In the Atlantic, Julie Beck has a great new piece on "How Friendships Change in Adulthood." It will ring true for Vox readers of, uh, a certain age. Like my age, for instance. Old, is what I'm saying.
I do think, however, that Beck left out an interesting piece of the puzzle. Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it's rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built.
We get by with a little less help from our friends
It's a familiar tale that Beck tells: Early in life, friendships are central to our development and sense of self. This is true right up through to those early post-collegiate years, when everyone is starting out in their professional lives.
And then people get married. They have kids. Their parents get older and need more care. They settle into careers. All those obligations — spouses, kids, family, work — are things we have to do. Friendships are things we choose to do. And that means, when time contracts and things get busier, friendships get bumped.
So as we get older, time with friends tapers off. "[In a study we did,] we asked people to tell us the story of the last person they became friends with, how they transitioned from acquaintance to friend," researcher Emily Langan told Beck. "It was interesting that people kind of struggled":
In a set of interviews he did in 1994 with middle-aged Americans about their friendships, [researcher William] Rawlins [of Ohio University] wrote that, "an almost tangible irony permeated these adults' discussions of close or ‘real’ friendship." They defined friendship as "being there" for each other, but reported that they rarely had time to spend with their most valued friends, whether because of circumstances, or through the age-old problem of good intentions and bad follow-through: "Friends who lived within striking distance of each other found that… scheduling opportunities to spend or share some time together was essential," Rawlins writes. "Several mentioned, however, that these occasions often were talked about more than they were accomplished."
This is a sad story. People almost universally report that friendships are important to their happiness and well-being. They don't want to lose touch with friends and stop making new ones. They lament it constantly. (I can testify to all of this firsthand.)
But as the habits of family and work settle in, friendships become an effort, and as every tired working parent knows, optional effort tends to get triaged.
Is this an inevitable state of affairs?
Our missing tribes
There's a temptation to say that this is inevitable, just the way things are. People grow up, they don't hang out with friends as much anymore, it's kind of sad, but that's just how it is.
But it's worth remembering that it is not inevitable. In fact it's quite new! For the vast majority of Homo sapiens' history, we lived in small, nomadic bands. The tribe, not the nuclear family, was the primary unit. We lived among others of various ages, to which we were tied by generations of kinship and alliance, throughout our lives. Those are the circumstances in which our biological and neural equipment evolved.
It's only been comparatively recently (about 10,000 years ago) that we developed agriculture and started living in semi-permanent communities, more recently still that were thrown into cities, crammed up against people we barely know, and more recently still that we bounced out of cities and into suburbs.
So everything about how we live now is "unnatural," at least in terms of our biology. Of course, that doesn't mean it's bad — it's generally a bad idea to draw normative conclusions from evolutionary history — but it should remind us that socially constructed living patterns have shallower roots than we might think from our parochial perspective.
Point being, each of us living in our own separate nuclear-family castles, with our own little faux-estate lawns, getting in a car to go anywhere, never seeing friends unless we make an effort to schedule it — there's nothing fated or inevitable about it.
Why should it require explicit scheduling to see a friend who lives "within striking distance"? Why shouldn't proximity do some of the work? That answer, for many Americans, is that anywhere beyond a few blocks away might as well be miles; it all requires a car. We do not encounter one another in cars. We grind along together anonymously, often in misery.
The loss of spontaneous encounters
Why do we form such strong friendships in college and form so few afterward?
I read a study many years ago that I have thought about many times since, though hours of effort have failed to track it down. The gist was this: The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact. That's why we make friends in college: because we are, by virtue of where we live and our daily activities, forced into regular contact with the same people. It is the natural soil out of which friendship grows.
This study isn't it, but it's similar, to wit:
The researchers believed that physical space was the key to friendship formation; that "friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood." In their view, it wasn’t so much that people with similar attitudes became friends, but rather that people who passed each other during the day tended to become friends and later adopted similar attitudes.
And this also reinforces the point:
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.
(If you know of the study I'm talking about, please, luvagod, send it to me.)
Some of this natural social mixing follows us to post-collegiate life. We bond with people we work with every day and the people who share our rented homes and apartments.
But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. Many if not most neighborhoods these days are not safe for unsupervised kid frolicking. In lower-income areas there are no sidewalks; in higher-income areas there are wide streets abutted by large garages. In both cases, the neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don't leave except to drive somewhere.
Thus, seeing friends, even friends within "striking distance," requires planning. "We should really get together!" We say it, but we know it means calls and emails, finding an evening free of work, possibly babysitters. We know it would be fun, but it's so much easier just to settle in for a little TV.
Those of you who are married with kids: When was the last time you ran into a friend or "dropped by" a friend's house without planning it? When was the last time you had a spontaneous encounter with anyone who was not a clerk or a barista, someone serving you?
Where would it happen? What public spaces are there in which you mix and mingle freely with people on a regular basis? The mall? Walmart? How about noncommercial spaces? Can you think of one?
