Fun-fact friendships: A personal essay
L
et’s go around the circle and introduce ourselves. Say your name, your major and a fun fact about yourself!”
His eyes scan the room and fall on me. I realize, suddenly, that the circle starts from me.
My mind instantly goes into overdrive, evaluating my whole life, every experience I ever had, searching for the perfect fun fact.
I recently started playing the piano — but that’s not unique, a lot of people play an instrument.
I used to have a cat — literally everyone has a pet, Merve!
I am from Turkey — OK, so what?
I love reading — nerd!
I finally decide: “I once broke my spine!” I spurt out.
“Woah!”s and “Oh my god!”s fill the room. Someone asks how I got injured: I tell them the whole story. When my turn is over, I sit back, relieved that my fact was fun enough but uncomfortable nevertheless. Despite my spinal injury being the fact I chose to share with them, I don’t like that the only thing these people will know me by is an injury I once had, an injury that has such a small part in my life right now, that has nothing to do with who I am.
Another girl goes after me. “I enjoy listening to music,” she says. A bunch of nods.
Next week, nobody remembers either of our names.
***
In college, fun facts are the start to most introductions in group settings: They are the ultimate icebreaker game, especially in classrooms or academic clubs. I’m sure most college students have found themselves faced with the fun-fact question at least once. In fact, I know some people who have a list of fun facts in mind at all times, ready to be used in a moment’s notice, guaranteed to surprise people, to interest them.
Despite their prominence in our conversations, I have never met anyone who actually likes the fun-fact question. In fact, everyone I have ever talked to about this has admitted to hating the fun-fact question and feeling stressed when asked it.
But if nobody likes the fun-fact question, why do we insist on asking and answering it?
The answer partly lies in another, much larger problem: We, as students, simply don’t have enough time and energy to build new, long-lasting friendships.
As we navigate through adulthood and life in college, many of us struggle with not having enough time. Classes are hard, studying is time consuming and research or other extracurriculars fill up all of our remaining time. I often find myself so exhausted that even socializing feels like a burden. Though meeting new people used to excite me in high school, in college, it can feel tiring.
It is tiring.
Making friends takes a great deal of energy and time. After all, when the person getting to know you has been absent for the first 20 years of your life, there is a lot of ground to cover. And you can’t do it all at once; building a friendship has stages, each carrying more weight than the previous one. Starting with the most superficial things, like your favorite movie or your celebrity crush, you go deeper and deeper, through your most important memories, thoughts, feelings, greatest fears. It’s a beautiful process, to get to know someone closely, until you one day find yourself surprised at how much you care about them, how saddened you are at their misfortunes or how you fill with joy for their happinesses.
This process requires an immense amount of trust, communication, mutual understanding and of course, time. For burnt-out college students with varying daily schedules and barely any free time, these friendship ingredients are hard to combine.
When nobody is willing to put in the extra effort to make new friends and get to know them better, the fun fact question emerges as an alternative. It simplifies things, allowing you to get away with knowing the bare minimum about someone and keeping things light.
But when the fun fact culture becomes the norm, it prevents us from building meaningful friendships and getting to know each other for who they are, instead causing us to judge people based on what they do or achieve.
We are alienated — robbed of our depth, our individuality — all the while contributing to a toxic social culture where people become their accomplishments, their hobbies and in cases like mine, even their injuries.
Eventually, as people are reduced to their skills and achievements, and encouraged to form more surface-level relationships with one another, they start seeing people as mere commodities. Friendships begin to mimic symbiotic relationships where each party benefits from the other in a material way, and this benefit is the glue holding them together.
Often, these symbiotic relationships are endorsed as an important part of college. One of the most common pieces of advice I get as a college student is that I need to improve my “networking skills.” I am introduced to other students in social settings — the only introduction I am given being their academic or professional qualifications — and am told to befriend them in case they could help me in the future. The concept of networking, building connections with people who might present you with opportunities, seems to me the end result of the fun fact culture in business settings, where someone’s worth is determined only based on what they have to offer you.
This individualistic culture that is constantly enforced in college under labels such as “networking” is robbing us of our humanity. Everything becomes mechanical, result-oriented, even our conversations. We don’t try to truly get to know each other: We just go through a checklist. Someone’s job, major or simply the fact that they got an internship in a successful company can become a good enough reason to build a relationship with them.
As these fun-fact friendships become normalized, we become confined to our categories: the athlete, the tennis player, the girl who broke her spine, the girl who listens to music, and so on.
But we are all so much more than that. When I think about my closest friends, I don’t think about the most interesting thing that ever happened to them. I think about their quirks, their sense of humor, the way they think about the world, the way they make me feel when I’m with them.
In the hectic rhythm of our college years, we sometimes forget to give friendships the time and space they deserve in our lives, reducing them to “fun facts” and “useful connections. But it’s always possible to go deeper, beyond the surface.
They say that friendship is like a flower, and that with love and care, it grows, blossoms.
So, take the time to grow it. Because when it does, it is beautiful.
Contact Merve Ozdemir at mozdemir@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter at @ozdemir_merve_.