Sometimes the most obvious tactics in life are only made clear when the words are spoken aloud by another. So when a middle-aged man, fresh from a divorce, declared to me in our shared office in Beirut, “I’m only going to spend quality time with quality people. No more killing time with anyone for the sake of it,” a flicker suddenly twitched in my naive mid-20s brain.
It hit me right at a point of growing unease with my social surroundings. I was, as we do in our youth, cycling through friends and acquaintances – often in hazy drunken settings – as rapidly as toilet paper.
The cycle seemed more pronounced as a gay man. On the one hand, being gay offered an instant plug-in to a community teeming with friendship-seeking peers: those wanting to go out to gay-safe venues at weekends and be free in our identities. I curated my social life around this access – partnering with whoever was available to go to whichever gay bar and club on Fridays and Saturdays. Fun moments were had, but beyond the laser lights, those connections were fleeting.
Some blossomed into deeper friendships but many fell away. If the objective is to party and get drunk, did it matter who made up the team for the night? But when it becomes clear that despite knowing 100 faces, few are truly worthy of the descriptor “friend”, time suddenly seems more precious. “Life is too short,” the man rounded off, as if veiling a subtle piece of advice to not wait until you’re in your 50s to appreciate the value of time.
Friendship in the Arabic language is not compacted into a single word but spread across a slew of words that distinguish companions by their significance. It’s increasingly by this spectrum that I’ve come to measure quality in a friend – the traits that go beyond the starting point of a shared identity or interest. A nadeem denotes an acquaintance, the boys I would typically bounce with in gay bars or gaggle with over brunch. Those are many and, as I discovered, if stuck in a routine of shallow socialising, they can easily become the predominant forms of companionship. But a khalil (a close, intimate friend) or safi (a confidant, the best of friends) are the precious few. Without investing the necessary time to develop these quality friendships, the threat of solitude in the later years of life looms large.
It took this man more than half a century to realise so much time had been lost on people who added little value to his life. Thankfully, he articulated it early enough for me to become more conscious about how I spend my time, and with whom I spend it.