Living with people
Say you're a family with children and you don't regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America.
One is living in a real place, with shared public spaces, around which one can move relatively safely. It seems like a simple thing, but such places are rare even in the cities where they exist. (I live in North Seattle, undoubtedly coded as urban for census purposes, but my walkshed is pretty lame. Meanwhile, a few miles south of me they're building million-dollar single-family homes square in the middle of a perfect walkshed, right across from the zoo.)
A robust walkshed is an area in which a community of people regularly mingles doing errands, walking their dogs, playing in the parks, going to school and work, etc. Ideally, cities would be composed of clusters of such walksheds, connected by good public transit.
But we don't live in such a world. Walkable communities are very difficult to find in the US, and because there is such paucity of supply relative to demand, they are expensive, accessible only to the high-income. Places where they exist, like San Francisco, tend to have absurd zoning restrictions that prevent growing them. (Our own Matt Yglesias has much to say on these issues.)
The second, even more rare, is some form of co-housing. There are many kinds of co-housing, too many to get into in this post, but my favorite, a common model in Germany, is baugruppen, or building groups. I wrote an enthusiastic post about baugruppen here:
The basic idea is that a group of people comes together to work directly with architects and designers, bypassing developers, to build a shared dwelling that they own collectively (a co-op, basically). Taking developers out of the picture saves money — 25 to 30 percent in Berlin, where baugruppen are common — and opens up space for much more ambitious, innovative, and sustainable architecture. It also fosters cooperation and community among members of the collective.
In practice, baugruppen are basically like condos, but with much more robust shared spaces and collective ownership rather than developer ownership. (If you want to know much more about them, passivhaus designer Mike Eliason has a seven-part series I highly recommend. He summarizes it as "private owners collaboratively building affordable multifamily projects.")
The idea behind baugruppen, and co-housing generally, is that it's nice to live in an extended community, to have people to rely on beyond family. It's nice to have bustling shared spaces where you can run into people you know without planning it beforehand. It's nice to have friends for your kids, places where they can play safely, and other adults who can share kid-tending duties.
Refusing to accept the status quo of default isolation
Both these alternatives — walkable communities and co-housing — likely sound exotic to American ears. Thanks to shifting baselines, most Americans only know single-family dwellings and auto-dependent land use. They cannot even articulate what they are missing and often misidentify the solution as more or different private consumption.
But I do not think we should just accept that when we marry and start families, we atomize, and our friendships, like our taste in music, freeze where they were in college. We shouldn't just accept a way of living that makes interactions with neighbors and friends a burden that requires special planning.
We should recognize that by shrinking our network of strong social ties to our immediate families, we lose something important to our health and social identities, with the predictable result that we are ridden with anxiety and loneliness. We are meant to have tribes, to be among people who know us and care about us.
To some extent, economic and employment trends have made us rootless. We move around much more and remain in jobs for less time (or work in the "gig economy"). We don't stay in one place the way our parents and grandparents did. Those trends, which have brought good along with bad, are likely irreversible.
But we can do something about the places where we live. We can make them more conducive to community and spontaneous social mixing. We know how to do it — it's just a matter of agreeing that we need it and changing policy accordingly.
In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children—all these come first.
This is true in life, and in science, where relationship research tends to focus on couples and families. When Emily Langan, an associate professor of communication at Wheaton College goes to conferences for the International Association of Relationship Researchers, she says, “friendship is the smallest cluster there. Sometimes it’s a panel, if that.”
Friendships are unique relationships because unlike family relationships, we choose to enter into them. And unlike other voluntary bonds, like marriages and romantic relationships, they lack a formal structure. You wouldn’t go months without speaking to or seeing your significant other (hopefully), but you might go that long without contacting a friend.
Still, survey upon survey upon survey shows how important people’s friends are to their happiness. And though friendships tend to change as people age, there is some consistency in what people want from them.
“I’ve listened to someone as young as 14 and someone as old as 100 talk about their close friends, and [there are] three expectations of a close friend that I hear people describing and valuing across the entire life course,” says William Rawlins, the Stocker Professor of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio University. “Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy. These expectations remain the same, but the circumstances under which they’re accomplished change.”
The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life’s whims in a way more formal relationships aren’t. In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit. You’re stuck with your family, and you’ll prioritize your spouse. But where once you could run over to Jonny’s house at a moment’s notice and see if he could come out to play, now you have to ask Jonny if he has a couple hours to get a drink in two weeks.
The beautiful, special thing about friendship, that friends are friends because they want to be, that they choose each other, is “a double agent,” Langan says, “because I can choose to get in, and I can choose to get out.”
Throughout life, from grade school to the retirement home, friendship continues to confer health benefits, both mental and physical. But as life accelerates, people’s priorities and responsibilities shift, and friendships are affected, for better, or often, sadly, for worse.
