

Perhaps somebody decided that real children might be worth trying.

Fortunately, that worked.

I made friends in the neighbourhood and we started school together. When I was nine, I moved to another town, where I lived until I was twenty.

During my school years I had plenty of friends. I was outgoing, generally happy and good at sports. Your classmates in those days became almost like siblings. We played all kind of sports, joined the Scouts, went skating, swimming and spent much of our free time together playing the sort of games that children today barely know anymore.  As soon as school was  over, we would throw our schoolbags behind the goals on the school grounds and play football endlessly and if it rained for a while, we could climb the rocks where the library stood and read whatever we could find until it cleared up again.

There was no social media.

There was also remarkably little television.

In Iceland there was no television at all on Thursdays, and for years there was none during the entire month of July.

Imagine explaining that to a fifteen-year-old today.

In summer, children went to stay on farms, attended sports courses or simply went outside and found other children.

Friendship did not require much organisation.

It just happened.

 Then life started separating us

After compulsory school I went to secondary school in Reykjavík, unlike all my old friends.

I spent the first two years with one group and another two years with those who continued towards university. I got to know plenty of people, but most of those relationships belonged to school. At the end of the day everyone went home, and my classmates and I did not even live in the same town.

My old childhood friendships continued for a while, partly through sport.

Then I stopped competing regularly, went abroad for almost two years to see the world, came home and eventually spent six years studying medicine.

Again, I met lots of people.

But knowing lots of people is not the same thing as having lots of friends.

University life included parties, of course, and all sorts of people crossed my path. Some became friends for a while. Most became acquaintances and eventually disappeared in different directions.

Then came work.

Marriage.

Children.

A career.

And suddenly the years start moving surprisingly quickly.

You work alongside people every day. You know their habits, their opinions, what coffee they drink and probably far more than you ever wanted to know about some of them.

You may call them friends.

But then one of you changes jobs.

And somehow you discover that you never actually knew their spouse, their children or much about their life outside work.

The friendship belonged partly to the building.

When the building disappeared, so did the friendship.

 Perhaps I am not the best example

This is my story, and I am probably different from many people when it comes to friendship.

I have often been quite enough for myself.

Others have been much better at maintaining friendships from childhood, university or work. Some people are naturally good at clubs, organisations and social groups.

Unfortunately, I seem to have been born with a slight allergy to organised social activity. A sort of a lone wolf.

Books and music have often been perfectly good company for me.

That does not mean I have difficulty making friends.

Quite the opposite.

As an only child, you learn early that if you want other children to play with, you have to find them.

I remember almost developing a radar that came out of the top of my head whenever I heard children playing somewhere in the neighbourhood.

An only child cannot simply turn around and annoy a sibling.

Children with brothers and sisters always have somebody available at home, even if they cannot stand each other.

We had to hunt.

And I became rather good at it.

Throughout my life I have met people I liked immediately and thought: I would like that person as a friend.

Not entirely unlike being attracted to a girl when I was younger, although usually with fewer complications.

Usually.

Friends are not guaranteed for life

The strange thing about friendship is how permanent it can feel while it lasts.

And how quickly it can sometimes disappear.

People move.

Lives change.

Families take over.

Careers go in different directions.

Sometimes a friendship simply fades without anything actually happening.

Sometimes it breaks.

And occasionally something happens between two people that makes it impossible to go back to what existed before.

There is an old saying that it is easy to make a new friend but hard to make an old one.

The older I get, the more truth I see in that.

A new friendship can become close and important.

But you cannot manufacture forty years of shared history.

You cannot recreate being thirteen together.

You cannot invent the stupid things you did at seventeen, the people you both knew, the places that no longer exist or the jokes that require no explanation because both of you were there.

Time creates something that enthusiasm alone cannot replace.

And then work ends

Now that my working life is coming towards its end, I notice another layer disappearing.

Former colleagues from different workplaces have gradually gone their separate ways.

That is perfectly natural.

Much of what connected us was work.

Yet I sometimes find myself thinking most about the childhood friends I have not seen for in decades.

Every so often there are school reunions. I have to admit that I have not been particularly good at attending them.

I have accumulated several sets of former classmates because I have attended quite a few schools.

It can be enjoyable to meet them again and ask the standard questions:

What did you end up doing?

Where do you live?

Are you married?

How many children?

How are you?

All perfectly pleasant.

But after a while there is a limit to how many times one can say:

“Do you remember...?”

The group I would genuinely like to sit down with again is the group of boys and girls I grew up with because we were so close in our youth

Not because we necessarily have much in common today.

I don't even know if we do.

But we once did.

And that counts for something.

So who are the friends now?

Family is different.

My parents, who died some years ago, were among my very best friends.

Today my wife is my closest companion, as is my youngest son, who is approaching fifteen and is still, up to a point, quite a lot like me.

Then there is my dog.

He follows me everywhere and has so far proved extremely reliable like dogs normally are.  He is also the only one who, so far - and probably forever – seems to think that I am God.  Someone once said, “The more I get to know people, the more I like my dog.  The saying has been attributed to various people, but it stands perfectly well on its own

Children are another matter. We naturally expect to recognise ourselves in them, but they have their own personalities and their own lives. There is no guarantee that we will always have the same interests or even see the world in the same way.

The bond is different.

It does not depend on whether we would have chosen each other at a party.

I still know a great many people.

I have plenty of acquaintances.

But I no longer have many people I would describe without hesitation as true friends.

Strangely enough, I am not particularly unhappy about that.

Perhaps because I have always been a little bit of a loner.

Perhaps because I have learned that friendship is not a competition in numbers.

And perhaps because, when everything is stripped away, there is one person you are going to spend every single day of your life with.

Yourself.

You had better learn to be a reasonably good friend to that person.

As for the rest, we will see.

Perhaps I will make a whole new group of friends when I finally end up in a nursing home.

By then I should have plenty of time and perhaps a goldfish memory as well, so everyone I meet will seem like someone I am meeting for the first time.

And presumably no job to get in the way.