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: 2020-12-19 10:20 am (UTC)I am...not very good at friends. I want to be! But I'm not. My problem is that I'm a natural loner and when the choice comes to inertia vs action (i.e. go out and meet new people) the choice is invariably inertia. I'm better at online friendships than real life ones, because I can maintain them from the comfort of my computer. But I'm not the sort of person who says "oh let's go out do X", either I do X by myself or it's simply not something I will do (have a beer in a bar by myself, go to a club by myself, etc.; go on vacation by myself or to the cinema or a play? sure, anytime!).
I've become, as an adult only, relatively okay at what you call context specific friends. I had a lot of trouble with friendships when I was in school (I'm an only child and didn't grow up in a neighbourhood full of kids so I always acted older than I was), but it was pretty okay in university. But those sort of went away when we finished. Moving to a new place for grad school was hard, but I was lucky that I fell in with a group of people who basically forced me to go out (that's when I really experienced what university student life was like, but with some disposable income!).
I stay in touch with some of them, and consider two of them real friends, but most of that also withered away.
I think part of my very specific problem is that I go through phases of depression/dysthymia when I simply Can't. (I'm not clinically diagnosed for Reasons, but I'm have good reason to believe it's the case.) I remain very functional at my job, but I simply Can't socially (also because I interact with tons of people at my job, it ises up all my social mojo). I've had a few lengthy stints of unemployment in the past ten years and as you may imagine that doesn't help, it throws you into so much uncertainty and it's not what I want to talk about then either. But then the communication goes dormant and then simply stops. The same thing is often true for friends-originally-from-fandom, while also here people may go away with context disappearing or life happening, coming back is a bit easier. Though I've taken a long leave of absence from fandom for reasons related to grad school and unemployment as well, when I wasn't even good company for myself let alone other people.
Actually now that I say that, I've actively tried to cut friends out of my life because of that way of thinking (not being good company for them) and it took me until just a year or two ago to figure out that some of those people might know that and still choose to be my friend because they can protect themselves and don't need me to do that for them. (Well, and then there are friends I'm very conflicted about, I think I told you about that 'wedding snub' from a few years ago and it sort of soured me on the whole group. But they also now simply lead different lives, married and with kids, I want to talk about other things than husbands and kids.)
I've had one friend at grad tell me point blank "you never say anything about yourself!" which...hurt but isn't wrong. However, part of that is because I don't always want to talk about work and at that point in my life, work and the shitshow that was going on with my supervisor were the only things going on aside from a low key fannishness. And I don't bring fandom, and the fic I write and my ideas on canon et al, into most areas of my real life if it's clear the people I interact with aren't fannish themselves. I'm chronically single (very much by choice), so I don't have my own woes about my partner or sex life to contribute so........ Idk.
But the bottom line is, I'm pretty okay by myself. Sure, there are times when I would wish there were more people in my life who I could talk to and who were physically closer and would just give me a damn hug, but it's not often or dire enough that I actually...do it. Besides, I'll be moving away (would have already, had the pandemic not interfered) so that whole process needs to start again one way or other and we'll see if that leads to a fresher start with more motivation. And now that I've found my way back to active fandom engagement, matters also are different. I do prefer the online community anyhow.
Also, making friends as an adult is *hard* when you're an introvert who doesn't like to go places.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-19 05:53 pm (UTC)This was the same for me too! My undergraduate years were really awful, because it was basically four bitter years of realising that my childhood and teenage friendships had been entirely context-dependent, and not knowing how to adjust and make friends in the new university context. (I moved city with my family and went to university there, while almost every friend from my home town remained there and studied there for univeristy.)
But then when I emigrated for postgraduate studies I was forced into a situation where I knew no one, had no family to fall back on, and had the great fortune to end up in a really friendly, sociable department where most of the other students shared my worldview, interests, and generally socialised in ways that I liked. Most of my non-internet friends are people I met during that time, and they're wonderful.
But the bottom line is, I'm pretty okay by myself. Sure, there are times when I would wish there were more people in my life who I could talk to and who were physically closer and would just give me a damn hug, but it's not often or dire enough that I actually...do it. Besides, I'll be moving away (would have already, had the pandemic not interfered) so that whole process needs to start again one way or other and we'll see if that leads to a fresher start with more motivation. And now that I've found my way back to active fandom engagement, matters also are different. I do prefer the online community anyhow.
It sounds as if you're in a situation that works for you, and that's a good thing. But yes, I totally agree with you that making friends as an adult is really, really hard.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-20 09:46 am (UTC)However, intellectually I know a lot of things I don't act on (like that exercise is good for me). So I remain in this holding pattern, very aware that it is not more than that. But I also think as long as I'm aware that I'm just getting comfortable in limbo, not all is lost. And as I said, the whole thing needs a reset anyway once I move.