In the world of love, the most effective way to test if someone truly loves you is to not be afraid of letting them go. If they love you, they will return, if they do not, then it was not meant to be. This is a difficult exercise to actually perform because the uncertainty of letting someone go feels dreadful, but it has been proven time and time again to be true that they will come back if it was meant to be.
You might be wondering why I am waxing poetic about love over here and letting people go? Because isn’t that what we all had to do in order for this quarantine to be possible? Did we not let go of all of our friends? Not because we wanted to test their love for us, but because we had to for the good of the planet. We were forced to release all contact with the ones we loved, even our parents and family, for the sake of our survival as a species.
I am going to take a pretty big stance here that you may or may not agree with, but I ask that you wait for me to explain myself before jumping to conclusions. I think that when it comes to our communities, friendships, family, and acquaintances, this separation is actually incredibly beneficial. Now, let’s talk about why…
In this time of uncertainty, we are all redefining how we communicate with each other and these methods have their limitations. Now that time is our most abundant commodity, we can communicate with whoever we want as much as we want… but we don’t. Over time, we will most likely find a familiarity with some friends and family and develop a pattern in communication, while others will just not be included in this out of sheer volume. I argue that those that you fall out of touch with, you never really meant to stay in touch with anyway.
Like Marie Kondo explains, you should only keep the things that bring you joy, consider this almost like a spring cleaning of friendships. Some friends you would maintain relationships with when you were social because you almost felt obligated to, maybe they were peripherally in your friend circle so you would see them sometimes and you thought it was polite to maintain that… but if now, when you have all the time in the world you aren’t communicating, you probably didn’t have much in common to begin with. Those friendships are okay to let go, they also deserve the time they would have spent forcing conversation with you to focus on their friends that actually seek out their company.
Think of yourself suddenly in the forest with a Skyroam device and you only have enough data to communicate with some people, who do you choose? Now what if everyone was in the same position with their WiFi Hotspot, who will choose you? This is the dynamic forming currently. Everyone is in isolation, and they only have enough energy to communicate with a group of people. The strong relationships will stay, and the weak ones will inevitably fall off. Let them, focus on the people that focus on you.
In this time, we are all learning how to maintain relationships with each other, and while it may feel forced and it may feel awkward, eventually you will find the people in your life that you can find a rhythm with, and you will lose some that you don’t, and I’m here to tell you that is okay, and frankly for the better!
