A good part of Cesare Pavese’s novels deal with friendship during the summer: the most obvious ones —The beautiful summer and The beach– to The devil in the hills either Among womenin the Turin-born writer’s narrative, young protagonists who hardly sleep and who hang around, exchange secrets, fall in love, suffer accidents or become addicts during their holidays are common. The eight mountainsthe film that won the Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, based on a novel by Paolo Cognetti, develops the narrative arc of a summer friendship that arises in a village in the Alps and is transformed year after year. Éric Rohmer, with films such as Clara’s kneewas another specialist in summer links, although in the films of the French director (or in more recent ones such as Call me by your name either Saltburn) desire always comes into play. But it is not necessary to travel to the Alps or turn to renowned authors to obtain more examples: summer friendships are also the driving force behind such popular sagas as The fiveof many of Rosamunde Pilcher’s works (those that were successfully adapted by German public television and that are re-run every weekend by Televisión Española) and —why not—, of the inevitable Blue Summerwhich is so close to us every July.
Although adventures like those of Javi, Piraña and Chanquete seem implausible to us today, summer still has something of an exception or a respite. The texture of the hours seems different, we produce less and a different rhythm and at midday, with the heat, almost everything stops. In a certain way, the days between St. John’s Eve and the end of August are a prolonged party and, like all parties, we live them with special intensity: more attentive and willing to sacrifice ourselves or to live epiphanies, like the appearance of several of those friends who seem definitive and, as they sing Kokoshca in The Force: “They are like sugar cubes, they sweeten the night and then dissolve.” For this reason, and because it is still common in July and August to return to the house where we have always gone with our families or to the village from which our grandparents emigrated a couple of generations ago, summer is the time of year when friendship is most visible. It is something that happens from Islantilla to Cadaqués, passing through Lo Pagán and Magaluf, or from Baiona to Pasajes; but also in any inland municipality where the Virgen de Agosto is celebrated. Right now everyone is forging, resuming or remembering their summer friendships. What is so special about them?
Can we have a million friends? Why summer friends?
Psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar is always the reference when talking about friendship. This English professor is known for having offered a round number (the Dunbar’s Number) which quantifies how many “significant relationships” or friendships an adult can maintain. According to Dunbar, although one can superficially know more than a thousand people, it is not possible to have more than 150 friends. One of his arguments is that the number of 150 people has been used since ancient times to organize social groups or armies because even then it was intuitively discovered that it was the maximum number of individuals capable of feeling linked by personal ties. Although, with the emergence of social networks, many consider that the Dunbar’s Number should be updated, this psychologist continues to recommend that if you run a family business, you should not hire more than 150 employees. Another of the ideas that Dunbar repeats in his publications is that friendship is usually based on six factors or coincidences (seven, if you count musical taste) and all of them have to do with similarities (in the sense of humor, political sensitivity or educational level) or shared experiences (having grown up in the same place using the same language). The existence of summer friends (as different from each other as Pietro and Bruno, the protagonists of The eight mountains) challenges these notions.
“My friendships in Toñanes —explains the writer from Santander Juan Gómez Bárcena, who, in his latest novel, The rest is airwhich gathers a good part of his experiences in his summer vacation spot—maybe they weren’t the ones I would have chosen in the city, where you looked for clearer ties of affinity; in the villages you relate to whoever is closest to you: by age, or because they ride their bike in the same neighborhood as you. That doesn’t mean that those ties weren’t very interesting, because you ended up relating to people very different from you and you learned a lot from those people, you learned certain social strategies, and at the same time you learned to look at your world from outside your bubble. In some way, Toñañes’ friendships helped me to look at my friendly ties in Santander in a different way.”
For the city dweller, accustomed to what sociologist Eva Illouz calls “negative choice” (bonds are established by elimination because the possibilities are almost infinite), summer can mean the establishment of very contextual ties, marked by involuntary coincidences and by differences that, in any other circumstance, would have been insurmountable. Gómez Bárcena goes on to recall “those friendships that were very intergenerational” and their advantages: “They covered a very wide age range, because the five-year-old boy, who was already allowed to go out a little, was in the same group as the 20-year-old boy who worked in the fields and went out on bikes with you. In that range, the older people tended to be sensitive to the children, and the children, on the other hand, to learn from the older people, although there were also clear asymmetries.”
Six weeks, thawing and freezing
Another factor studied by sociology regarding the formation of friendships is the relevance of the time shared by two potential friends. Thus, it is possible to superficially know a potential friend for years without that friendship becoming a reality, whereas, if for some reason (such as a new job or a group activity) you have spent several hours a day sharing with someone, Friendship can be considered solid in a matter of about six weeks. Summer, with its routines so different from the rest of the year, favors situations of this type. “On the beach I meet people with whom I share a hobby“I have a job (sailing) and I would probably never have been friends with my friends from the beach if I had met them at a school in Madrid. There is something special about them that unites us,” explains Ana Smith Cuenca, a Madrid native in her early twenties who works as a sailing instructor in Santiago de la Ribera (Murcia) during the summer. “We spend mornings and afternoons together, working, and at night we go out together. That is decisive: they are relationships of an intensity that they don’t have in Madrid, because on the beach I live with them and we share the relative lack of obligations, the feeling of freedom…”
What if there is a meeting outside the shared environment? “When we meet or coincide in the city, seeing each other becomes something very strange. This mixture of completely different environments is disconcerting: it is exciting, but it is still strange the irruption of certain people, who seem to belong to another life, into your routine,” answers the young woman, who admits that, once the summer is over, “she might talk every three months” with those she lives with during the holidays. “But it is always as if we had spoken yesterday,” she points out. Gómez Bárcena adds: not having much contact with summer friends during the rest of the year is almost part of its charm, and she remembers a curious phenomenon: “Sometimes you wrote letters with a boy, but normally you didn’t hear from him again until the following summer, then there was always a little thaw, every summer you said goodbye being very good friends and when you came back things were very cold again because a year had passed, things had happened and the relationship had to be lubricated again.”
The end of friendships is another of the moments that Dunbar has examined and for which he has data, and one of his conclusions is that, although we tend to associate fractures and explicit arguments with breakups and slow, quiet declines with friendships that fade, the former (i.e., anger) are also common among close friends. However, when it comes to summer friends, it is more common to simply lose touch. “Over the years, many of my friendships were lost,” says the author of The rest is air“Not in the sense that there was a breakup, but in the sense that you came less and less and, above all, at the moment when you move from the time of playing to the time of just spending time together, a leisure time based on going out for a beer or going out loses a lot of closeness. With children it is clearer, you find yourself on a path and suddenly someone says to you: I’m going to play, are you coming? And if that invitation is genuine it is easy to accept. When I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, somehow a whole series of obstacles also appeared. So I have lost many of those friendships, but I have not lost the affection and the ability to remember those times,” concludes the writer, with a certain melancholy. “Well, I believe —clarifies the sailing instructor, a teacher training student in Madrid— that the people I see year after year will accompany me throughout my life. Every summer there are people you know in a more superficial way, and they are not going to accompany you; But those you spend time with summer after summer are the ones who will be there forever. At least in our case.” In the background, his group of friends and coworkers nod.
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