* * *
The saga of adult friendship starts off well enough. “I think young adulthood is the golden age for forming friendships,” Rawlins says. “Especially for people who have the privilege and the blessing of being able to go to college.”
During young adulthood, friendships become more complex and meaningful. In childhood, friends are mostly other kids who are fun to play with; in adolescence, there’s a lot more self-disclosure and support between friends, but adolescents are still discovering their identity, and learning what it means to be intimate. Their friendships help them do that.
But, “in adolescence, people have a really tractable self,” Rawlins says. “They’ll change.” How many band t-shirts from Hot Topic end up sadly crumpled at the bottom of dresser drawers because the owners’ friends said the band was lame? The world may never know. By young adulthood, people are usually a little more secure in themselves, more likely to seek out friends who share their values on the important things, and let the little things be.
To go along with their newly sophisticated approach to friendship, young adults also have time to devote to their friends. According to the Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, young adults often spend between 10 and 25 hours a week with friends, and the 2014 American Time Use Survey found that people between 20 and 24 years old spent the most time per day socializing on average of any age group.
College is an environment that facilitates this, with keggers and close quarters, but even young adults who don’t go to college are less likely to have some of the responsibilities that can take away from time with friends, like marriage, or caring for children or older parents.
Friendship networks are naturally denser, too, in youth, when most of the people you meet go to your school or live in your town. As people move for school, work, and family, networks spread out. Moving out of town for college gives some people their first taste of this distancing. In a longitudinal study that followed pairs of best friends over 19 years, a team led by Andrew Ledbetter, an associate professor of communication studies at Texas Christian University, found that participants had moved an average of 5.8 times during that period.
“I think that’s just kind of a part of life in the very mobile and high-level transportation- and communication-technology society that we have,” Ledbetter says. “We don’t think about how that’s damaging the social fabric of our lives.”
We aren’t obligated to our friends the way we are to our romantic partners, our jobs, and our families. We’ll be sad to go, but go we will. This is one of the inherent tensions of friendships, which Rawlins calls “the freedom to be independent and the freedom to be dependent.”
“Where are you situated?” Rawlins asks me, in the course of explaining this tension. Washington, D.C., I tell him.
“Where’d you go to college?”
“Chicago.”
“Okay, so you’re in Chicago, and you have close friends there. You say ‘Ah, I’ve got this great opportunity in Washington…’ and [your friend] goes ‘Julie, you gotta take that!’ [She’s] essentially saying ‘You’re free to go. Go there, do that, but if you need me I’ll be here for you.’”
I wish he wouldn’t use me as an example. It makes me sad.
* * *
As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it’s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid’s play or an important business trip. The ideal of people’s expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their lives, Rawlins says.
“The real bittersweet aspect is young adulthood begins with all this time for friendship, and friendship just having this exuberant, profound importance for figuring out who you are and what’s next,” Rawlins says. “And you find at the end of young adulthood, now you don’t have time for the very people who helped you make all these decisions.”
The time is poured, largely, into jobs and families. Not everyone gets married or has kids, of course, but even those who stay single are likely to see their friendships affected by others’ couplings. “The largest drop-off in friends in the life course occurs when people get married,” Rawlins says. “And that’s kind of ironic, because at the [wedding], people invite both of their sets of friends, so it’s kind of this last wonderful and dramatic gathering of both people’s friends, but then it drops off.”
In a set of interviews he did in 1994 with middle-aged Americans about their friendships, Rawlins wrote that, “an almost tangible irony permeated these adults discussions of close or ‘real’ friendship.” They defined friendship as “being there” for each other, but reported that they rarely had time to spend with their most valued friends, whether because of circumstances, or through the age-old problem of good intentions and bad follow-through: “Friends who lived within striking distance of each other found that… scheduling opportunities to spend or share some time together was essential,” Rawlins writes. “Several mentioned, however, that these occasions often were talked about more than they were accomplished.”
As they move through life, people make and keep friends in different ways. Some are independent, they make friends wherever they go, and may have more friendly acquaintances than deep friendships. Others are discerning, meaning they have a few best friends they stay close with over the years, but the deep investment means that the loss of one of those friends would be devastating. The most flexible are the acquisitive—people who stay in touch with old friends, but continue to make new ones as they move through the world.
Rawlins says that any new friends people might make in middle age are likely to be grafted onto other kinds of relationships—as with co-workers, or parents of their children’s friends—because it’s easier for time-strapped adults to make friends when they already have an excuse to spend time together. As a result, the “making friends” skill can atrophy. “[In a study we did,] we asked people to tell us the story of the last person they became friends with, how they transitioned from acquaintance to friend,” Langan says. “It was interesting that people kind of struggled.”
* * *
But if you plot busyness across the life course, it makes a parabola. The tasks that take up our time taper down in old age. Once people retire and their kids have grown up, there seems to be more time for the shared living kind of friendship again. People tend to reconnect with old friends they’ve lost touch with. And it seems more urgent to spend time with them—according to socioemotional selectivity theory, toward the end of life, people begin prioritizing experiences that will make them happiest in the moment, including spending time with close friends and family.
