I love my friends. Really I do. It's probably easier to tell when I am actually with them, though. Since most of my friends live at a distance from me, you would think that I talk with them on the phone, or text to keep in touch. I'll be honest. I don't. Not even my best friends will override my intense dislike of phone calls. The most they might get is a text. Usually not even that.
Fortunately, they don't seem to mind. We just wait until we are back together and then spend the next eight hours catching up on everything. Let me tell you, talking for that long will wear your voice out.
It does make me wonder, though. I know that I myself am a low-maintenance friend. I don't require a great deal of time and effort to feel secure that we are still friends. What I question is if I somehow managed to collect a circle of friends that are the same way, or if this is maybe not as unusual as I might have once thought. Maybe it's a combination of the two factors.
Or maybe these friends feel that I am extremely fickle and are simply far too polite to complain about my apparent neglect.
I used to email a couple of good friends on a fairly regular basis. This was back when people would actually print out emails to save them. I probably still have them in a folder somewhere among my childhood things. While I don't feel quite as close to one of these friends due to no longer keeping in constant contact, I still feel that old bond, and were she to suddenly call or want to hang out, I'd be all over it. After I got over my anxiety from an unexpected phone call, that is.
Email seems to have gone out of fashion, though. Instead we have texting and Facebook. I'm finding Facebook more and more impersonal, and I don't really think I like it. I've gotten to the point that I share very few pictures and even fewer statuses updating my friends about my life. I have been using it to post links to the blog, though. Maybe that will satisfy someone.
The one and only reason I can come up with for why I do not text my friends--unless I don't have their phone number--is that I am terrified that I will text at an inconvenient time. I realize, logically, that that is exactly what texting is for. They can read and reply later if I send at an inconvenient time. But there you have it. I'm paralyzed because I don't want to make someone else uncomfortable. I really need to work on that.
So...more social anxiety from me, and I think I've said enough for now about my love/hate relationship with communicating via cellphone.
Want to read more about my introverted misadventures?
Check out these posts:
I Hugged a Stranger
Talking To Myself
Shhhh...I'm Introverting
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