I've been thinking a lot about friendship recently. The last week has been the start of what I am expecting to be a month concentrated with meetings with my closest friends before I move and attempt to make more friends in a different province. So needless to say, I have been thinking about how I actually became friends with the people I'm closest to. I met my best friend (and current roomie) J when we were 13 - that's almost 16 years ago - so it's hard to even trace how our friendship developed to where we can tell each other everything, but as she enjoys reminding me, I ignored her at first until we bonded over a shared teenage obsession. In junior high it was relatively easy to make friends. For those of us who weren't counted among the "popular" crowd, anyone not among the groups that ignored you for fear of social stigma or actively shoved you into lockers was a potential friend - girls who liked the same band, the same boy, played the same instrument, lived on the same street, were in the same classes - it didn't matter. Now, much later, it seems to be a bit different. Thankfully, life post junior high is much less openly hostile, but it is not quite as easy to make those lasting friendships in the same way. How I met one of my best friends, C seems to be an exception to that - while teaching at the same school, we had a very elementary school moment where I walked into her classroom and said the grown-up version of "We're going to be best friends, okay?" But even that wasn't completely instant.It was C and our mutual friend J who told me about an article in the Chronicle Herald (July 16, 2012) appropriately titled "The challenge of making friends as an adult". If you haven't read it, you really should, but I'll summarize - it's harder to make close friends as adults than it was when we were in school because, according to sociologists, there are three conditions that are crucial to the formation of close friendships:
- Proximity
- Repeated, unplanned interactions
- A setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other
That explains why it was so easy to make bffs in junior high and high school, why college room mates become so close and why most of my close friends are people I have worked with and why my mom, who has recently retired and moved away is finding it difficult to make new friends. For someone as nerdy as I am, it's somewhat comforting to know that there are sociological conditions that help to foster relationships and that the ones that don't develop are more because the conditions weren't right than anything that I'm doing wrong. Phewf.
