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 11:32 pm (UTC)The internet has absolutely transformed this for me - and specifically twitter, which I know isn't your thing. I've made *so* many friends that way. Not generally people I have no connection with, but it's been a wonderful way of deepening conference/yoga hellos into something where you know enough about one another to share quite a lot. People can have terrible personae, and be utterly fake online, but it's hard to do that under a consistent account for a long time among people who do know you a little bit. I've gone on holiday three times with people I know 97% through social media, but with just enough reality that I know they are for real. It's always been excellent. And some of them have been rocks in this last year, whereas people I know through more conventional routes haven't all been great. I guess it helps to skip those middle phases of "person who seems pleasant but is there a terrible thing I have yet to discover"?
I think you're right about the need to get to a shared sense of values. It builds warmth - not that you have to share everything, but you have a bedrock of comfort in their company. (One of the few genuinely good things about the last few years has been anyone who I knew in June 2016, I know whether or not we have some basic worldview in common.)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-19 05:47 pm (UTC)I've gone on holiday three times with people I know 97% through social media, but with just enough reality that I know they are for real. It's always been excellent. And some of them have been rocks in this last year, whereas people I know through more conventional routes haven't all been great.
This is my experience with a lot of internet friendships, although my equivalent would be the people I met through Philip Pullman fan forums thirteen years ago. I've travelled all over the world and stayed in the houses of these people, gone on holiday with them, helped them with uni stuff — one of them was my bridesmaid at my wedding. If you meet the right people online in the right circumstances, the result can be incredible.
One of the few genuinely good things about the last few years has been anyone who I knew in June 2016, I know whether or not we have some basic worldview in common.
Oh, indeed. (And, because I know how people voted in my constituency, I know that I'm not walking around day by day, surrounded by frightened racists. 73 per cent of voters — which obviously doesn't include the large number of non-Commonwealth immigrants who couldn't vote — share my worldview. That was enough for me to know that this place is home.)