This is a rant about friendship. I don’t have answers. I’m just screaming into the void.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people about how hard it is to make friends and how hard it is to maintain friendships. Especially as we get more adult-y and our lives change to be more solo or coupled. It takes effort, and it’s easy to get lost in etiquette and social anxiety and inertia.
Most of us weren’t actively taught how to make friends or be friends or even how to have those qualities inside of our romantic or familial relationships. All relationships are complex and many include elements of friendship. Most of us stumble through these relationships and pick up skills as we go along. Often by accident.
Ending a friendship can be as heartbreaking as ending a romantic relationship. We often have had to navigate this grieving process alone because socially we don’t have space or words to acknowledge this type of loss.
Social emphasis is on romantic or family relationships, and friendships are ranked as secondary to those. We identify ourselves and our place in the world first by our family and partnership connections, and less often by our community circles. And again, this deemphasizes the need for elements of friendship in almost all of our relationships.
The pandemic challenged the dominance of inherited family in favor of a chosen friend family when we created our covid bubbles. Even then, we held these little friend family communities secret as if people shouldn’t know who we chose to spend this anxious and intimate time with.
In this post-covid world, there seems to be a deep sense of solitude and loneliness. A conflict between the comfort and learned safety of being alone, contrasted against the “life is short, do all the things” panic realization. We are all struggling with this and we need to talk about it.
I don’t have answers to any of this because I don’t think this is a new problem. But if you have the bandwidth or resources to be an agent of change within your social circle, now is the time.