Are you a social couch potato?
I first read William Rawlins’ book “Friendship Matters” over twenty years ago. Revisiting it now, I’m struck by how it captures why friendships are so important and so fragile.
We know friendships are crucial for our development as people. Friends provide emotional support, information and help, and they help us learn about ourselves, strengthen our capacity to relate to one another, and make decisions about our lives. In short, they're central to our success.
But we also know how easy it is to let friendships slide, especially as we move into adulthood and our careers.
Rawlins suggests two big reasons for this. The first is structural. As we grow, the choices we make and the responsibilities we take on can crowd out older friends and limit our ability to make new ones. In that case, renewing our commitment to friendship means restructuring our lives to give friends more space.
The second reason Rawlins proposes comes from the ambiguous nature of friendship itself. In contrast to the relationships we have at home and at work, which are more clearly culturally and sometimes even legally defined, friendships pose a series of ambiguous and complicated questions we're always answering.
How do we tell a friend from a casual acquaintance? Are we equals? Is a relationship a means to an end or an end unto itself? Where can we depend on each other—and where do we need to remain independent? Where do we set aside our misgivings and care for each other, and where do we call each other out? How much can we be vulnerable, and how much should we hold back?
In other words, friendships are a lot of work. And they can be a source of uncertainty and stress, especially if we’re not socially confident or out of practice. So it’s not surprising that we might feel tempted to let them slide.
The two elements can become part of a vicious cycle, in which our social environment—influenced by years of COVID-induced isolation and chronic stress—makes us more unsure about and uncomfortable with interpersonal relationships.
We pull back from others and fill up the space with work, family, and binge watching, which leaves us more out of practice navigating the complexities of friendships. So we pull back even more.
Psychologists Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz argue we need to think about our social fitness—our ability to make and maintain connections—the same way we think about our physical fitness. Just like we need to work our bodies if we’re going to keep physically healthy, we also need to work our relational "muscles" to keep emotionally healthy.
And, relationally, many of us have become couch potatoes.
Many of us have participated in couch-to-5K races, where the goal is to work up slowly to a fitness goal. What would a couch-to-friendship program look like?
And if you feel like a couch potato, how might you gradually and safely build your social fitness?
