The Friendship Metric(s)
I think about friendships in my life quite often. I tend to be on the idealistic side about 'communities' and 'friendships'. I've definitely heard the words,"you are too idealistic". And I agree. I can be. But I wonder if sometimes we settle in our friendships. We aren't honest about how we really feel. Because maybe we are worried about losing our friendships? Losing our identity in a community?
It is just something that plagues me often about people expectations of friendships/communities. Maybe because I am idealistic but sometimes I feel I/we are just pretending and faking it around each other. And for personal reasons, I just hate that feeling. So I did this. I narrowed down some personal metrics of what is important in friendship to me.
Transparency. Vulnerability. Honesty. Trustworthiness.
I think those 4 words are really important to me in friendship. What are some that are important to you? How do you personally cultivate 'meaningful' relationships/friendships in your life? Really interested.
i love this.
if i ever feel upset at someone being "fake" it's usually because i've been fake recently.
very reflexive... it's like looking in a mirror!
wow. yes exactly.
Hey Jesse,
I was reflecting about this as well. I have your four values plus:
I am still kind of iterating and learning about my process for meaningful personal relationships. Currently it looks like that:
I filter based on your four values and my other bullet points down to 150 - 200 people.
I group people into categories with approximately the size of the Dunbar numbers:
I think about my weekly time allocation. Time minus work, sleep, other habits, side projects etc and choose how much of my free time I allocate to personal relationships.
I distribute the time mostly to the first three layers.
I use my app https://meetfriends.app to manage reminders.
After interactions I take 2-5 minutes to reflect and perhaps adjust. Things change as we change activities and locations and people change as well.
Hope this is interesting!
Kai
Hi Kai,
Thanks for the helpful comments/feedback. Very intriguing to see the process you use to filter down your best friends/close/good/friends. How do you distinguish between those?
Checked your app out. Looks pretty cool! Color scheme reminds of Tinder lol. I love the fact that it centers around the human interaction. And remembering important things like birthdays :).
I try to spend more time with the smaller categories. I generally appreciate quality over quantity, minimalism and focus in many aspects of my life. So now I am on an experiment to apply this for personal relationships.
Facebook allows 5000 people. If you think about your free time and how much time this would be divided by 5000 it's not much. We have to figure out what works best for us.
Reminders work well for my habits and other things like Duolingo or Zero for fasting. In some good personal relationships I was less proactive than the other part. I travel quite often and being abroad I forgot to keep in touch with some here and then.
Oh maybe I need to change colors then although I thought their color was more red.