How to Make and Lose Friends in Just 47 Years
This always happens. Last week, I wrote a semi-pissy (though well-thought-out) article about how gratitude is overdone, especially around the holidays, and what did I spend all this week doing? Feeling so genuinely, sappily grateful for my stupid, wonderful fucking friends. As soon as I spill my guts about how much something irritates me, I spend the next thirty days rolling around in it like a dog in fresh roadkill. It’s irritating but maybe a good strategy? I should write about how much I hate winning the lottery, cleaning the house or publishing a book.
Let me just say, I am not wrong about the gratitude thing. And I STILL don’t want distressed wooden planks, the internet and your mom telling me how to express my gratitude in a bullet journal.
BUT…
I’ve always counted myself lucky that, from the time I was six years old until I graduated high school, I lived and went to school in the same community. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had a group of friends, some of whom I’d known since fifth grade, and I couldn’t tell you how I met most of them. It just happened, like some sort of side effect of puberty. My friend group gathered people over the years like a snowball rolling downhill until it was a nice, solid, reliable mass. We clicked, we could count on each other, and we knew all of each other’s secrets.
Because I’d never had to try consciously, I struggled to make friends in college.
On more than one occasion, I kept company with what turned out to be the wrong group of people. I floundered, and I was lonely. But there was no shortage of people to choose from. I lived in a giant dorm with 3,200 other students who all hung out in the hall and were open to late-night pizza and conversation. There were hundreds of people in my classes ready to form study groups.
I joined a giant co-ed service organization that had events almost every night of the week. Even for someone with zero practice making friends, it wasn’t too excruciating. We had lots of time and flexibility. We could drink beer and have an impromptu slumber party on a Tuesday night if we wanted. Eventually, I culled the people I really liked from the group and just hung out with them.
Those friends were wild, witty and entertaining. Sometimes, shit got interesting. There was this one time, in the desert, with cactus spines in my ass…but I digress.
As an adult, it’s been harder.
Over the years, I’ve lost touch with many of my friends from high school and college. We keep up with each other on Facebook, but our lives have diverged for various reasons. When, at 30, I got divorced, I lost a lot of them. Some stopped talking to me outright; others kept their distance from the drama and drifted away slowly. Some I miss, some I don’t.
At the age of 35, I found myself remarried with two little kids and close to zero friends. Both my sister and my best friend had moved to the far corners of the lower 48. They live in Brooklyn and Seattle, respectively, and neither of them had kids at the time. I needed friends to commiserate with — people in my same crazy and bored little-kid place in life who were also, you know, cool. Like me. So I joined a meetup group of new parents and started going on playdates. I approached it the same way I had in college.
Join an organization, figure out who the cool people are, then slowly back away, taking them with me.
That is how I met Catherine and Christina, two people I still keep in touch with, even though we no longer live near each other. They were my people. They didn’t judge how any of us parented; they were more of the “however you can get it done” variety. They were empathetic, realistic, funny and sarcastic. They saved my sanity as a parent of insane little people (They’re all insane; it wasn’t just mine.) more than once. In college, it took me about three bumbling years to find my people. As a new mom, it took me about a year.
When we moved out here by the lake, it was time to make friends again.
So I joined another neighborhood meetup for moms. I volunteered at the school and again found people here and there I clicked with. When I decided to back away from volunteer work to focus more on my writing career, I was a little worried I’d stop seeing people. That I’d turn into Gollum in my office, tippity typing on my keyboard with my claw hands and slowly losing touch with other people’s reality.
Indeed, there are times I don’t talk to anyone all day, and then when I run up to Randalls for milk and the cashier asks,
“How are you doing today?”
I’m like, “I doing… don’t know… how to talk human.”
But I find I see more of my actual friends instead of whoever happens to be at the school carnival. When I feel the need for interaction, I text someone who really enriches my life — someone I know will provide witty conversation, honest admissions, intellectual stimulation and humor. Someone who, when we depart the coffee shop and hop in our separate vehicles, I will leave feeling refreshed, relaxed, encouraged or a sense of clarity. People who are good at sharing their innermost selves and just as good at listening to others do the same.
I have not always had good friends in my life.
There have been times when I had no friends and times when I had “friends” — the kind of people I drank beer with but didn’t trust. I’ll admit, I drove that. I was sometimes so closed up that no one could get past my hard shell, even if they wanted to. There were times I simply picked the wrong people to glom onto because I was lonely. Perhaps one of the reasons I haven’t always had good friends is that I have not always been a good friend.
It’s taken a lot of practice, but I’ve finally gotten pretty good at not just meeting new people but cultivating relationships, at being myself and not worrying about being likable or cool. And recognizing that just because someone is nice doesn’t mean I have to hang out with them if I’m not feeling it. Odds are, if I’m not, neither are they. I have so little time to hang out these days, I don’t want to waste it (or the other person’s) if it feels like obligation and not a salve for the slog of life.
This is my long-winded way of telling my friends how grateful I am for them. Recently, they have helped me make hat-wringing decisions by letting me ramble and asking me questions until I figured out what I want. Friends have made me laugh. Friends have given me an impromptu stick of butter to make pancakes without my feeling like I need to pay it back. Friends have let me vent about work and relationships. Friends have told me what excites them, what frustrates them, what they love and hate. And all without judgment. They make my life so much better, and I hope, as I’ve gotten better at this friend thing, I do a little of the same for them.