Having spent the last 10 days of summer in Germany with family and friends, I came back to the states with more than a few subjects on which to reflect. These have little to do with politics, or the economic differences one perceives between the continents, but instead mostly the divergent ways in which we live.
During the trip, a cousin of mine said she was struck by the relatively higher value placed on the establishment and maintenance of friendships in Europe. She spent her childhood in the United States, and this difference in attitudes was perceptible to her through visiting her sisters, who studied and live in Europe. I was somewhat skeptical about this observation at first, but she explained that it seemed to her such relationships come and go on a coincidental basis, and losing touch with people is a regular phenomenon.
I thought of friends and acquaintances I made through temporary associations such as clubs and classes with whom I have lost contact. After graduating from high school, I made little or no effort to sustain relationships with the vast majority of the friends I made there. Another cousin, whose wedding I was attending, had invited a friend she made during a public Spanish course, which ended many years ago. The groom had invited friends from all stages of his life who had lived through the same vicissitudes. The obvious warmth and closeness of this and other friendships at the wedding seemed to confirm the validity of the contrast.
After further thought, I realized much of our interaction requires a specific reason or pretext, and even between the best of friends there is an assumption that both parties are in a state of busy self-occupation until one needs the other. Regardless of how often we use the excuse “I have been so busy lately,” when we fail to make time for friends it is only rarely valid; if something is important enough, we can almost always make time. At the end of the day, it is fair to say that relative to other cultures, we Americans put less emphasis on friendship, the central aspect of life.
When depression and loneliness are so widespread in our society, one must ask why we do not turn more often to the strength offered by meaningful friendships. There is of course no single answer, but I believe it is partly based on an idea of friendship through commonality of interests and inclinations rather than on that of experience. Interests and personalities change over time, whereas experiences are immutable. The strength of common experience as a foundation for relationships is seen in soldiers returning to war zones so as not to leave their comrades. Until we decide collectively that the people who have traveled the same paths as us share something fundamentally important, I believe we will not be as skillful at friendship as others are. Perhaps working adults could use another week or two of vacation in order to set aside time for to make such a change possible.
I do not mean to be blindly fulsome about the social health of Europe the way Walter Duranty was about the Soviet Union; the continent surely has its share of ills. However, I think in this respect we stand to learn a great deal from our European siblings. Success and personal fulfillment may be the most reachable in the United States, but we must be cautious that our paths to them are not exclusively single-file.
Goutham Ganesan is a junior chemistry and biochemistry major. He can be reached at gganesan@umd.edu.
