Dear Uncle, How can I build long-term relationships without ruining them?

Posted by Uncle Dan on May 7th, 2008 | Categorized as Ask Uncle | 242 views and 1 Comment

Dear Uncle Dan,

I have a Friendship problem.

Almost all of them are mostly short-term. It’s fun to chat and email them, but i seem so lonely sometimes. How can i build long-term relationships without ruining them?

—

Dear Jirah,

I think a lot of us have this same problem. Friendships can be a flimsy thing, but that flimsiness is a help sometimes, because while you might feel like you lose some people with time and distance, the lack of time and distance can bring them back just as easily.

People tend to tell you that your real friends will stick with you over years, and this is true. But I think that no one is actually unkind, or malicious to you, when a friendship dies for understandable reasons like time, distance, and a loss of a shared environment. The friendship might not be what it used to, but you’ll always share the memory of it at least, and what it meant to you.

I have some friends I haven’t really talked to for years, and it makes me feel bad at times, because those friendships meant a lot to me then, but it sometimes feels like there isn’t much left, and that as a result, all my friendships are short term, and forever doomed to just be the occasional email or facebook update afterwards.

But I also think it’s a choice. If you value a friendship, you have to work for it. It doesn’t come by itself just because you’re friends. It’s often a conscious decision you have to make, because especially for us, it’s so easy just to abandon them in your mind, and move onto new friends, because they always come and go.

Short friendships aren’t necessarily bad, because time doesn’t decide strength and they can be very intense in that short time. But they are sad, because you never have enough time to spend with the people you really value. The only thing I can recommend is to make the extra time necessary to maintain them once they leave.

But don’t let that limit you to the new friends you can make. Don’t get hung up on the losses of yesterday that you miss the opportunities today for a fulfilling life tomorrow. It’s so easy to do that, too, with the losses we face in that area. But a good friend is a good friend, and as many people say, sometimes the time passes and when you see them again it’s like nothing changed.

I won’t say that happens all the time, because I’ve had it change on me before, because a change in environments and lives going in opposite directions can change the way you approach an old friendship, but more often than not, it’s a positive experience.

All I can really say is to enjoy the time you have with people, and if you really value them, make the effort to keep them once they’re not in your daily life anymore, but not to the extent that you shut out the people who could be in your daily life now.

Daniel Nguyen-Phuoc

Vietnamese in ethnicity, born in Houston, Texas. Lived in Jakarta, Indonesia for 14 years while going to a British International School to finish with the International Baccalaureate. Survived only two years in the University of Michigan before ending up in Switzerland. Graduated from an international (and that's meant in every word) hospitality college. Interesting life, to be sure. But not the only one.