This is a real problem that should be tackled in itself, rather than suggesting friendmaking as a side effect of joining a class or sports group etc. There's a prevalent view that people don't make friends when older because only children and young adults do that. That's so wrong it's sad, people shouldn't be shy to say they want to make friends. There used to be institutions and venues that made it natural for people to bump onto each other again and again (from the church to the pub to the barber), then modern life, competition and individualistic culture came along and now people only listen to their i-pods. It seems to me that this is a transitory (lonely) period until we find our new social venues.
The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
71–80 of 320 posts
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#72At first I and my best friend regarded each other as assholes, but we were forced together by a casual bridge game. One afternoon I arrived at his house to discover the game was off -- he'd been accused of date rape and he and his housemates were processing the news. He'd slept with a friend of his girlfriend and this story was her excuse to the girlfriend.
I remember leaving the room, looking out a window and thinking "This guy isn't as big a prick as _that_." (I had seen something like this before.) And I went back in and said, "what are we going to do about this?" I had enough standing among this larger circle to help slow down the rumors and witch-hunting until things got sorted out, which happened quickly after Friend of GirlFriend admitted it was just a lousy story. (He was never accused of this again, and never had been before.)
We ended up living together for years, and I helped him move to university for his masters. It turned out that we had similar interests and enjoyed similar arguments and enjoyed picking stuff up off one another. He introduced me to all sorts of music, and, a Jew, learned from me to give up ice cream for Lent. (I got more from this friendship than he did.) When a friend's boyfriend moved into town for her, we took him as a roommate, and cut her out when she dumped him two weeks later -- we hardly knew the guy, but she had friends in town, and he didn't. There was the day he yelled at me for suggesting something _he_ did all the time, because it wasn't something _I_ believed in.
Unfortunately, he was killed in a freak car accident, returning from completion of his masters'. That was a long time ago. I've never come close to anything like him.
In your twenties you live with more drama. You're figuring yourself out, you do stupid things, people do stupid things to you. It's easier to see who and what people are, and you need people more to bring you through all the noise. As we age as we figure out our basic choices and move on from there. The drama recedes and the volume goes down. We get more complicated and it becomes harder to read us. Confessions that made sense as we were figuring stuff out start to seem a lot more demonstrative and overwrought. Let's face it, many of us make soul-deadening choices and become much less interesting.
As we "grow up" the stuff that was questioning and exciting starts looking like instability. The raw threads of personality that can be woven into another person get woven up into others and ourselves and tucked out of sight. For lots of people this is actually good, there is less chaos and more enjoyment and more creativity. But it does become harder to make friends.
tldr; Cherish your friends. You can lose them, and they're very hard to replace.
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#73Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#74Just going to share a little anecdote here. I moved to Los Angeles in 2004. The next year I organized a softball team, mostly coworkers at the time. There are six of us that have been playing since we started, going on seven years now, even though we've almost all since changed jobs. Even though it's "just softball" (and our league is about as uncompetitive as possible without being totally beer-league), we've all ma…
Beyond the juvenile stage men can't bond through "play time". Men bond through shared struggle and purpose. You aren't going to make close lifetime male friends at some stupid beer centric sports league.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Men-Jack-Donovan/dp/0985452307
I think it's an interesting distinction that this is not really true of women. Women can get close over various shared interests and activities.
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another factor. In my observation, people on the east coast make truer and deeper friendships than people out west. I'm a lifelong westerner and when I first started spending time in the east I felt, in this respect, like I had come home for the first time. People I met (socially, not on the street) would actually do things like make eye contact, listen to what each other said, and respond to it. They were no…
That may be less a West Coast / East Coast thing and more a California thing in particular. I say that because my family hosted a couple of exchange students from France who were really struck by the veneer of friendliness here, and the very real distance that people maintained beneath it. Later, when I went to France, I found that there was an initial aloofness that I mistook for vague dislike. But after a while, th…
It's not just a California thing. We have the exact same thing here--we call it the "Seattle freeze".
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#761. It helps to volunteer regularly for a non-profit cause that you believe in, or at least approve of. You likely will get to know some "nice" people; once you establish that you're actually committed to whatever the cause is, and not just on the prowl, then you can establish lifelong bonds. 2. It also helps to be cheerfully unembarrassed about taking the lead in organizing groups to do stuff. People are often secret…
1. A lot of people do this stuff purely for the social aspect.
2. Agreed.
3. We have poor intuition about the way the universe works. And not just on the big or small scales. Your average five year old has probably seen black lines when looking at a light source though there nearly touching fingers, but nobody they know can tell them why that happens. However, religions tend to have vary good answers in terms of how people think. And I don't mean that in a bad way, even if they are gibberish they still add a level of comfort that the universe works just like how they think it does.
