Friend and the City

With a latest display of a "nuclear" fallout between once-best screen friends Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker, one is left to wonder what friendship really is.

Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte became a symbol of New York, fashion, adventures, but most importantly, an unshakable bond and hope that true friendship, as well as true love, can overcome any obstacle and become unshakable over the years. So it is hurtful to see that the reality of life of screen is much different to what we have seen in the popular HBO series. According to Kim Cattrall, her and Sarah Jessica Parker have never really been friends in real life and at most colleagues. According to several media sources, Kim has often felt alienated from other three heroines and there were rumors of Kim arguing fairness of SJP being paid the most. After all, the series would never be the same without Samantha. However latest Instagram outburst of Kim got me thinking, do we really have real friends out there and what is a friendship as such?

With a rise of social media and Facebook, we got to the point of proudly displaying our addition of 1,001st friend followed by 3,000 likes and the whole concept of friendship started to fade somehow into unfamiliar territory with "add me on Facebook" being only one thing we are likely to say to someone we just met. And as they do, we hardly remember who they are or ever talk to them.

So what is this all about, after all? When you google "friend," what comes out is the following: "a friend is a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations."

It is true — an unshakable bond, some sort of connection, and desire to be there and help when needed, for better or worse. The above got me thinking: can social media really be a platform to develop such bonds or even to keep them going as "life support"? It still seems to be pretty effective for personal attacks or retaliations, but it is weird how often in this race to collect as many friends as possible we somehow find ourselves completely alone.

Several studies suggest that big towns and cities make us more alienated and isolated from each other and somehow you find yourself in a 8 million person city, never alone, but very lonely. Time is precious, work has to be done, and with only a couple of minutes on a bus or train left to catch up on online "friends" lives, we keep it going.

And from my recent experience of asking for help from several people who I thought were my friends, I have learned once again that the old saying, "a friend in need is a friend indeed," is a confirmation of my theory that you only can have one or two real friends, and when it comes to the rest of them, they are just people you know. And perhaps not even that well...