And some people do manage to stay friends for life, or at least for a sizable chunk of life. But what predicts who will last through the maelstrom of middle age and be there for the silver age of friendship?
Whether people hold onto their old friends or grow apart seems to come down to dedication and communication. In Ledbetter’s longitudinal study of best friends, the number of months that friends reported being close in 1983 predicted whether they were still close in 2002, suggesting that the more you’ve invested in a friendship already, the more likely you are to keep it going. Other research has found that people need to feel like they are getting as much out of the friendship as they are putting in, and that that equity can predict a friendship’s continued success.
Hanging out with a set of lifelong best friends can be annoying, because the years of inside jokes and references often make their communication unintelligible to outsiders. But this sort of shared language is part of what makes friendships last. In the longitudinal study, the researchers were also able to predict friends’ future closeness by how well they performed on a word-guessing game in 1983. (The game was similar to Taboo, in that one partner gave clues about a word without actually saying it, while the other guessed.)
“Such communication skill and mutual understanding may help friends successfully transition through life changes that threaten friendship stability,” the study reads. Friends don’t necessarily need to communicate often, or intricately, just similarly.
Of course, there are more ways than ever that people can communicate with friends, and media multiplexity theory suggests that the more platforms on which friends communicate—texting and emailing, sending each other funny Snapchats and links on Facebook, and seeing each other in person—the stronger their friendship is. “If we only have the Facebook tie, that’s probably a friendship that’s in greater jeopardy of not surviving into the future,” Ledbetter says.
Though you would think we would all know better by now than to draw a hard line between online relationships and “real” relationships, Langan says her students still use “real” to mean “in-person.”
There are four main levels of maintaining a relationship, and digital communication works better for some than for others. The first is just keeping a relationship alive at all, just to keep it in existence. Saying “Happy Birthday” on Facebook, faving a friend’s tweet—these are the life support machines of friendship. They keep it breathing, but mechanically.
Next is to keep a relationship at a stable level of closeness. “I think you can do that online too,” Langan says. “Because the platforms are broad enough in terms of being able to write a message, being able to send some support comments if necessary.” It’s sometimes possible to repair a relationship online, too, (another maintenance level) depending on how badly it was broken—getting back in touch with someone, or sending a heartfelt apology email.
“But then when you get to the next level, which is: Can I make it a satisfying relationship? That’s I think where the line starts to break down,” Langan says. “Because what happens often is people think of satisfying relationships as being more than an online presence.”
Social media makes it possible to maintain more friendships, but more shallowly. And it can also keep relationships on life support that would (and maybe should) otherwise have died out.
“The fact that Tommy, who I knew when I was five, is still on my Facebook feed is bizarre to me,” Langan says. “I don’t have any connection to Tommy’s current life, and going back 25 years ago, I wouldn’t. Tommy would be a memory to me. Like, I seriously have not seen Tommy in 35 years. Why would I care that Tommy’s son just got accepted to Notre Dame? Yay for him! He’s relatively a stranger to me. But in the current era of mediated relationships, those relationships never have to time out.”
By middle-age, people have likely accumulated many friends from different jobs, different cities, and different activities, who don’t know each other at all. These friendships fall into three categories: active, dormant, and commemorative. Friendships are active if you are in touch regularly, you could call on them for emotional support and it wouldn’t be weird, if you pretty much know what’s going on with their lives at this moment. A dormant friendship has history, maybe you haven’t talked in a while, but you still think of that person as a friend. You’d be happy to hear from them and if you were in their city, you’d definitely meet up.
A commemorative friend is not someone you expect to hear from, or see, maybe ever again. But they were important to you at an earlier time in your life, and you think of them fondly for that reason, and still consider them a friend.
Facebook makes things weird by keeping these friends continually in your peripheral vision. It violates what I’ll call the camp-friend rule of commemorative friendships: No matter how close you were with your best friend from summer camp, it is always awkward to try to stay in touch when school starts again. Because your camp self is not your school self, and it dilutes the magic of the memory a little to try to attempt a pale imitation at what you had.
The same goes for friends you only see online. If you never see your friends in person, you’re not really sharing experiences so much as just keeping each other updated on your separate lives. It becomes a relationship based on storytelling rather than shared living—not bad, just not the same.
“This is one thing I really want to tell you,” Rawlins says. “Friendships are always susceptible to circumstances. If you think of all the things we have to do—we have to work, we have to take care of our kids, or our parents—friends choose to do things for each other, so we can put them off. They fall through the cracks.”
After young adulthood, he says, the reasons that friends stop being friends are usually circumstantial—due to things outside the relationship itself. One of the findings from Langan’s “friendship rules” study was that “adults feel the need to be more polite in their friendships,” she says. “We don't feel like, in adulthood, we can demand very much of our friends. It's unfair, they've got other stuff going on. So we stop expecting as much, which to me is kind of a sad thing, that we walk away from that.” For the sake of being polite.
