On the fantasy of friendship

An antidote to feeling deflated

Does the fantasy version of your social life ever get in the way of appreciating reality?

While living in a sharehouse, I once gave a tour to a potential subletter. Afterwards, she praised the warmth of the home and shared that it had been really hard for her to find a friendly and sociable living environment. She told me that in the fantasy version of her social life, she is simply cooking dinner, chatting and watching telly with her housemates.

Naturally, this made me think about the fantasy version of my own social life. I am invited to glamorous dinners and fun parties. I go on weekend trips to quaint country towns. I join someone on a spontaneous dip in the ocean.

But as fun as it is to think about, this fantasy often leaves me feeling deflated. It feels out of reach, this shinier, busier, more spontaneous version.

Thinking back to my conversation with the potential subletter, I realised that in coveting what I didn’t have, I had overlooked that I was living someone else’s fantasy—cooking together, chatting, watching telly with my then-housemates.

Why do so many of us overlook what we have?

Perhaps these fantasies are perpetuated by society’s emphasis on our social connections for overall happiness and longevity.

On the one hand, the highlighted importance of our social lives has motivated this project—on the other, I can find the research, the stats and the urgency anxiety-inducing.

For example, when I first heard British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s suggestion that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 stable relationships, I felt daunted. How do people know so many people?

If we get the sense we don’t quite have the social life we think we should, it can be discouraging and isolating. Are we the only ones spending Friday night alone? Do other people also long for more connection, invitations or fun? Is anyone else also encountering difficulties, or am I specifically not good at this friendship thing?

Intellectually, we might recognise that surely we're not alone in navigating tensions with other people.

Even still, not only do our own fantasies haunt us, but we also build fantasies about the social lives of other people. In these projections, people have more friends, attend more parties, and communicate more deeply with friends and family.

In short, other people’s social lives are simply better.

The friendship paradox

There is a phenomenon known as the “better than average” effect. People think they are better drivers than average, better students than average, and so on.

But there is one area where we tend to believe we fall short: our social lives.

Research indicates that people believe others are more popular, dine out more, possess larger social circles than themselves and so on.

This can partly be explained by the friendship paradox. The phenomenon observes that, on average, an individual's friends have more friends than that individual. This is because it’s likely we all know a super connector who pushes up the average between your friends.

All of this can add fuel to the fantasy. Super connectors or more prominent people might also skew what we see, creating an illusion of other people’s social lives. Combine this with what we see via social media, and we have a rather warped reality.

As

Rob Henderson

wrote in The friendship paradox and the illusion of loneliness:

“Suppose you have 10 friends. Three are popular, sociable, love to travel, and frequently share photos of themselves and their adventures online. Another three are homebodies who seldom go out, who you visit only a couple of times per year. And the remaining four are similar to you, with average social lives.

The way our minds tend to work is that when we are asked to think about our own social lives, we don’t compare it to the three homebodies. We rarely see them, and thus they are not weighted in our calculation. We place some weight on our four friends who are similar to ourselves, and who we see more often.

And we place a lot of weight on the remaining three jet-setter friends, who loom large in our minds and in our social media feeds. Thus, we compare ourselves primarily against those three popular friends and assess our lives as duller lives than average.”

By comparing ourselves to a skewed sample or the highlight reel, we’re left with a deflated view of our own social lives, which can, in turn, impact our sense of life satisfaction.

The three-step antidote

If fantasies—either our own or projected—are impacting our wellbeing, perhaps the following shifts can provide an antidote:

1. Limit comparison

By peeling back the curtain, we can cultivate a more realistic view of everyone else’s social lives.

Take social media—of course people are posting their great night out, their holidays, their adventures, but what about all the stuff you're not seeing? We rarely post moments of loneliness, confusion, or nights at home watching Netflix.

It's futile to compare the ebb and flow of your week with someone else's highlight reel.

2. Question assumptions

We should also recognise that we never really know how someone else feels. Sure, someone might seem socially gregarious and popular, but we all feel slightly on the out at times.

Maybe someone is rich in acquaintances, but longs for deeper connections. Others might crave going out and having fun, but have a clashing agenda. Our longings and inner conflicts might seem unique when in fact they are shared.

Once we dismantle the assumptions about others, we can stop fixating on what we should have and focus on what we want.

Maybe we’ve been too focussed on accumulating more, rather than finding ways to go deeper.

Maybe we’ve been chasing after the most popular, rather than turning towards those who really care about us.

Maybe we’ve even been thinking we need to busy ourselves socialising, rather than enjoying our own company.

3. Start appreciating

It’s okay to want more friends, invitations, and connection—but the key is to appreciate what we have that’s real instead of feeling deflated by fantasy.

After that conversation with the subletter, my own fantasy has begun to fade, and I started to reframe the way I think about my social life.

I’ve learned we can turn away from fantasy and towards what we do have.

Instead of focusing on the friendships I’ve lost, I think about the ones I’ve gained.

Instead of trying to find more connections, I’m trying to find ways to reconnect and expand existing relationships.

Instead of longing for an invitation to some party with an intimidating guest list (a party my introverted self likely won’t enjoy anyway), I’m sending out invitations, delighting in the ones I do receive, and cherishing other forms of contact like phone calls and virtual coworking hangs and mornings spent sitting around.

When you focus on what’s right within your grasp, you might just find it’s more than enough—perhaps even the very thing someone else craves.

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Many thanks to editor Susie Thatcher for your keen eye on the draft.