Intentionally making close friends
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Intentionally making close friends
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Re: Intentionally making close friends
#2This deserves a deeper read
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#3I really like reading this article and I think it's a good start to get rid of a loner lifestyle.
There's however one caveat... making close friends is quite a culture dependent topic in my opinion. Making close friends requires differerent approaches depending on the culture you're living in. Strategies that work in San Francisco may not work in Miami, Buenos Aires or Trondheim.
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#4This is interesting because I have a handful of close friends, but I've never made a close friend intentionally. I suspect that even "naturally social" people might benefit from thinking about their social lives and relationships with more intention, especially as we/they get older and opportunities for random friendship development tend to wane, especially in highly-individualized Western society where people spend most of their time focused on themselves and their nuclear families.
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#5This fellow had higher emotional IQ at age 17 than me at age 27. Great read!
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#6I skimmed through and the article looks a lot like what I think as well. One bonus point I didn't see is that the more people take the intentional-based approach the easier it is to befriend each other. My best friendship was formed and is sustained through intentional effort we share to keep it this way.
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#7I don't really understand this tendency to create these artificial systems for having friends. To me it's in the same category as dating apps, or weird exercise routines.
The best way to have deep friendships is to live a social life. Engage in the community you livee in, take on responsibility, be politically active, start a business, become an open source maintainer, if you're religious go to church/mosque/etc. If you're active and engaged with the people around you'll basically have no choice but to have deep friendships. We're social animals by nature, there's no need for a ten step program.
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#8Many people make close friends at university, even without intentionally doing so. There's a common, yet erroneous, pattern of thinking in many "successful" people where they attribute their actions to their success without considering that they may have still been successful had they chosen different actions. In this case, the author may have still formed closed friendships had they not chosen to do so intentionally, as many other students do. The only way to really know would be to have the author clone themselves twice and have each clone go through school with one intentionally seeking out close friends and the other not.
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#9I’ve only really intentionally made a close friend one time. However, my longest closest friend was not that way. Him and I bonded pretty much immediately after getting into a fist fight on a high school wrestling mat during practice and our coach had to separate us. Now he’s been there through most of my achievements and I his. Good guy, doing a PhD in chemical engineering at Case Western now.
Re: Intentionally making close friends
#10I don't really understand this tendency to create these artificial systems for having friends. To me it's in the same category as dating apps, or weird exercise routines. The best way to have deep friendships is to live a social life. Engage in the community you livee in, take on responsibility, be politically active, start a business, become an open source maintainer, if you're religious go to church/mosque/etc. If…
Some of the suggestions you offer don't really increase the chances of making close friends.
Like being an open source maintainer - how is that really going to lead to close friends?
Or starting a business - sure you might network more, and meet business partners, but do they really become close friends?
I will say that going to a church regularly was the #1 thing that really led to lots of friends for me. Like instantly.