But the things that make friendship fragile also make it flexible. Rawlins’ interviewees tended to think of their friendships as continuous, even if they went through long periods where they were out of touch. This is a fairly sunny view—you wouldn’t assume you were still on good terms with your parents if you hadn’t heard from them in months. But the default assumption with friends is that you’re still friends.
“That is how friendships continue, because people are living up to each other’s expectations. And if we have relaxed expectations for each other, or we’ve even suspended expectations, there’s a sense in which we realize that,” Rawlins says. “A summer when you’re 10, three months is one-thirtieth of your life. When you’re 30, what is it? It feels like the blink of an eye.”
Perhaps friends are more willing to forgive long lapses in communication because they’re feeling life’s velocity acutely too. It’s sad, sure, that we stop relying on our friends as much when we grow up, but it allows for a different kind of relationship, based on a mutual understanding of each other’s human limitations. It’s not ideal, but it’s real, as Rawlins might say. Friendship is a relationship with no strings attached except the ones you choose to tie, one that’s just about being there, as best as you can.
Post by tacosforlife on Nov 4, 2015 6:46:09 GMT -5
As a city dweller, I've found this is so true with my friends who move to the suburbs. Our relationships have zero spontaneity. Those of us who live in the city see each other often.
H has joked in the past about wanting to buy a giant house to share with our friends. He's referred to it as a compound, but I'll have to tell him that he just wants baugruppen.
Even though we only live 10 miles max from each other, it still takes a long while (50 minutes if I'm going to hers) to visit with my closest friend in London as she's south of the river and I'm north. But not having kids makes it a lot easier to actually make last minute plans.
I don't work with other people so I really need to make an effort to do things in order to make and keep friends. Field hockey has definitely helped with that.
I went from a walkable city and having a good social life, to a small city without sidewalks or other pedestrian infrastructure and having a crap social life, to living in a super walkable city and having an amazing social life. I don't think any of these are coincidences. I run into people all the time and its great! It's also something I'm not willing to give up again. My two requirements for any future places to live are that it has to be walkable and it has to have an international airport. Sadly the first one rules out 99.9% of the US.
Fascinating! And I totally agree. I haven't made any new friends for years up until recently. What changed? I had a baby and started going to go breastfeeding support groups. After seeing the same moms several times, we've started to become friends. But it takes more than one interaction to get past the stranger phase to the lets get together phase.
As a city dweller, I've found this is so true with my friends who move to the suburbs. Our relationships have zero spontaneity. Those of us who live in the city see each other often.
H has joked in the past about wanting to buy a giant house to share with our friends. He's referred to it as a compound, but I'll have to tell him that he just wants baugruppen.
We have talked about a 'commune' with our closest friends...buy a big property and have separate houses but be able to live 'in community' with each other more easily (meals, hanging out, etc)...it was something we joked about when one of us was in serious crisis but honestly, if we had the money, we would do it.
Hmm, I get what she's saying but I think it depends on the type of neighborhood you live in. We live in a suburb and recently, in the past 5 years or so, it has turned over from old couples who rarely go outside to a lot of young families. About a block away from our house, there is a triangle of grass where all the kids meet up to play. Parents stand around watching and gabbing. We have neighborhood block parties in the summer. All of the houses on either side of the triangle go all out for Halloween every year with crazy decorations and treats for the parents who stop by. My next door neighbor hosts an art exhibit/party for the kids every year. You see kids riding their bikes everywhere. As a result of all of this, the neighborhood in general kind of has an old fashioned, 1950s vibe to it, like something you'd see on a show like Mad Men. I wouldn't say we are "besties" with any of our neighbors but we get along and socialize.
The thing is, like the article mentions, you have to put effort into making this happen. The people who live in our neighborhood evidently care about building some sense of community (I'll admit - more than us, I am kind of a homebody and a free rider who benefits, lol). Not everybody does though and that is ok too.
As a city dweller, I've found this is so true with my friends who move to the suburbs. Our relationships have zero spontaneity. Those of us who live in the city see each other often.
H has joked in the past about wanting to buy a giant house to share with our friends. He's referred to it as a compound, but I'll have to tell him that he just wants baugruppen.
This is the case with our friends too, and it is one of the big reasons that I would not want to move to the suburbs.
A few friends and I have a joke that when we all win Megamillions we're going to move into a mews together.
We recently went to a birthday party for a friend who moved out to Vienna--like 18 miles out of DC. It was on a Sunday and we were in the car for more than 2 hours round trip. On the way back, H and I were pretty much like well we probably aren't going to be friends with those guys much anymore. It basically absorbed our entire day.
Life is busy and we travel a lot. Sometimes I feel like I struggle to maintain friendships with my good friends in DC and the very close in suburbs--it's pretty much impossible to keep up with people who move further away.
