I don't think it has to do with age I think it has to do with the end of the 40 hour work week, the always connected work culture doesn't leave much room these days for people of any age to form old fashioned friendships outside of work
Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
281–290 of 745 posts
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#282I think you can make good friends at any age, but you need the right environment for that. When you're young you spend a lot of time with the same people, like in school, which is the environment you need to build a close friendship. When you're older you tend to meet a lot of new people, but you don't have many opportunities to spend a lot of time together. Except at work, which is why many people make close friends…
I agree entirely. Friendship requires repetition. When you are older, your time gets spread across more activities, leaving less opportunity for repetitive time spent together. I'll add that the workplace can be problematic for friendship as there is extra room for undue hostility. If someone makes a mistake, for instance, that mistake may fall directly on your shoulders and friendships predicated on that type of sit…
Add to that heterogeneity that not everyone will have the same openness to friendship at the same time as another. Maybe you pulled an all nighter the night before going to your weekly Saturday spin class. You probably won’t feel social, but the people around you might.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#283> Thayer Prime, a 32-year-old strategy consultant who lives in London, has even developed a playful 100-point scale (100 being “best friend forever”). In her mind, she starts to dock new friend candidates as they begin to display annoying or disloyal behavior. Nine times out of 10, she said, her new friends end up from 30 to 60, or little more than an acquaintance. > “You meet someone really nice, but if they don’t r…
> Thayer Prime, a 32-year-old strategy consultant who lives in London, has even developed a playful 100-point scale (100 being “best friend forever”). In her mind, she starts to dock new friend candidates as they begin to display annoying or disloyal behavior. Nine times out of 10, she said, her new friends end up from 30 to 60, or little more than an acquaintance.
This is like that terrible "The Rules" dating book. How about we treat each other as human beings and not as instrumentalities? We have instincts and biases, but we also have minds and self determination.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#284People are a sum of their life experiences. People who are older, have more that goes into that equation. More often equates to complexity and intricacy, like a complicated key, that becomes harder and harder to find a lock for.
In my early 20's, I was more open to hanging around people I know I didn't like, or wasn't compatible with, because I didn't want to be alone or without friends, craved attention, and saw every social encounter as a stepping stone and potentially valuable.
Now, I know better. When you get older you realize you don't need to surround yourself with people whom you don't like, no longer crave as much attention, and already stepped along many of life's stones. You also put on less of a pretense to others and care less about being liked. It's more important to be authentic and true, even if that means having less friends, than a phony with a lot of fake friends. All this has the result of making it more difficult to randomly find real friends.
It's common I'll meet many new people but the ones who I stay in contact with are few and far between, and that's okay. People come into your life and go out of it, it's just the way things work. I'm thankful for everyone I've had in my life and know that there are many more great people who I have yet to meet.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#285> Thayer Prime, a 32-year-old strategy consultant who lives in London, has even developed a playful 100-point scale (100 being “best friend forever”). In her mind, she starts to dock new friend candidates as they begin to display annoying or disloyal behavior. Nine times out of 10, she said, her new friends end up from 30 to 60, or little more than an acquaintance. > “You meet someone really nice, but if they don’t r…
Besides the obvious craziness of keeping track of these things... It's worth noting that some people are just completely shit at timeliness, no matter how important the thing is. I am and so are my a lot of my friends "I'm running 30 minutes late!" often meets a "No worries, I might be an hour". A punctuality obsessed person would hate me.
If you are running 30 minutes late, you are saying that whatever you did in those 30 minutes is significantly more important than the fact that the other person loses 30 minutes.
Occasionally, that is true. Most often, it is simply a sign that you disrespect the other person.
It's not about being "obsessed with punctuality", it's about realizing that the other person has a schedule that you are impacting as well. And then choosing to not give a damn, in the case of perpetual lateness.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#286One anecdatum: I simply lost most interest in having friends by 25. I lost the rest when I had a kid. Now my friends are my daughter’s friends parents. I don’t really like them, I just end up chit chatting with them while our daughters play.
Are you male? I don't want to assume. But as a woman this is something that really concerns me about the guys I and my friends date. I see my father doing the same thing. Once they get into a stable relationship they seem to think that there's no need for a social life beyond their girlfriend, coworkers, and maybe one or two very close old friends... but those old friends tend to drift away. The reason it bothers me…
I agree with everything you wrote except that you seem to be implying this is a male thing, when it is equally common for a woman to drop her friends once she is in a stable relationship and to become dependent on her partner for all social interaction (the suddenly codependent girlfriend is something almost all men experience at some point when dating). Later in life it sometimes manifests as an obsession with ones children at the expense of everything else. Suddenly all conversations are about the kids, etc. The phenomenon definitely applies equally to men and women.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#287One anecdatum: I simply lost most interest in having friends by 25. I lost the rest when I had a kid. Now my friends are my daughter’s friends parents. I don’t really like them, I just end up chit chatting with them while our daughters play.
Are you male? I don't want to assume. But as a woman this is something that really concerns me about the guys I and my friends date. I see my father doing the same thing. Once they get into a stable relationship they seem to think that there's no need for a social life beyond their girlfriend, coworkers, and maybe one or two very close old friends... but those old friends tend to drift away. The reason it bothers me…
There's an old saying: "A conservative under 30 has no heart. A liberal over 30 has no brain."
People age, and that includes their personalities.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#288I have tried to make guy friends and the main problem seems to be that they're boring. We just run out of stuff to talk about unless we have some business related stuff to talk about. I prefer lady friends ( AS IN FRIENDS WHO ARE FEMALE WHO I DO NOT HAVE A SEXUAL OR WORK RELATION WITH AND WHO I AM NOT TRYING TO DATE ) as there's always the flirty subtext to play around with and they are just pleasant to be around and…
That's a fine way to live, but OP is about life after 30, when most people tend to pair off into marriages and flirty is more frowned upon.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#289I think you can make very good friends at any age. But
1. I have very old friends with a lot of, let's call it "weaknesses". Our friendship is "grandfathered" but if I meet new people I don't tolerate such things anymore.
2. Sometimes you meet an interesting person and would like to hang out more but things don't develop. This person never has time etc. You can also maintain only a limited amount of friends.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#290Why? Babies and hobbies, drug abuse and work addiction. That's about most of it.