Rebecca Frech - Can We Be Friends?

Can We Be Friends?

Rebecca

Frech

Our

Sunday

Visitor

www.osv.com

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division

Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.

Huntington, Indiana 46750

Except where noted, the Scripture citations used in this work are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright 1965, 1966, 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Every reasonable effort has been made to determine copyright holders of excerpted materials and to secure permissions as needed. If any copyrighted materials have been inadvertently used in this work without proper credit being given in one form or another, please notify Our Sunday Visitor in writing so that future printings of this work may be corrected accordingly.

Copyright 2018 by Rebecca Frech. Published 2018.

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All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts for critical reviews, no part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without permission from the publisher. For more information, visit: www.osv.com/permissions.

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division

Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.

200 Noll Plaza

Huntington, IN 46750

1-800-348-2440

ISBN: 978-1-68192-262-1 (Inventory No. T1950)

eISBN: 978-1-68192-263-8

LCCN: 2018932966

Cover and interior design: Lindsey Riesen

Cover art: Shutterstock

P RINTED IN THE U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA

About the Author

Rebecca Frech is a Catholic author, speaker, CrossFit coach, and the managing editor of The Catholic Conspiracy website. She is the author of the best-selling Teaching in Your Tiara: A Homeschooling Book for the Rest of Us, a co-host of the popular podcast The Visitation Project, and a columnist for the National Catholic Register. She and her husband live just outside Dallas with their eight children and an ever-multiplying family of dust bunnies.

Dedication

For Kara, who still loves me even though I write books.

Contents

Introduction

Life is nothing without friendship.

Cicero

When I first began thinking and talking about writing this book, I was surprised at the reaction of the people I had mention it to. It didnt seem to matter who they were, when I said the word loneliness, their own tales of being and feeling isolated would pour out. Almost everyone, it would seem, is lonely.

Ive spent a lot of time thinking about the loneliness that seems to run rampant in our world. Never in history have people been more connected than we are now. Were all walking around with easy access to almost every person weve ever met. A scroll through the directories on our phones nearly always turns up someone to talk or chat with. Silence and time to ourselves are now completely optional. Our phones come with us everywhere (if you have kids or a dog, you dont even pee alone anymore!). Which has many of us wondering: If Im never by myself, why do I feel so lonely?

Were not meant to be solitary creatures. Way back in the beginning, God looked at Adam and declared that it wasnt good for man to be alone. It wasnt long before God created Eve. They had a couple of kids, and then a few more. Those first people could have spread out and gone anywhere, but history shows us that they mostly stayed together. They congregated in tribes and then towns, not just for safety but also for companionship. Fast-forward thousands of years and were still congregating, not just in person, but in virtual villages and communities. Still, were left wondering, How can a society that centers on constantly being connected have so many people feeling as if they are all alone?

I started my research where I usually do, with a call to my grandmother. Ninety-six years old and still sharp as a tack, shes a treasure-trove of common sense and wisdom. Ill tell you why yall are all so lonely these days, she drawled. Its on account of three things air conditioning, television, and women drivers.

I waited for her to explain what she meant, and with a sigh she said: Back before air conditioning, it used to be just too darn hot to sit inside on a summer afternoon and evening, so we didnt. We sat outside on our front porches with a big pitcher of sweet tea and visited with our neighbors. We knew the names of everyone living up and down our street, and there was always someone there if you needed them. Its not that way anymore. Its cool and comfortable in your homes, so you go inside and sit in the cold air. Youre bored or lonely because the people in your television talk to you and keep you company, so you never actually have to spend time with any real people at all.

She thought for a moment and then said: But what really did you in was women drivers. Once women started driving and folks got a second car, people started driving their kids all over the place. Used to be that kids played in the neighborhood or did sports at the school. Now yall are driving them an hour each way for ballet or soccer or goodness knows what else, and patting yourselves on the back for being good mothers. It seems to me that youve traded having a life of your own for your kids being busy. That doesnt seem like a very good trade to me.

She was right, of course. Shes always right. It goes so much further than air conditioning, television, or women drivers (none of which are bad things, of course, and, actually, theyre all pretty good). Almost everything in modern life seems designed to keep us alone and lonely. How did it get this way?

After talking to Grandma, I started Googling. I kept running across the terms Dunbar Number and Dunbar Theory as explanations for whats going on in our modern relationships. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has spent years studying human social interactions and has come to the conclusion that we all have a finite number of people we can fit into our social circles. For most people, that magic number is around 150. Thats everyone from your spouse and children, to your relatives, to that guy from high school that you keep up with on Facebook. It doesnt matter how long your list of Friends is, you cant maintain relationships with more than a total of 150-ish.

A hundred fifty people is a lot of people to keep up with, but it used to be much simpler. Most people lived in the same place for the whole of their lives. If they did happen to set off for somewhere new, they left their social network completely behind and constructed a new one for themselves wherever they happened to be. They became completely enmeshed in the fabric of their new community. The people they knew mostly knew one another, and friendships overlapped and wove around one another, creating a densely woven society. We dont do that any longer.

These days, we are a much more mobile society, but we dont really leave anyone behind. Instead, we maintain our social and emotional ties to people through social media and technology. Relationships that would have died natural deaths in the past now dont ever have to end. We grow up and leave for college, taking with us all of the people we knew and loved throughout our childhoods. We gather a few more in college and elsewhere along the way. We keep adding people to our circle, but the number of relationships we can actually maintain never changes. Eventually, we end up somewhere and settle down with room for just a few spots left in our circle.

Even worse, our people dont know one another. They may not even know of the others. Our relationships no longer interweave; theyre more like the random pattern of a shotgun blast. The kind of community that people were designed to live in no longer exists for most of us. There are all kinds of gaps between our relationships and those are the cracks that we end up falling through.