Friday open thread: making friends
Dec. 18th, 2020 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Welcome 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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2020-12-18 07:59 pm (UTC)I'm the sort of person who has an enormous number of acquaintances, many of whom I think consider us friends. And I've certainly had more than my fair share of the 'context specific' friends you mention, people who at the time I thought I would know for the rest of my life.
I think the differing POV of my acquaintances is based on the fact I'm a very reliable person, who knows how to keep a secret, is up for an adventure and is reasonably good company. Perhaps that's what most people are looking for in a friend?
I am, perhaps, too comfortable being alone. I have a lot of trust issues left over from childhood so it takes more to win my trust and loyalty but once earned it's practically indestructible and that's my definition of friendship. So, I have five people I would consider 'real' friends apart from MG - I've know one since birth (cousin) and another since we were four years old.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-19 05:33 pm (UTC)I agree with you that people often have different perspectives on whether they are acquaintances or friends — but unless one person actually directly asks the other whether they see them as a friend, I'm not sure it matters. As long as each person is satisfied with whatever they're getting out of the relationship, does it matter if one person thinks of the other as a friend and the other thinks they're acquaintances? (I suppose the problems would only arise if expectations became mismatched.)
I'm very different to you — I tend to rush into friendships pretty quickly and share a lot of myself. I do try to gauge how people react to this, and if it's clear that we have mismatched expectations I step back. I also have a sense of perspective about all this, and don't take things personally if someone doesn't seem to want to rush into a close friendship — I just accept that we have mismatched perspectives, clashing personalities, or don't view our shared context in the same way.