Friends Suck and Making them is Worse

Let me preface this by saying that I love my friends, and the people I surround myself with are nothing less than amazing, but I think we can all agree that turning a stranger into a friend is not always an easy feat. Often it feels like more trouble than it is worth and the results are not always positive.

In the United States, and likely in a lot of other places, our early social lives are very strange. Essentially, the entire time that we are in school we are trapped for the majority of our time with people exactly or very close to our age. Having been working for a couple years now I have come to realize just how strange that is. There is no other point in life, except maybe the final years but that is its own problem, where this is the case, and I am not convinced that it is a good thing. However, it makes one thing easier: building relationships.

School:

Whenever I look back on my time in grade school I cannot help but cringe. While I am sure I will look back on this time of my life similarly, I am still shocked that anybody continued speaking with me after some of the things I pulled during that time. One thing about me is that I am terrible with keys. In elementary school after losing the fifth house key I had been handed my father finally installed an external keypad as a garage door opener. When I went off to college I moved into an insane asylum that had been reconfigured into student housing, central state asylum for anyone curious. That first year there I locked myself out of my room so much that I eventually had to keep a spare with a friend, but before I had that fail safe in place I got locked out of my third story room, and I had a friend climb out the window and across gutters from the 1800 to climb in through my window to let me in. I remember my heart sinking when he made the climb, a small blanket tied to his wrist as his only safety net, and he shouted back to me that the window was locked. Luckily they were just 150 year old windows and he was able to wiggle it open. I now live with this man, and I am not allowed to have a house key.

All this to say, school is bad for a lot of reasons, but somehow it is an amazing place to build long lasting relationships. But what happens after a person leaves school? Somehow things change. I have another friend that I went to school with. He met his wife freshman year of university, and married her immediately after graduating. I am not certain how we got onto the conversation, but I remember him telling me that he felt a lot of pressure to find his wife during university because it would be practically impossible to do so after. At the time I really wanted to deny that as a truth, but somehow it truly seems to be the case that any kind of relationship is much harder to come by in life after our schooling.

Friendship:

Relationships seem to be a black box to a lot of people. How do you turn a stranger into a friend seems like a challenging question, but it boils down to three things: “proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other” (Alex Williams).  School seems to allow for this to happen more often than other settings because the majority of the people anyone interacts with is on close to equal terms. Age, classes, teachers, and general experiences are shared by many at that time. It creates a lot of common ground. The way classes are scheduled we see the same people frequently, proximity. The fact that school occurs in a confined space means that we tend to bump into the same people frequently, unplanned interactions. Plus, because there is little at stake between our peers during school, it’s easier to open up and be vulnerable.

Once we move on to being in a workplace meeting the above mentioned criteria becomes much harder. Immediately there is more on the line when we interact with those around us. First of all, most schools have a higher population density than most workplaces, and with the increasing popularity of remote work that becomes even more true. So, all of a sudden our proximity to others takes a sharp dive. Unplanned interactions are less frequent as well. In our new “connected” world every professional interaction seems to come from a calendar invite. There is less and less of a chance for you to bump into really anyone and start conversing. I believe that the real nail in the coffin is that it is hard to confide in someone at work. There is just too much on the line. If the wrong thing is said it could cost the entirety of a person’s income.

How to adapt:

Well, we have gone from an environment that promotes connection to one that does the opposite. If only there was some third place that could help. “Third places is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg and refers to places where people spend time between home (‘first’ place) and work (‘second’ place)” (Stuart M. Butler and Carmen Diaz). For a lot of people a third place does not necessarily have to be outside of the home. I know that my roommate has found a community through games that he plays online, and has even been able to see them in meat space - the physical realm. Some examples of third spaces that call for physical gatherings from the getgo are churches, parks, recreation centers, hairdressers, gyms and even fast-food restaurants. While it might be odd to see the golden arches on the list, recently a “newspaper

article on McDonald’s found that for lower-income Americans, [McDonald’s is] becoming almost the equivalent of the English pub” (Stuart M. Butler and Carmen Diaz).

Being able to have a third place that can be frequently attended helps meet all three criteria for making a stranger into a friend. Start thinking of something that can lead to having a third place. For me, I play Magic: The Gathering. It is a trading card game that is about thirty years old now. I go just about every Friday to my local game store (LGS), and I have found a lot of great people in doing so. Recently I had to go to Bentonville Arkansas for work. It was an entirely new place for me, but I was able to find an LGS near where I was staying. I got to go play with people I had never met before, and our third place that we had in common set the groundwork for communication. They really welcomed me with open arms, and I ended up having a terrific time. While I was there it did not feel like I was far from home at all. It was one of the neatest experiences I have had recently.

Third places do seem to be on the decline. Increasing rent “in many cities also make low-cost informal meeting centers harder to maintain” (Stuart M. Butler and Carmen Diaz). Even here in Indianapolis I lost the LGS I had been going to for years due to a rent hike this past Summer. Regardless, I do believe there is still a third place out there for everyone, and it is well worth looking for.

Sources:

Title: Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?

Author: Alex Williams

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html

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Title: “Third places” as community builders

Authors: Stuart M. Butler and Carmen Diaz

Source: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/09/14/third-places-as-community-builders/