No Man Is an Island
By: Glen Hines
Tags: Self Improvement, Community, Personal Development, Life, Relationships

What am I talking about here? I’ll use a few examples. I will list these examples from the severest situation of a friendship completely broken, then work up toward those relationships that appear healthy on the surface, but when looked at deeply, show signs of being one-sided.

First, suppose a guy who used to be one of your best friends and you never communicate anymore. You were best friends for almost fifteen years. He was the best man at your wedding.

And now, he doesn’t return a single text or phone message. Why? You have no idea. You just know you’ve done nothing to offend him. You never had a falling-out. Sure, he was like this even when you were roommates in college, when he would go through these strange periods of silence. Hot and cold.

You’ve probably had friends like this. You get the idea. But now it’s nothing. Silence. You don’t lose sleep over it. You just can’t explain it. Sometimes in life, we don’t get an explanation. Part of living and maturing is coming to grips with the fact you have no control over anyone but yourself.

Then there’s the guy who you were close friends with for about the same period of time. You met him in college, and you continued to be close friends well into your respective professional careers. And once you started having families, it continued. The two of you had very similar professional career paths, and you routinely came back around to live in the same cities where you would get together and spend time together as families. You attended one another’s weddings. You were close.

Then some years ago, he did something friends do not do; he took advantage of circumstances when your family was in a vulnerable situation. I don’t need to tell the whole boring story to make my point, but he severely damaged your friendship.

With years of perspective now, perhaps you overreacted. Perhaps you didn’t. The bottom line, however, is you have made several attempts since then to reconnect with him to smooth the incident over, but he is apparently not interested in doing so.

And that’s fine. Maybe you’re not meant to be friends anymore. When you really consider it, maybe you weren’t really friends to begin with.

As Christians, we have a duty to make every effort to make things right with those who have wronged us. Matthew 18: 15–17 lays out the procedure we are required to follow when faced with one of these situations. “Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother.” This also applies if we ourselves are the offender and have wronged someone else. Matthew 5: 23–24 mandates that we are to be reconciled to our brothers and sisters when we have wronged them.

But the facts is — as with my two examples — we have no control over the other person. You make your efforts, and then you put it in God’s hands. And you go on with your life. This applies in any relationship, whatever the type.

The above two examples are extreme. This hopefully is not a common experience, because if it is, you might need to look closely into the mirror. As my wife’s grandmother used to say, “If you look around and everyone else is crazy or they make you mad, then maybe you’re the problem.” But in most cases, it’s something not nearly as bad as these two examples.

With respect to society in early 2018, outside our families, the vast majority of our “relationships” these days essentially fall into two categories: (1) people we actually spend time with (the vast minority); and (2) people we are “connected” with on social media (the majority). The caveat to this is if you don’t spend time on social media, this won’t apply to you. Let’s analyze those two categories to see how they fit with Donne and King’s statements above.

With respect to group one, I would argue the people we probably are closest to are the ones who share our specific station in life as we go through it. For instance, if you are married and you have three kids ages 17, 14, and 11, you are very likely closest to that other married couple who has three kids ages 18, 15, and 10. Why? Because you have more in common with them than anyone else. You are living the same experiences they are living on a daily basis. The more you change these variables, the less you have in common with someone else, and so on. I would argue this also applies to your social media “friends;” you probably spend more time looking at one another’s posts than you do looking at the posts of your other social media “friends” who either do not have kids or do not post about similar subjects. Think about it. If you have children, do you have the same relationship with the couple who don’t have kids as you do with that other couple who does? Probably not. Why? Because you don’t relate to them as well, and they don’t relate as well to you. How could they? And how could you?

On the other hand, group two — our “connections” and “friends” on social media — still a relatively new phenomenon, fall into subcategories of their own. I will make some observations based on my comparatively short time using social media. Unlike most, I did not start using social media until about 2011. And my use has gone through several fits and starts for various reasons. But I immediately noticed two basic things, both of which were a proverbial double-edged sword.

First, I couldn’t believe how many people I was able to re-connect with after what was in many cases decades, for instance, my old high school friends. Unlike many people, I moved away from home right after graduation, attended college in another state, then went into the military for two decades. I never attended any of my high school reunions until just two years ago. I didn’t keep up with my fellow classmates. But when I finally got on Facebook in 2011, I was able to regenerate many of those relationships and catch up with them. The same was true for my old college sports teammates. This has been a mostly positive development, and I would estimate that most of my FB friends are made up of these groups.

But the other thing I immediately noticed was I was getting “friend requests” from people I didn’t even know, or with whom I had never been remotely close. I started calling this the “Linkedin affliction.” You know. Everyone on Linkedin wants to get the goal of having “500-plus” “connections.” So they accept any and all connection requests, mostly from people they’ve never met. I myself am guilty of doing it, but it’s also the reason I spend very little time on Linkedin.

I took a different path with Facebook, and I have intentionally never had more than about 200 “friends,” because honestly, that’s about the most I can try and keep up with without giving short shrift to everyone. Similarly, each one of them is someone I have actually been friends with at some point, and they all generally make an effort to keep the “connection” a two-way street. But even within this group, one starts to notice trends. For example, some people engage, then fall off the radar. Some almost never post, and a few others become “self-promoters,” posting only about themselves, yet never responding to anyone else. And the later group has a blind spot about it. It’s all good, as they say, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the “relationship” is not the proverbial two-way street. Knowing this, I do everything I can to not be one of those kinds of “friends.”