SURFACE LEVEL

2020 has been an EXTREMELY interesting year for all of us. I think this is the first time that we are all experiencing exactly the same thing at the exact same time. Unlike in previous years where all of us may have had different experiences depending on what was happening in our lives at the time.

Apart from the pandemic, I’m sure that we can all agree that 2020 has given us time to reflect on our lives. Personally, I’ve had time to reflect on my life goals, work on my relationship with God, think about what is meaningful to me and observe my friendship circles and those around me.

Being an only child, I was always used to having a lot of friends. I always wished I had siblings and because of this I tended to treat my friends as my siblings. Carrying this trait as I grew older and with the growth of social media, I began to start seeking friendships online to try and make me feel more valued.

Between 2013–2018 I owned an online business. In all honesty, my business journey was an amazing one and it helped me to discover aspects of myself which I had never come across. It also connected me to wonderful people and some of them are a big part of my life today. On the flip side however, becoming recognised through my business made me accessible to people and through this journey I made a lot of surface level friendships, some of which brought me extreme issues.

Let me explain what a surface level friendship is for those of you who may be unsure. If you have a person in your life who you can only speak with for less than 10 minutes and when you speak the topics which come up are the same, or you and the other person do not exchange in-depth information about yourselves then that is a surface level friendship. Surface level friendships are all about association and a lot of the time in my opinion they aren’t for good reasons. Unfortunately for me,I didn’t realise that a lot of people wanted to have a surface level friendship with me when my business was operating and I fell in to the trap of trusting a lot of people that I shouldn’t have with very personal and sentimental information about myself.

I only began to realise that these friendships weren’t real when I stopped running my business and by then it was too late… all that information I had shared had gone.

I was speaking with my best-friend recently (shoutout Chris) and we were speaking about surface level friendships. We both discovered that I’m definitely not a surface level person and I find it extremely difficult to speak with people who I can’t be deep with. I’m a very expressive person, I love to tell people how much I love them and care for them and share different elements of my life with my close people. When I feel as though I can’t do this with someone I switch off.

Now Chris had a different idea, she believed that surface level friendships are important and as we grow as it’s all about building your network. Chris felt that you should be able to get to a point where you can differentiate the different levels of friendship around you, therefore surface level friendships shouldn’t be an issue.

When it was explained to me in this way, it made complete sense. Throughout life, you will make surface-level friendships and you can’t just dismiss people because you’re not close with them. It’s all about how you handle these ‘friendships’ and make sure that you guard your heart.

During this year, I looked at a few surface level friendships of mine which had gotten quite far in terms of the length of time they had gone on and I decided to cut them off. My reason for this was that these people knew too much about me and I didn’t feel comfortable having them around when I knew that our friendship would never develop from the surface level stage.

This was a personal decision I had to make for myself and in all honesty I don’t regret one bit of it. Will I decide to have surface-level friendships again? I think I will actually but I have learnt a lot about over-sharing and privacy and I will not be making the mistake again of trusting any regular person with my most precious details.

Learn to protect yourself!

I wanted to throw the question out there. What do you think about surface-level friendships? Are they necessary? Or are you just like me who would rather not but is learning how to get around it.

Have you had to distance yourself or cut some people out from your life this year?

Leave a comment below :)

Love Boohema

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