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Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

nytimes.com

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Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#721

Post by rak00n »

drewmol wrote: post #248
hx2a wrote: post #26

I'm 42, and I wish someone told me in my 20's it would be harder to make new friends as I got older. I would have done things differently. I would have put more effort into making friends then. I am able to make new friends, but they end up being more like acquaintances most of the time. Currently I am in grad school, and that's working out well for me. There's something about the shared camaraderie and shared suffer…

Have made an effort to add new friendships, the effort is a conclusive prerequisite to strong, valuable ones. Emails in profile, if you drop me a line I'm happy to invest 30 mins/week toward shared camaraderie w an internet stranger ;-)

It's not scalable. How many camaraderie from Internet will you serve?

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#722

Post by anonforthis1249 »

julianilson wrote: post #661
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a cool tool, but I just wanted to add that I'm a man with at least 50% female friends, so restricting me to only making friends with men is a shame. I think we've moved past the whole "not being able to be friends with someone of the same gender" thing (nevermind the fact that people of the same gender can date!). There are probably better ways to tackle people using the app for dating.

Yeah, it was a tough call tbh. The thing is that most other apps slide into dating territory because that's where the money is. And it ends up ruining the experience for everyone who's not there to find a mate. Wrote up a longer post on the reasoning here [1]. It's definitely in the roadmap, we're just two guys working on this, so it'll take a bit of time to manage that transition carefully. [1] https://www.we3app.co…

I think you guys made a great decision as it definitely sets your app apart. It made it very clear that it's about finding friends, rather than a potential mate.

As another fellow expat, my main issue is trying to make friends with locals or other people that are outside the "expat bubble."

From my experience, those who stay in expat bubble too long become really toxic (both the expats and the locals that hang around them).

I've been learning the local language and have made a lot of progress by just getting involved in specific hobby groups like hiking and birding.

It's tough but rewarding.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#723

Post by tjalfi »

ahtu123 wrote: post #630
tjalfi wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Seattle and everyone else on my daily commute is immersed in their smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

Isn't it the same for any large city?

It might be but I won't make general claims based on a single sample.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#724

Post by jchallis »

pritishc wrote: post #407
jchallis wrote: post #331

I have found Randi Zuckerberg's quip that of [family, sleep, fitness, friends and work] you can focus on three at a time. For me, it's family, work and fitness. If I have extra time, I use it for sleep. Friends are critically important. They just aren't as important as family, work, fitness and sleep. If I had more free time, I'd invest more in sleep than finding relationships.

Doesn't fitness imply the need for sleep?

Yes. I'll refine to exercise/eat healthy as these require explicit time.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#725

Post by peoplewindow »

Kuiper wrote: post #530
peoplewindow wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't read too much into the struggle thing. I made tons of friends in my 20s and early 30s. Many of them moved away to other cities with time, so I have fewer friends now, but that's also partly due to being in a long term relationship, so I have less time, and I'm still friends with some of the people I became friends with in my 20s, and between work, relationship, life and those other friends there isn't much time…

> none of the friends I made in my 20s were friends borne of a shared struggle. [...] The city I moved to had a lot of transient worker types moving through them so there were lots of events organised by and for expats (perhaps I should call us migrants, as that's what we were). People would turn up to a bar and know nothing about anyone except that we all wanted to make friends, and maybe even hook up. I think this…

That's just a shared experience, not a struggle.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#726

Post by surge »

ValentineC wrote: post #646
VLM wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genealogy can be interesting. My ancestors "third places" have mostly closed down. I'm the first in my male lineage in an unknown but large number of generations to not be a Freemason. On the other side of the family, Church is not politically cool today.

I've found my local hackerspace to be an awesome "third place", and we're hoping to figure out a way to market it as such to boost our dwindling membership.

My best friends came from a local (now defunct hackerspace) which spun into a lock picking group (of which some people from hacker space were members, which spun into some of my best friendships and a recent career move.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#727

Post by surge »

ravenstine wrote: post #10

The article makes it pretty clear that relationships and marriage take the place of friends, especially for men. 30 is also that sort of point where women who haven't had kids already think "uh oh, better soon than never". I can see the downvotes coming already for speaking on behalf of women, but I have more female friends than male ones and the number 30 is universally dreaded for the reason I describe. Well, then…

I lost a good chunk of my friends when I had kids, they just stopped talking to me or stopped inviting me to things because they figured, I'm a family man now. That's true to an extent, but I'm not a family man when I'm at work, I'm not in Dad mode when I hang out. I since made new friends, some married, some not, some with kids, some not. Various ages and career ranges.

They also got married, and fell into that spouse politics trap (if our wife or significant other don't like each other or click), we can't hang out, ever. I most of my friends I don't even try to make our spouses meet, except through happenstance, and even then, it doesn't matter since 95% of the time we're doing something, its out with friends, and we only have a few friends where we'll do something with their spouse.

Some tried to get in contact when they had kids but quite frankly, I've moved on.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#728

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

julianilson wrote: post #590
kokey wrote: post #508

As someone who has been an expat in several locations and also divorced, I have found that it's not really due to age but down to where the people around you find themselves in their life and where you find yourself in life. When young people go to college a significant portion of them are in a situation where they would need to seek and develop new friendships. The same happens if you move to a location which has a…

Fellow expat here. This problem had been on my mind for years. Like you said, the main challenge is how to spot the most compatible people in a sea of strangers that are in a similar phase in life. I built We3 to try to make this easier (and it looks like it's working!). We launched recently and matched around 30k people already. It's a mobile app where profiles are private. And it connects people in groups of 3, but…

Is this just a data collection app? Do you monetize the data because it asks for so damn much.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#729

Post by rpiguy »

newfoundglory wrote: post #350
rpiguy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is not at all equally common, it is a known health risk for men that they are likely to have less social support than women, and it is one of the contributors to the very elevated mortality risk of becoming a widower compared to becoming a widow. Here’s a reference to a few older studies if you like - https://books.google.com/books?id=J3-78PdF83kC&pg=PA201&lpg=...

Social support and codependency are two different things. A codependent person will transfer their dependency to someone else. I was pointing out that codependent women drop their female friends just like some married men do.

Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)

#730

Post by narrator »

afterburner wrote: post #319
narrator wrote: post #147

I 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…

Would it be fair to say you need to be titillated to give a shit?

Being a hetrosexual male, being titillated by women is not really a choice I have a lot of control over. I do have control over my behavior and what I do and say. I actually find extremely attractive women somewhat difficult to have relationships with as sometimes it's difficult to look at them without cracking a suspiciously wide grin.
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