Many years ago, in the predigital world, when my friends and I graduated from college, we scattered across the country to begin our first jobs.
Gradually, but inexorably, we began to lose connection. It wasn’t easy to keep up. Long-distance phone calls were expensive. It took a real investment of time to write a letter, put a stamp on it and drop it in a mailbox.
Pursuing a career, and raising a family, began to take precedence over investing in those once precious relationships. Over time, most of us lost touch altogether.
Not so for my daughter Kate, now 31, or for her friends, who are equally scattered geographically, but keep in touch constantly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest and by text, e-mail, Gchat and Skype.
In truth, I didn’t take any of these forms of communication seriously. They struck me as superficial, and often self-absorbed, updates on the most prosaic details of their lives. Yes, I occasionally posted on Facebook, but not about where went for dinner or being stuck in traffic. I bought into the idea that the millennial generation’s obsession with social media was undermining the depth of their relationships.
Then last week, Kate got married â€" over four days at a location she and her fiancé, Philip, had chosen in western Massachusetts, three hours from our home in New York. The wedding weekend made me realize that it was the ultimate expression of all the ways Kate stays connected to her friends.
On Thursday evening, there was a dinner for the early arrivals, in advance of the Friday rehearsal dinner, which was the prelude to the wedding itself on Saturday. More than two dozen friends of Kate and Philip showed up for the Thursday event, and the dinner went on for hours.
The following evening, 160 people appeared for the rehearsal dinner, meaning the vast majority of those who planned to attend the actual wedding.
One friend after another offered toasts, a genre that often runs to the maudlin and the ge! neric. To my surprise, these talks were rich in details and nuance, attuned to and appreciative of the complex person I know Kate to be.
Among the highlights were dramatic readings of two verbatim transcripts of Gchat conversations Kate had with different friends two years earlier, shortly after she’d been contacted on OkCupid by a guy from high school who would eventually become her husband.
Kate and Philip spent a year planning their wedding, down to the smallest detail. As the long weekend progressed, I realized it wasn’t just their union they wanted to celebrate, but at least equally all of the people they love - and they love a lot of people. Generalization though this is, my strong sense is that members of her generation aren’t willing to let ambitions trump their relationships.
Their community is much wider than mine and my wife’s. Kate, Philip and their friends don’t move on when they move to new cities. They simply add on. They keep in touch through hundreds of tiny digial connections, and these moments add up. The constancy of contact helps to sustain the freshness and the intensity of their relationships.
What Kate has taught me - never so much as last weekend â€" is that it’s possible to be both intensely focused at work and also intensely engaged in other people’s lives; ambitious in the world and generously giving in relationships, discerning and perceptive about people and their foibles, but simultaneously able to focus on the best in each of them.
This energy was contagious. I rarely stay up past 11 p.m. On the wedding night, I finally went back to my room at 1 a.m. Dozens of Kate and Philip’s friends stayed much later than I did, and most of them were back again at 9:30 the next morning, for the post-wedding brunch.
Even after they finally headed home, they didn’t really leave one another. That night, the next day and the day after that, Kate and her friends were all over social media, posting pictures and sending each other message! s about t! he experiences they’d shared at the wedding.
Inspired, I posted my own first Facebook picture, walking toward the wedding with Kate, just before the ceremony. In response, I heard from old friends I haven’t spoken to in years.
As the comments and “likes†piled up, I was amazed by how filled up I felt by these brief affirmations, and how happy I was to feel reconnected with friends from my past. The next day, I posted a video of Kate singing an incredible original song to Philip about the history of their relationship - have a listen â€" and reveled again in the outpouring that followed.
The day after the wedding, I sent friend requests to a half dozen of Kate’s friends, who quickly accepted. Small as these gestures are, they felt surprisingly intimate and nourishing.
I see now much I’ve given up over he years by keeping my work focus so central and my circle so narrow. I understand more viscerally why Kate and her friends spend so much time keeping up on social media. It’s nearly a week since the wedding, the “likes†keep coming, and my heart still feels wide open.
Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.†Twitter: @tonyschwartz
