Beyond Selidor

This conversation is all really fascinating to me and one thing it makes me think about is that as an adult/post college -- whether online, IRL, or hybrid -- I've pretty much always made friends in groups? clusters? I don't mean that I met everybody at the same time and place, but that for whatever reason (an active fandom, a highly social job, heavy involvement in a cause or project), I got into a successful friend-making groove, and often I was a conduit for connecting those people to each other.

So I suspect it was partly about the surroundings but also partly about my behavior and attitude -- I was in a mode of actively listening and actively sharing; JUST trying to get people together based on common interests (book clubs, classes, writing workshops, meetup groups, whatever) have yielded some fun times in the activities themselves, but never turns into people that I reliably communicate with or talk to outside of the activity itself.

I like your comment about sharing personal things a lot, too. That makes so much sense. Over the past few years -- 2017 to 2019 or so -- I spent a lot of time at public meetings and organizational events and the like, and I decided to make a point of reaching out to people that I saw occasionally to actually make time and sit down with them one on one, ask about their personal story and share what felt important of mine. Not all of these get togethers led to deep personal friendships -- sometimes I realized 'this person is on a fully different page from me in terms of priorities -- but some of them did.

I think the failure mode of personal sharing is scaring people off with oversharing and talking too much (which I know I've done both IRL and online) but for the most part I've learned not to take this too personally. That might not have been what person was looking for at the moment, but it's balanced with a lot of people I would not have gotten to know if I hadn't taken those steps.

It's funny that I think I submitted this prompt to you a few months ago when the 'going out and meeting people the "normal" way didn't feel AS far off as it does right now, and now I'm struggling with how to maintain those relationships without the real life connection (it doesn't help that I've gotten off Facebook for the most part, which has mostly been a good decision, but which was helping to maintain some of those local friendships in the background even when we were too busy to see each other much).

I'll be interested to follow up on this thought process in a year when HOPEFULLY we'll be seeing more of a normal.