PS: As to thermodynamics sunlight renders most simple arguments meaningless. If you find comfort from the ideas great, just don't look to deeply for there be dragons.
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another factor. In my observation, people on the east coast make truer and deeper friendships than people out west. I'm a lifelong westerner and when I first started spending time in the east I felt, in this respect, like I had come home for the first time. People I met (socially, not on the street) would actually do things like make eye contact, listen to what each other said, and respond to it. They were no…
That may be less a West Coast / East Coast thing and more a California thing in particular. I say that because my family hosted a couple of exchange students from France who were really struck by the veneer of friendliness here, and the very real distance that people maintained beneath it. Later, when I went to France, I found that there was an initial aloofness that I mistook for vague dislike. But after a while, th…
It might be a San Francisco thing. I moved to California (Los Angeles) when I was young, and recently moved to the East Coast (New York). I don't have many friends back home, but we(~6) keep up with each other (especially back home) on all sorts of events/happenings. I actually had problems when I first moved that while I was sincere about being friends, people (on the east coast) did not believe I was serious.
Or maybe my circle of friends are not the norm in Cali.
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#78I knew a guy who made a boatload of money off of the dotcom bubble. He kept doubling down and doubling down, then at right about the peak he told himself "I have as much money as I'll ever need if I cash out now. There's no reason to take any more risks." In other words, he timed it perfectly (based on his own situation - he wasn't genius and he would freely admit that) So here he was, a multimillionaire who'd spent…
"So there were always people around. There were always women willing to sleep with him. But they were there for the money and he couldn't delude himself into thinking otherwise." For some reason people seem to think that someone wanting to be around because of a person's fame or money is less pure than other reasons because it's not real. Generally when people want to be around someone it's because they give them som…
It would be impossible to have a meaningful friendship on such grounds. That is not friendship it's a trade between "fame/money" and "rich friend". It's not just "less pure", it's insane and wrong.
It's entirely possible to be true friends with people of vastly different status. People have a great instinct for real friends when they see one. The problem with rich/famous people is that their lifestyle changes vastly since they can afford not to work, they live in more isolated neighborhoods and it becomes increasingly rare to bump onto people with similar goals in life.
If you're super rich you can work your way through the social elite, but if you're averagely rich this doesn't seem to be an option.
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously there are people who can't do this (Zuckerburg, and plenty of much smaller examples too) but I don't see why, if you have the choice, you'd let people know how rich you are. Of course, unless you live the life of someone much poorer people can always guess ("hey, nice house you've got there..."), but people who talk about how rich they are, or show off with the money... just seems stupid to me.
He didn't realize it would be a problem in the beginning. After that I think he was just afraid to move away from the people he knew. I've thought a lot about what I would do in that position, and came to the same conclusion you did. The right thing to do probably would have been to move far away, live simply, and take up a hobby so he could meet people on an equal footing. Of course, it's easy to decide how other pe…
Or get a normal day job, even if you don't need it. It provides social comfort. It works.
Re: The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
#80Just going to share a little anecdote here. I moved to Los Angeles in 2004. The next year I organized a softball team, mostly coworkers at the time. There are six of us that have been playing since we started, going on seven years now, even though we've almost all since changed jobs. Even though it's "just softball" (and our league is about as uncompetitive as possible without being totally beer-league), we've all ma…
Beyond the juvenile stage men can't bond through "play time". Men bond through shared struggle and purpose. You aren't going to make close lifetime male friends at some stupid beer centric sports league. http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Men-Jack-Donovan/dp/0985452307 I think it's an interesting distinction that this is not really true of women. Women can get close over various shared interests and activities.
Yeah, I read Fight Club too, dude.
We could have a much deeper discussion on the evolution of society and how the gradual reduction of physical survival difficulty has eroded a lot of the male bonding development that used to exist. But a lot the OP was about difficulty making friends even when people had a lot of things in common, so I was sharing an anecdote on how a shared activity and commitment, even for a mostly trivial hobby, still led to what I considered good friendships.
You may consider bonding through my softball team "play time." I posit that it's better than not bonding at all, but if you really want to dismiss my friendships and suggest the only way to forge lifetime male bonding is to form an underground anarchist militia and make bombs out of soap, I'll take that under consideration.