Redefining Friendship

A many thanks to Facebook for keeping us up to date regarding the latest family celebrations, parties, and most importantly our ‘friends'’’ birthdays! Since 2004 Facebook has been keeping people connected to everyone, regardless of time zone, distance, or whether or not they even know each other. With social media redefining the term 'friend', defined as “a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations,” how do we reconcile true friendship with virtual friendship?We could start by putting the affection back into our friendships...the love. “I love you” is not reserved for just our parents, family, and lovers. Age old adages like “blood is thicker than water” have proven to be untrue time and time again, but why do we still hold them as universal truth. Our families are corrupt; and just because we share genes does not make them infallible. Even when surrounded by biological family members, our friends can be the real pillars of strength in our lives. Let’s promote our friends to family status. Invite your friends to your Christmas dinners and ‘family celebrations.’ Let’s add depth to our relationships by showing up to congratulate and celebrate our friends’ accomplishments. We all know the story of ‘that one friend’ that asks for goods or services for free as opposed to paying for it. Making use of your friend’s goods/services is only step one. In the same way that we would emotionally, and sometimes financially, support our family members with whatever business ventures they are engaged in, we can do the same for our friends. Attend launch events, listen to them vent, and support them by engaging with whatever they do. Finally, it is time to take back the word “friend,” or at least contextualize it. Differentiate between a “friend” on Facebook and your real life “friend.” It is impossible to do the above mentioned things for all 500 of your Facebook friends, but it is possible to do so for people with whom you share mutual affection in reality. Friendship is just a way of describing a non-sexual and non-biological relationship with someone who actively loves and supports you, but especially to describe someone who chooses you to be in their life, and visa versa...if our virtual ‘friends’ don’t do that, we can keep our sentiments tied up in emojis; not in the title of “friend”.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu1OIgWCt1M