This is how we have fallen out of touch with DHs friends from college. It's essentially at least a 2 hour drive to see them and now, with kids, spending the night is a PITA. So we just don't see them.
As a city dweller, I've found this is so true with my friends who move to the suburbs. Our relationships have zero spontaneity. Those of us who live in the city see each other often.
H has joked in the past about wanting to buy a giant house to share with our friends. He's referred to it as a compound, but I'll have to tell him that he just wants baugruppen.
We have talked about a 'commune' with our closest friends...buy a big property and have separate houses but be able to live 'in community' with each other more easily (meals, hanging out, etc)...it was something we joked about when one of us was in serious crisis but honestly, if we had the money, we would do it.
Funny, we joked about buying a duplex with our best friends. But they ended up buying a house 45 mins from us. I love them and we try to get together, but it is hard. They have 3 older kids. Now that we have a kid too, I really wish we lived next door to them. This article is making me sad.
Almost all all of my good friends moved far away. even though we all still live in the same general area, many are over a 30 min drive away which makes it so many ch harder to get together. It was so much easier when we were all in college together.
We have talked about a 'commune' with our closest friends...buy a big property and have separate houses but be able to live 'in community' with each other more easily (meals, hanging out, etc)...it was something we joked about when one of us was in serious crisis but honestly, if we had the money, we would do it.
Funny, we joked about buying a duplex with our best friends. But they ended up buying a house 45 mins from us. I love them and we try to get together, but it is hard. They have 3 older kids. Now that we have a kid too, I really wish we lived next door to them. This article is making me sad.
My BFF went from living about 40 minutes away to closer to 90. . I almost never see her. Now, due to some shitty life circumstances on her end, she will be moving back towards me and I am so happy.
We recently went to a birthday party for a friend who moved out to Vienna--like 18 miles out of DC. It was on a Sunday and we were in the car for more than 2 hours round trip. On the way back, H and I were pretty much like well we probably aren't going to be friends with those guys much anymore. It basically absorbed our entire day.
Life is busy and we travel a lot. Sometimes I feel like I struggle to maintain friendships with my good friends in DC and the very close in suburbs--it's pretty much impossible to keep up with people who move further away.
OMG. I have a friend who recently moved to Falls Church. She claims she's a 15-minute drive from DC. NO. She's delusional. Google says it's a 17-minute drive from her house to L'Enfant Plaza without traffic. So that is actually 30 minutes minimum to anywhere you'd actually want to go. It would probably take 45 minutes to get there from my old house.
We're friendly with a couple of our neighbors but we're not friends who do things together. Our friends are people who I've met through a moms group when I became a SAHM. There is a core group of about seven of us. My best friend lives in Idaho but the phone and Facebook make it easy to keep in touch. I'm making new friends through a local group based on my hobby. My sister is my other BFF and she lives 10 minutes from us. DH and her husband get along very well and do things socially together.
My point is that making friends as an adult is more intentional than when you were young and circumstances like school and work and even your neighbors influenced who you're friends with. As an adult, I choose to make friends based on common interests by getting involved in things like moms groups, book clubs, bunco games, guilds, etc.
As a city dweller, I've found this is so true with my friends who move to the suburbs. Our relationships have zero spontaneity. Those of us who live in the city see each other often.
H has joked in the past about wanting to buy a giant house to share with our friends. He's referred to it as a compound, but I'll have to tell him that he just wants baugruppen.
This is the case with our friends too, and it is one of the big reasons that I would not want to move to the suburbs.
A few friends and I have a joke that when we all win Megamillions we're going to move into a mews together.
This conversation prompted H to look at houses even though we are not close to ready to buy. We actually found one in the suburbs that I could handle. But it's in a first ring suburb and right near the middle of town. So it's walking distance to lots of things, including our family physician, and is on a major bus line to downtown. There are a few suburban areas that are sufficiently walkable for me, but only a few. I have a feeling we will move into a 3-bedroom rental for a while after we have kids because I will be so picky about location that it will take us a while to find an acceptable house to buy.
I recently read a book about aging and mortality, and a huge theme is the ability to remain independent. I have a senior friend (maybe 70?) who has a personal requirement for all her doctors that they be on the bus line that goes by her house (which is in a fairly walkable neighborhood) because she doesn't want to be reliant on her children should the day come that she has to give up her keys. I'm impressed with how forward thinking and pragmatic she is about aging.
Fascinating! And I totally agree. I haven't made any new friends for years up until recently. What changed? I had a baby and started going to go breastfeeding support groups. After seeing the same moms several times, we've started to become friends. But it takes more than one interaction to get past the stranger phase to the lets get together phase.
My first baby was a huge boost to my friends circle. I've lost track of most of my college friends - most of them left town after graduation, or we didn't have much in common other than class. The baby got me going to a few group activities where I saw the same people almost every week and I found the ones I could enjoy. Now he's 4.5 and those friendships have matured. I don't know how I'll ever make new friends, though. Baby #2 did not have the same effect. I guess I wait for him to make school friends and start hanging out with their moms.
