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Prairie Librarian's avatar

Oh man, I struggled with friendships all through my teen years and 20s! I would have said I had fewer than 3 close friends at any point during those decades. I couldn't say why that was -- some combination of being socially awkward, a late bloomer, whatever -- but high school, undergrad, and graduate school were not halcyon days of friendship for me, heh.

I had a brief "golden age" of friendships in my early thirties, newly out of grad school and into a professional job, in a happy relationship. I organized a number of well-attended weekly and monthly and seasonal gatherings with friends, and it all felt so wonderful... until almost all of those friends started having kids and stopped prioritizing these gatherings, and I entered the long, dark years of infertility. But what emerged from that was a concerted attempt at cultivating friendship with people who could meet me where I was AND who became my role models for how I want to live with the cards I've been dealt. A few of my parent friends became that, but so did many, many new friends -- most of them older, and/or queer, and/or out of step with the "usual" life trajectories and expectations in some way.

This resonates so much: "You’re either a person with time and energy for friends and community or you’re not. You’re a person with a somewhat malleable schedule or you’re not. You’re a person who has so many priorities in front of friends or you’re not." To that, I'd add, you're either a person who can be comfortable with the emotional vulnerability and risk of building and maintaining close friendships, or you're not. There have been times in my life when I didn't have that capacity, and times when I did.

Building and maintaining friendships is such a confluence of luck, prioritizing, skill (which I did NOT have in high school or in my 20s, not really), and what I'd call emotional availability, and it's amazing to me that I have as many friends as I do! I have more, and deeper, friendships now in my 40s than I ever have before.

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Antonia Malchik's avatar

Infrastructure is an under-appreciated factor here. danah boyd’s research with teens emphasized how loneliness starts to get built in when friendships are conducted online (when not in school) not out of choice but because kids can’t walk or bike to meet with friends and are dependent on their parents for rides. How much friendship-building and -maintaining skill gets lost in those years simply due to a physically isolating world?

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