Friday open thread: making friends

[dolorosa_12]

Welcome back to another Friday open thread — the second-last for the year! Today's prompt is from likeadeuce:

Talk about the process of making friends or what takes a connection from casual to friendship.



I'm actually really interested to see other people's answers here, because making friends as an adult is really hard, in my experience! I can tell when someone is a friend, but the process is a bit of a mystery to me, and I'm not sure if it's a single, uniform process, or rather something that varies from friendship to friendship.

Pretty much all the friends I've made as an adult are people I either met online through fandom, or people who were students with me in the same department at Cambridge while I was doing my MPhil and PhD. In my experience with both sets of friends, our friendships developed through a process of (over)sharing very deeply personal stuff with each other. I'm not sure everyone else is like this, but I find it hard to be friends with people who aren't prepared to be open about their emotions and personal experiences (and aren't comfortable with me sometimes talking about mine), at least to a certain extent. I'm sure some people have fantastic friendships built solely on the foundation of shared interests and experiences, but for me this isn't enough — we need to have some degree of shared outlook, and it's only possible to really understand this outlook if both parties are comfortable talking about things other than shared interests.

I don't know if that makes sense — as I say, friendship is a bit weird and complicated!

This is a bit outside the scope of the prompt, but I would also add that I have a fairly healthy attitude to friendship. Some friendships endure, whereas some are very context specific, and once that context disappears, the friendship withers. If this happens, I try to have a sense of perspective, value the friendship for what it was while it lasted, but don't really mourn or stress about its loss. We may drift back into each other's lives and pick things up where we left off, but if we don't, that's still okay.

What about you?

Comments

[pauraque]

our friendships developed through a process of (over)sharing very deeply personal stuff with each other

This has been a pattern for me too, but in my experience it can be a double-edged sword. It's a fast track to feeling close to someone, and sometimes that works out, but I've also had it happen where it led to a degree of closeness and oversharing that began to feel smothering to me. And once you're there, it's not the most comfortable thing to try to walk it back and bring the friendship down to a lower level.

So, I've tried to cultivate a more gradual style of developing friendships. A little sharing about personal stuff here and there, but not jumping straight to pouring our hearts out. For me this works better and seems to lead to more lasting friendships rather than ones that are intense but flame out quickly.

[author_by_night]

This has been a pattern for me too, but in my experience it can be a double-edged sword. It's a fast track to feeling close to someone, and sometimes that works out, but I've also had it happen where it led to a degree of closeness and oversharing that began to feel smothering to me. And once you're there, it's not the most comfortable thing to try to walk it back and bring the friendship down to a lower level.

That's an excellent point. Or it's oversharing without any authentic closeness, which can be dangerous - but even if it's nothing more than irritating, it does mean you may have become more of a support system than a true friendship. A true friendship should allow for the balance you mentioned.

In retrospect, I had one that definitely went very quickly to all personal all the time. It did become necessary - we both went through some pretty awful things, and I'm glad we had each other's backs, but there was a level of codependence and an inevitable mini-fallout.

I agree that a slower burn leads to more lasting friendships.

[dolorosa_12]

This has been a pattern for me too, but in my experience it can be a double-edged sword. It's a fast track to feeling close to someone, and sometimes that works out, but I've also had it happen where it led to a degree of closeness and oversharing that began to feel smothering to me.

Oh yes, I totally agree. For various reasons, I often used to end up being the person who various friends (both in-person and online) who were going through really terrible psychological and emotional difficulties would come to for help. A lot of the time, I was completely out of my depth (I literally had to talk people down from multiple suicide attempts, which looking back is completely horrifying — I was in no way equipped to deal with that, and it's a miracle the people in question are still all right). On other occasions, the situation was less severe and it was something I was perfectly capable of handling, but it left me feeling the other person had assumed a level of closeness that I didn't share, and made me feel like I was being used.

So, I've tried to cultivate a more gradual style of developing friendships. A little sharing about personal stuff here and there, but not jumping straight to pouring our hearts out. For me this works better and seems to lead to more lasting friendships rather than ones that are intense but flame out quickly.

This seems like a very sensible approach.