I really miss hanging out with friends and doing "nothing." Now it seems like whenever we get together with friends it's always for a very specific reason, like a birthday party, or to go out and DO something like go out to eat, go to a museum or zoo, etc. It gets expensive and I say no a lot because we have a really limited budget these days. I really want to just go over someone's house and hang out to watch a football game. But I can't invite myself over to do that, and we live in a small apartment with 2 kids so entertaining at our home is pretty much impossible.
Growing up I remember my parents having people over for a cookout or just a night in, but it seems like no one does that anymore. It's always about scheduling and doing $$$ things. I feel like all my friendships now are superficial, we only talk or hang out for an event or other planned activity. It makes me sad.
The sad truth of my life This is why the people I call my close friends are ones that don't need constant/regular contact for the friendship to be there--with all of them, we've gone a couple years with nothing more than e-mail contact at times.
We're actually hoping that moving into a small, new community will give us the opportunity to make new friendships and create a sense of community. And we're looking forward to some of friends' kids hitting late teens/college in the next few years.
I live in a town that's omd but really developed in the 40s and 50s, when a train line to the city came down here allowing it to become a bedroom community. I definitely see the difference between the planning and layout here compared to my SILs new development. Everything here was designed to be walkable because not all families had one car, let alone two, when things were designed. Our middle school was built as the only school in the 30s to replace the previous one room schoolhouse and was placed dead center so everyone in town can walk there (the town is only 2.5 square miles).
It really has made it easier to build a community. Few kids get bused to the elementary school (which is on the outskirts of town), so we meet other parents standing around at pick up. It really does have that organic way to build a friendship when you smile and say hi every afternoon. My kids play outside until dark with the neighbor kids. Within sight of my house there are 4 first graders, three third graders and five or six toddlers. The kids are all out playing until dusk together. Even my two year old can now be outside without me (with the girls present) for a few minutes at a time.
All that said, as the article discusses, it's also a very expensive community to get into. I don't fool myself into thinking that this opportunity is open to everyone in America. It's very clearly not.
But ironically- when we lived in the city and had DS, I TRIED to meet people. I joined a moms group. I got out a few times to meet up w/ people - both during pregnancy and after.
OMG - what a total fail. I found most of the women to not be very inviting, TBH. It was weird. I just never gelled w/ them.
But then we moved to the 'burbs and, really, by total luck, moved into a great neighborhood w/ lots of families w/ kids DSs age. DH and I have made a lot of friends and it's a pretty social neighborhood. I enjoy it SO MUCH more than our kid time in the city.
Which is why I agree w/ what @246baje said - it's about attitude too. I remember the first two book clubs that I went to - it's like we all found each other. We were a group of women who are moms but who also like to socialize, who want to make friends, etc. It's a very inclusive group and we all love it and enjoy it.
Kids have made it easier for us to connect in our neighborhood. DD starting kindergarten was a huge factor in us getting to know other families, and now we run into people we know just about everywhere, whether it's Costco or a walk in the neighborhood. Like a pp mentioned, if any of us are in a pinch we know we can reach out and someone would be able to walk a kid to school, get a ride to a birthday party, etc. And it's starting to lead to adult friendships as well.
Walkability is so important to me. My current neighborhood is so close knit because we all walk to school (no busses and the school is nested in the neighborhood), we have a gym, pools (open all year), parks, retail shops, yoga, a salon, and more all easily walkable and as part of a mixed use planned neighborhood. We have bike trails that extend deeper into the community. And this is in the Los Angeles area which is notorious for being so car dependent.
I've also lived in a military base and my husband and I called it "college in our 30s" because of how social and close knit people were. And fast! We were only there a year (husband had to attend war college) but we made so many lifelong friends. Our housing was organized into courtyards and it was impossible to go outside without running into someone. I could walk to church, the doctor, and all of my kids extracurricular activities. It was totally Mayberry.
We are transient due to the navy but when we find ourselves finally looking for our forever home, walk ability will be key. My favorite place on earth is downtown Annapolis, MD and I'd love to buy a row house and walk everywhere.
Having lived in apartment in the city, a condo in the city and a house in the country/suburbs, the most interaction I've had with my neighbors is in the country/suburbs. I never saw any of my neighbors in either the apartment or condo. We see our neighbors all the time, stopping to chat over the fence, etc.. We routinely pop over with toys for the kids or dogs or "I baked 8 million loaves of zucchini bread. Please take one."
I don't see some of my friends from college on the regular because we live in different states. But we talk/text/email regularly and make a concerted effort to get together. These women are my tribe - they're the people I call for problems with the kids or job or whatever.
We see other friends who are local on the regular with little effort.
