When is being without friends, acquaintances, associates, relatives, extended family enough?
WYFP? is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
Friends of a Certain Age: Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? (2012)
....In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.
As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.
No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now.
But often, people realize how much they have neglected to restock their pool of friends only when they encounter a big life event, like a move, say, or a divorce....
In studies of peer groups, Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California, observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had.
Basically, she suggests, this is because people have an internal alarm clock that goes off at big life events, like turning 30. It reminds them that time horizons are shrinking, so it is a point to pull back on exploration and concentrate on the here and now. “You tend to focus on what is most emotionally important to you,” she said, “so you’re not interested in going to that cocktail party, you’re interested in spending time with your kids.”
As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added
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"...proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other..." All of these are lacking in cyberspace (although unplanned interactions do occur in social media), although I am grateful that we do have WYFP to be a more structured interaction, albeit constrained by a variety of necessary conventions of non-meatspace interaction. I don't know if I could have had more friends at any point in my life, everything seemed tenuous and for some reason, my lives kept overlapping, former lovers wound up overlapping with the networks of my professional life as I discovered it was much harder to trust all professional relationships beyond certain conventions.
Finally, my few remaining friends with whom relationships had been largely established since college drifted away as well for a variety of reasons. My last few years did become largely built around my life caregiving my mother and my spouse although as I have written before, my spouse and I never really knew each other well enough from a historical point of view since there were just stories not shared because they were too painful or potentially injurious to our relationship. Our respective individual sadness may have been what drew us together except that with my spouse's passing I have the luxury of being able to indulge a greater degree of grief.
As I try to care for my mom, I do find how I lack the opportunity to interact with very many people although that will change soon as I undertake a temporary part-time job for a couple of months. DK has become a surrogate extended family although my cynicism has tended to insulate me from over-engagement even as I spend a significant amount of my waking hours doing either job-applications or making snarky comments in DK with an occasional break to actually write seriously.
As desolate as this may seem, it still is about reach and grasp as I consider some creative projects as well as some research in the coming year and to paraphrase kos, I can't do a lot of political phone activity, but probably should make some commitments to doing political work with social media as the platform.
Anyway, that's my very mundane existence to this moment, what's your FP?