Depth not breadth

Restrictions are gradually easing and the opportunity to meet more freely with friends and family is finally going to be possible again. For many people, this will be a huge relief, but there are also those who are dreading this.

On a scale of relief to dread, I wonder where you are?

Truth is, many of us will have mixed feelings. The last year has been restrictive, but there’s also been something much simpler about life without all the social engagements. It’s made us focus in on key relationships more than ever, and in a world where you have to choose which bubble to be part of, we’ve had to choose carefully. 

For me, the last year has shown me who I really do want to spend time with. That’s not to say, there aren’t people I’ve really missed, but it’s helped me to be much clearer about who my ‘key people’ are. This is no bad thing.   

There’s a theory that we can only maintain around 5 close relationships and around 15 other friends. I have in excess of 700 ‘friends’ on Facebook, but these kind of ‘friendships’ have no depth to them.  My 700 is made up of people I went to school with and haven’t seen for over 20 years, people I met on holiday once, and in a quick check just now, a woman I lived near for 3 months and spoke to twice!

This ‘breadth’ of friendships doesn’t mean I have depth, and it’s the deep connections that we need more of in order to thrive in life. It’s a basic human need, that if unmet can be as damaging to our as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to a study done by the British Red Cross and the Co-Op in 2016.

The challenge is that connection with others isn’t straight forward. Connection with others is one of our core basic human needs, and so when we seek it out, the stakes are high. Every attempt at connecting has the potential to fail as well as succeed which means we need a certain amount of confidence to seek it out.  

One of the ways we can decrease the risk is by only investing in connections with a minimal amount of emotional energy/time/effort. This ‘play it safe’ approach means we never stand to lose too much. But this doesn’t really create the kind of enriching connections we need. Real connection happens when we invest that bit more, that bit more often. It happens when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with others, honest about our triumphs and our failures, honest about our hopes and our dreams, honest about what we want and need. The stakes here are bigger, the potential to be hurt greater, but so are the potential rewards and benefits. 

Many of our modern methods of communication create opportunities for us to connect with minimal investment; looking at someone’s social media feed rather than meeting up face to face, sending a message rather than making the call, declaring our strong opinions in an email rather than engaging in respectful dialogue and debate. 

Connecting with others is important for our wellbeing and something that needs our investment if we are to live well, fully and deeply. It will take risk, but the risks will pay off in the end. 

And so, as restrictions ease, let’s consider what kind of re-connections we want. It would be easy to jump back to attending all the same groups, seeing all the same people, doing all the same activities we did before, driven by a desire to regain the ‘normality’, we’ve all been craving. But maybe there’s an opportunity to create a new normal which invests in less people, more deeply. It will have its costs, but also its rewards.  

A moment to reflect

I wonder what stands out to you most in what you’ve just read?

I wonder what the most important thing is for you to take from here?

I wonder what one small action you might take today to respond to this?

I wonder what one small action you might take in the coming week to respond to this?