BUT. I only have a small group of close friends. I don't have the 8 million friends from college that others seem to have developed. So it takes less effort to maintain those relationships than it would to maintain a wider circle of friends.
Post by StrawberryBlondie on Nov 4, 2015 10:05:41 GMT -5
My very best friend lives in the northwestern suburbs and I live in the southeastern suburbs. I don't blame either of us for living where we do - we live where we work. That said, getting together is so extremely difficult. It takes about 45 min to get to her house on a good day. She had her kid's birthday party even further out and it took for.ever. I almost didn't go because even staying at the party for an hour took over 3 hours out of my day.
I've also lived in a military base and my husband and I called it "college in our 30s" because of how social and close knit people were. And fast! We were only there a year (husband had to attend war college) but we made so many lifelong friends. Our housing was organized into courtyards and it was impossible to go outside without running into someone. I could walk to church, the doctor, and all of my kids extracurricular activities. It was totally Mayberry.
We are transient due to the navy but when we find ourselves finally looking for our forever home, walk ability will be key. My favorite place on earth is downtown Annapolis, MD and I'd love to buy a row house and walk everywhere.
This is another angle. My parents spent their late 20s to early 50s moving countries and homes every two years. Overseas, the community was there and welcoming (and part of my dad's job was entertaining, they had at least one party a month at their house and they were both active in many social activities). When my dad retired, they moved back to their college town with only one couple they called friends living there. They now see those friends about once a year. They have friends all over the world, but really no friends at home. They've had a very hard time establishing new close friendships. And they live in a town considered one of the best to move to in retirement in the US.
My mom does go to a small neighborhood Sat morning coffee/tea and has one work friend she does day trips with (but she still refers to her as "my ex-coworker" vs a "friend"). And they do go to church and have some church friends, but they don't do much outside of church with them. If my parents want to do a "couple" activity with another couple, they ask us--and we live ~1 1/2 away (and usually go, because we don't have much of a social life beyond them either).
BTW: Annapolis is amazing--I have a friend that lives on Admirals Row and I love going there for our yearly/twice-a-year lunch and wandering around after lunch.
Post by penguingrrl on Nov 4, 2015 10:20:52 GMT -5
Oh, I will add that living in NYC was the loneliest experience for me. I never saw the same people twice at our closest playground and anything indoors was too expensive for us to do. I joined a meetup group and the group was so huge that I never saw the same people twice through that either.
We recently went to a birthday party for a friend who moved out to Vienna--like 18 miles out of DC. It was on a Sunday and we were in the car for more than 2 hours round trip. On the way back, H and I were pretty much like well we probably aren't going to be friends with those guys much anymore. It basically absorbed our entire day.
Life is busy and we travel a lot. Sometimes I feel like I struggle to maintain friendships with my good friends in DC and the very close in suburbs--it's pretty much impossible to keep up with people who move further away.
OMG. I have a friend who recently moved to Falls Church. She claims she's a 15-minute drive from DC. NO. She's delusional. Google says it's a 17-minute drive from her house to L'Enfant Plaza without traffic. So that is actually 30 minutes minimum to anywhere you'd actually want to go. It would probably take 45 minutes to get there from my old house.
I used to live in Falls Church and it just stunned me how the trip into DC could take 15 minutes or it could take 90 minutes. I lived five minutes away from one of my co-workers, and remember that big snowstorm that happened in the afternoon a few years ago and it wreaked havoc on the roads? I saw the weather forecast and said, eh you know, I'm going to leave now. I left at 3:00 and it was raining when I left. Fifteen minutes later, it was snowing as I pulled into my driveway. She left at 5:00 pm and didn't get home until 1 am.
I live in the suburbs of Houston. I have good friends an hour away from our house in all directions who all say they live in Houston.
We don't attend the 2 hr kid birthday parties that our American friends have. But we go to kid birthday parties for our Caribbean friends because they start at 1 and you stay for 8 hrs, everyone bathes their kids there, puts them into pjs and then we head home.
An hour drive is worth it to hang out for a whole day. Not so much if you are driving for as long as the event is.
YES. I have a friend who lives close to 1:30 away from us. She used to invite us to both her kids b-day parties. The one time we were actually able to go- it was 3 hours round trip for a 2 hour party.
Me being me, if I asked a friend from that distance to come, I'd probably say "hey, afterwards, come back to our house!". spend some chill down time together and make it more worth their while.
She didn't do this. And really, it's fine. They may have had too much going on. I DO respect that. But - the outcome of that is that we aren't going to go to anymore of her kids' parties. It's just too long of a drive for a short time frame. Give me another 2 or 3 hours to do SOMETHING together - I'm up for it. But for just those 2 hours at a crazy bounce house where everyone's head seems to be on a swivel. It's just too much.
Post by cattledogkisses on Nov 4, 2015 10:29:04 GMT -5
I find the sense of community is much more developed in small towns, actually. You see everyone frequently and so everyone knows each other, and relationships develop out of that.