Liquid Friendships: Links With Expiration Date

There are friendships without an expiration date that give us life, happiness and daily support. However, liquid friendships abound. They are people who leave as they arrive. Figures whose confidence is frayed day by day, those who appear before us full of festive enthusiasm, noise and complicity to gradually fade until they disappear.

Something that most of us learn over the years is that friendship is generally dynamic. It usually changes over time. As we mature or our interests change, there are people we leave behind while new ones appear. Now, there is no shortage of people who point out that this process has been accelerating in recent years: we know many more people and many more disappear from our side.

Proposals to stay, to have a good time are no longer made. Messages take longer to respond or simply stop from one day to the next. That person with whom we previously shared everything, suddenly, no longer has the key to our trust because he has turned the page, because he navigates other interests, among other people.

The philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has already pointed this out to us. We live in a postmodernity in which the durable gives way to the transitory and the need, in turn, to desire and utilitarianism. A friend is for many today like a mobile application, something to use while entertaining us and serving us for a purpose. Once we get bored we uninstall it and try a new one, because the possibilities are endless and the interests, of course, change.

What do liquid friendships consist of?

Aristotle said that cultivating a friendship is a virtue. Have we perhaps stopped being virtuous, of remembering that of “who has a friend has a treasure”? Maybe yes, emotional commitments may no longer be valued so much, the volatile prevails and relationships without obligations in which we move according to interests and needs.

For many this dynamic is a reflection of the society in which we live. In this complex, globalized and fearfully dynamic world, nothing lasts, everything can change from one second to another. Technology, for example, is governed by planned obsolescence. The labor market no longer has the stability of past decades. Most are struggling to survive by accumulating a chain of temporary contracts.

Volatility, fragility, instability … We could define in many ways the canvas of our social settings, a micro-universe to which the information we receive is impregnated with that liquidity. What we take for granted today, tomorrow we can discover to be false, what we take for valid today in a week may expire because reality is already different. Liquid friendships are one more element of this peculiar existential kaleidoscope.

In a world without certainties, ties without adherence reign

Life without friends is less life, it loses its best musical notes, the refuge of affinity and the support of emotional support. The vast majority of us like to have these figures. However, there are those who look for them, but under a premise: “it better be temporary. ” Better liquid friendships because they prefer bonds without adherence.

Why establish permanent relationships if everything is moving under our feet? Why commit ourselves to a bond if the world is already trapping us in its chaos of uncertainties?

We recycle, change, consume and become interested in a new person (product). It is an endless cycle because the offer is not lacking, because when we let a friend go, it is not too difficult to find another one.

Friendships that end in one click

A part of the population does not remember what the world was like before the Internet took hold in our lives. Everything changed with the arrival of Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp … Those who were far, finally, were close. Suddenly, our small window of life widened and we began to receive information continuously… And what was even more interesting: we had the opportunity to meet new people.

Technology has since allowed us to establish ties in multiple ways. But yes, these links are usually weak enough to be undone at any time. We can meet someone in any social network or application, however, liquid friendships such as liquid loves are defined by being able to end that link with just one click. It is enough to delete them from our contacts or simply block them.

The person is already aware (and if he does not, time to time) because ghosting is one more feature of this fluid society in which some suffer and others navigate in indifference.

Liquid friendships and the power of the transitory, origin of a new form of emotional pain

There are those who still believe in the strength of ties. There are many people who care, care and dedicate time and will to that friendship. Because a friend is, at the end of the day, the family that one chooses and as such is looked after by it. However, to find ourselves suddenly with the disinterest, the coldness and the sudden disappearance of someone, hurts and contradicts.

It `s difficult. Because when a friend values the transitory more than the permanent, we are lost. Because if that person we appreciate focuses more on the immediate than on the long term and is also interested in utility rather than the value of friendship itself, nothing makes sense anymore.

Should we get used to something like that? Absolutely. In a fluid world you have to stand firm. Because there are vital aspects that cannot change, or erode with these new types of societies. Friendship, like love, must be stainless, treasures to be cared for and cared for like precious jewels and not throwaway objects.