“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” Shakespeare

Although I’m not a particularly outgoing person, I enjoy meeting new people. While I don’t always make the best first impression (I’ve had more than one good friend tell me they initially expected me to be a bitch), I am lucky enough to have found several kindred spirits in my life. Some were people I saw almost everyday for years. Others I only knew for a few months. What’s funny is that the time frame didn’t matter at all.

What mattered was what kind of person they were, and upon what grounds our friendship was based.

At the time I went to college, some of my friends and I stayed in touch through AIM. During my junior year, Facebook was invented, which became a new way for people to keep in touch. All of a sudden people didn’t disappear completely. Over time, as Facebook reached out beyond college, more and more people began to show up. I received constant updates on engagements, babies, headaches, break ups, and how much people loved/hated their jobs. I didn’t even have to have conversations anymore. I could just know.

Now I am not really against social media. In general I very much like it. I have friends living all over the country, and some even out of it, and I really like knowing what’s going on in their lives. I like that we can still share with each other and not feel like total strangers.

However, I think that social media, and all the other technological ways we keep in touch, exacerbate a problem very common among young people. When someone likes your status everyday, it’s easy to believe they like you, too. Most likely, they do. But it takes less of an effort to click on a thumbs up icon, or send a little smiley face, than it does to actually listen to you when things get rough. Sometimes the people with 1,000 friends are surprised to find they suddenly have no one.

That’s doesn’t mean these people aren’t acquaintances. You might still enjoy talking to them or spending time with them or just having them in your life, and the feeling is probably mutual. But true friendship is more of an investment. And it’s important to realize which people are the ones who will really stand by you and help you become the best possible version of you. It’s not worth your time to fight to keep people around when they have no interest in staying, or to expect more from people when they have shown you time and again that they lack a certain attribute that you value.

Now here’s where that quote comes in. I don’t think that because someone shows their “true colors” or lets you down it automatically means they should be cut off. It just means that they’re not the person you hoped they were, and perhaps should not be counted among your “true friends”. It’s okay to only have a few of those. In terms of friendship, quality and not quantity matter more.