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

[likeadeuce]

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.

[dolorosa_12]

I really love the way you describe your own friend-making experiences, particularly the fact that you seem to be the driving force between connecting groups of people into new friendships. I am terrible at this, and it just seems to require so much energy! I think it's in part because I don't like being the one to organise events, because I have this horror of imposing or making people feel like they're obligated to attend social events, and so in the end I never organise anything! It's hard to be the social hub if you're terrified of organising events and inviting people to them!

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.

This is very true, and certainly reflects my own experiences. I think in most instances it's probably me being the oversharer, although there have been a couple of rare occurrences where I felt that someone was imagining a degree of frienship between us that I didn't feel, which is always uncomfortable.

I hope that when things return to something approaching 'normal' you'll be able to pick up those local friendships where you left off. The pandemic has had a strange, distorting effect on people's social lives.