Yeah, it’s atrociously hard building solid friendships as an adult with kids and a day job. At least when I compare it to my memory of school and university. In the latter scenario we had heaps of time just to hang out and chill together and we got to know one another over the journey of growing up and puberty and education and so on. In the former scenario time is a commodity for everyone, no-one has time to burn any more and the salient question is never “do you have time for …?” but “will you make time for …?”. We have to make time for one another.
Men in particular are atrocious at forgetting to do that and it’s not uncommon for them to experience that most of their close friends are in fact their wife’s friends.
Even with effort it’s hard because relationships are two sided (at least, multisided in small groups). Nowhere is that more salient than in one of my focal leisure activities, tabletop (board/card/other) gaming. Something I’ve done my life long and continue doing as an adult because I work in IT and don’t need to spend more time on screens but more time in the company of people. And game play is one of the many options on the table for making that happen. And yet, while there are two player games the best games kick in at 4 players. Those I manage to get in once a month at least with friends. But I have some great games that need 6 or 7 players but moreover get more fun and sweeter with every play for a good while, the joy of the play is knowing the ins and outs and knowing each other and so on. In 20 years now I’ve not managed to find or create a group of 7 regulars who’d commit say to playing a handful of these in rotation once a month for a year or two.
That said, at times I’ve come close, but never quite there, able to count up a few who might but never enough to actually bother tabling the idea yet.
But there’s a general paucity of commitment in this face of life, and so that’s something I raise at a Men’s table I attend routinely, and try to spruik in the games group I run and for walks I participate in or organise etc etc. We’re about to do an annual Murder Mystery dinner party for example which has been a routine for most of the last 20 years (is actually my birthday present as I don’t want more “stuff” and when asked once a long time ago now, what I wanted by my wife, I mentioned this, a three course meal with good friends over a murder mystery scenario, so it’s been a thing since). Every year though we put our heads together to think who we could/should invite and it’s quite challenging at times. We need three couples and they have to be the intersection of several sets namely: people we want to see, people who’d enjoy a role play 3 course dinner, people who are available on the date, people who will commit and show up (as it falls tad flat if there’s a no show given roles are all assigned). That four sets and the intersection on lucky years produces fills the six extra roles in a jiffy, and on other years has been a bit of brain-storm session between us.
It’s that last set, the people we know who will commit and show up, and we trust not make some last minute excuse or worse just apologise (we’ve had that once or twice and it riles us both – I mean we’re putting on a 3 course lavish meal in a decorated house for you, if you can’t make it that’s fine, but at least bother to give us a good reason – I mean you don’t have to be honest, we don’t care, the simple act of furnishing one, real or not, communicates to us how much you do regret not coming in a sense, where a simples sorry, says nothing, leaves us in the lurch, one day, on the day calling single friends we knew to see if they wanted to join is that night – finding a ring in – failure to even try to and explain is just too easy, and says to us that’s what your invite is worth to me – needless to says such fold aren’t reinvited in subsequent years, create the hole they stand in so to speak, which I don’t say out some sense of highbrow superiority, far from it, I think it’s a match made in heaven, we see each other as much as it matters to each of us …). Which is why the observation remains that a paucity of commitment is definitely underpinning the difficulty of maintaining adult friendships.
To balance that and why I think of it in part is a lovely friend of ours who makes every effort to be there for our annual midwinter feast (another annual tradition in which we invited friends and notably the families of our kids friends to join us for a pot luck feast – everyone brings a dish and we share them via a buffet in our bay window), said something very memorable to us one year. We praised her one year for being stalwart regular and someone we always loved to see at the feast. She retorted that her mother taught her to accept invitations and honour them whenever you can, failing which they stop coming in …
To wit the paucity of commitment sees a paucity of effort and invitation. Reminds me of this guy I remember who wrote a book It think about the year he decided to accept every invitation extended to him (excepting clashing ones perforce), to make no excuses to accept them and bring enthusiasm to them. I remember him reporting how profoundly it changed his life for the better and how many doors of opportunity it opened for him.
And the price is? That we’re slowly recognising that loneliness is a real and widespread killer. We’ve all known or heard of that person who died not long after their spouse did and of the man who died not long after retirement, now we have a contributory reason or explanation. And we know that people who remain socially engaged and active outlive their self-described introvert fellows by measurable amounts ;-).
