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 11:48 pm (UTC)I think, because my family moved around a lot as a child and I had very different experiences at all my schools, I had to really figure out how to make at least a superficial rapport happen quickly and not just rely on instinct, which serves me fairly well these days. Offline it means saying yes to a lot of things when I'm in a new situation, but in both spheres it means a lot of figuring out everyone's boundaries and managing that. Patience and time, though, really are the main things for me.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 10:25 am (UTC)I think, because my family moved around a lot as a child and I had very different experiences at all my schools, I had to really figure out how to make at least a superficial rapport happen quickly and not just rely on instinct, which serves me fairly well these days.
That makes a lot of sense, and also helps explain why I find things so difficult: I lived in the same city from the ages of three to eighteen, I went to my local preschool, then the local primary school, then the local high school, and then the local college (in Canberra the last two years of secondary school are in a separate 'college' rather than being in high school) — so basically I grew up surrounded by the same bunch of people for my entire childhood. I did change and add to my social circle during those years, but there was no need to do so at speed, and I always knew more than half of the people in my year when I moved from one school to another.
It really sounds as if your childhood experiences served you well and helped a lot when navigating friendship in adulthood.