And yet, even when a friendship manifests perfectly, those around you will often still have trouble accepting that adult BFF-dom can start in the most unexpected of places. Speaking personally, I once made a very good friend while out in a bar. She happened to be on a date that was going particularly sour, and being that I am a selfless person with a soul and a moral compass that can only be compared to those of Jesus Christ himself, I swooped in and gave her someone to talk to outside of the socially obtuse and rather lecherous man who was foisting himself upon her at every turn. I am fully aware that this puts me firmly in the running for Greatest Cockblock in Human History, but I feel I did the right thing, given the circumstances. In any case, before the night was through, we had talked at length over drinks and exchanged numbers, only to end up becoming very good friends. For us, the process seemed as natural as it was serendipitous. Sure, you don’t go out to bars cruising for friends every day, but when it happens, it’s certainly a nice surprise.
But many of our friends remarked on how strange it was that we met just like that. They expressed a vague fascination with our ability to strike up a friendship with a total stranger with whom we had, at least at first, nothing concrete in common. It seems like the kind of thing that happens in movies, perhaps, where everyone is attractive and charismatic and full of interesting quips about any situation, but not in real life. To us, our friendship was a pleasant bonus on an otherwise average night out. To many around us, it was a vague yet palpable admission of something more sinister. (Most of the more judgmental people are likely assuming that we met on some message board for people who have some horrifying fetish, and, frankly, I’ll let their minds wander.)
Whether we realize it or not, though, almost immediately after finishing our schooling (and the cocoon of forced interaction that goes along with it) we become fairly closed-minded about what a friend group is supposed to consist of. Aside from the idea that there are a finite amount of sources from which to draw your meaningful relationships, there is also a definite caste system that begins forming around you, outside of which you are not really meant to socialize. What kind of job you have, how old you are, what kind of money you’re making, what part of the city you live in—they are all invisible checkmarks down a list that hovers above all our heads, telling us exactly the kind of people we are expected to be hanging out with.
And even if you are the kind of person who doesn’t allow these things to influence your decision making when it comes to potential buddies, that doesn’t mean that everyone else isn’t going to be making these subtle judgments. You only have to stray several standard deviations away from your professional and lifestyle lane to realize how strict everyone else’s social code may be. If you are working a prestigious, high-pressure job, making a good amount of money, chances are you aren’t going to maintain your friendship with the guy who works at the coffee shop and uses his spare money to buy fancy whiskey and new Moleskines for his tone poems. While it can sometimes be based in practical things—such as people who work in food service having nearly opposite hours to those who work office jobs—a huge part of it stems from people putting themselves into small niches of society and believing, on some level, that leaving that niche would constitute a kind of betrayal. We can recognize that it’s stupid and petty, and yet so many of us end up participating in it without even realizing what we’re doing.
Of course, there will always be the good friends from our past with whom we remain in close contact—but that takes just as much effort, if not more so, than meeting new people while out and about in our adult lives. If you’re not willing to put in the time for regular Skype sessions, to make treks to their important events, and/or just to visit them from time to time, or to keep up with what they’re doing in life with genuine interest and care, they are not going to magically stay in your life forever. We all know the friends who, despite being awesome parts of our life at one point, made absolutely zero effort to continue being there for all of life’s changes and events and thus sort of faded into nothingness. If you want to be able to overcome the naturally different directions you’re being pulled in by life choices, geographic location, and social status, you’re going to have to make it work yourself.
As your prospects get narrower and narrower, it seems only natural that you break out of the more confining aspects of social interaction that adulthood brings. Who cares if you and your closest friends vary in age or income? Why aren’t things such as worldview, sense of humor, or personal principles more important factors when it comes to deciding who we want to hang out with this weekend? When we are in school, the people we choose to spend our time with have earned it through being genuinely cool people. As we get older, though—and age into a bracket where we have literally zero limits on the kinds of people we could be meeting if we put a little effort into it—the chances of being foisted into the same boring group that we don’t really like just because they are similar to us on paper are staggeringly high. In fact, there are only a few groups of people you are likely to move around in, if you don’t take matters into your own hands.
Work Friends
These are the people you see day in, day out, and most likely there is nothing wrong with them. Even though you are encouraged, through the relentless machinery of capitalism, to compete against them for your very life, they are probably pretty cool. Depending on how dedicated to your job you are, and/or how many hours you’re putting in, they could end up being your central social group entirely by default. Many times you get sucked into a routine of hanging out almost exclusively with work people simply because you have neither the time nor the energy to set things up with people who aren’t walking out of the building with you at that very moment. As an added bonus, you have nearly endless things in common with them, even if that means that a huge number of your conversations will end up centering around work, which is ostensibly the thing you’re trying to avoid by socializing in the first place. Overall, work friends will likely form a kind of baseline to your daily life. They may not be the people you would pick if you had a choice, but they are decent and readily available. I like to think of them as the Subway sandwich shops of friend circles.
It should be mentioned, though, that there is still a veneer of professionalism that coats all these interactions. While letting loose and having fun is a given in any friendship, there will always be a certain degree to which you must hide yourself, lest you be branded as the insane, prone-to-crying lush you sometimes are on more spirited nights out. The last thing anyone wants is the boss to casually find out about your true feelings for him when you accidentally let it slip at a work happy hour the night before. Also, if you add your work friends on Facebook, they will know when you’re lying about being sick because you are brutally hungover.
Old Friends
These are the remnants of your social group from when you were but a naive young sprite with your whole life ahead of you, not yet crushed by the prospect of having to center your otherwise sweet life around a nine-to-five job. Likely acquired while in adolescence, college, or even childhood, these are the people you’ve known “forever” and with whom, through a decent amount of geographic luck, you’ve been able to remain in close contact. Because of your shared history, you automatically feel a depth in your interactions, even if you weren’t incredibly close when you initially became friends. Because, as becomes painfully clear when you’re hanging out with 85 percent work friends, a friend established during school—one with whom you did a fair amount of “coming of age”—is often worth about five acquaintances formed in adulthood. Because this old friend knew you when you were far more irresponsible and prone to doing things like taking mushrooms and running around naked on a school football field, you’ve established a level of trust and honesty that is almost impossible to re-create with people who have only known you in the context of “adulthood.” To your grown-up friends, you are a responsible human being with good prospects for the future and serious opinions about offshore dr
illing. To your old friends, though, you are the person who once ate fifteen Taco Bell soft tacos without vomiting to win $30.
It should also be stated that, despite old friends’ clear benefits, there is serious danger in becoming “that guy” who only remains friends with the people he knew from school and never actually branches out to explore other social options in life. If you’ve ever borne witness to a social group collapse in on itself from constant, undiluted exposure to the same people well into adulthood, you know that it is a path littered with semi-insanity and a fear of the unknown that can cripple even the most well-adjusted person.
Family Friends
As you become more of a whole, rational human being with the ability to see things for what they are, you may start to realize that your family is not just one homogenous, terrible mass out to stop you from living your ideal life. Everyone from your parents to your cousins to your drunk aunts can become potential friends in adult life, people with whom you can relate and communicate in a way that is at once intensely familiar and relatively light. Few things are more satisfying than being able to go out drinking with family members once deemed tragically uncool and realizing that they are, indeed, awesome. There is also the added bonus of being able to confide in them in a way that you cannot with anyone else, as they are linked to you by blood and have watched you grow literally since birth.
It should be said, though, that the distinction between friend and family—though capable of being blurred from time to time—should never be eroded completely. Aside from the obvious catastrophes created by parents who want, even at a young age, to be “cool friends” with their children instead of the crucial authority figures they need to be, a fight between any two family members that would otherwise be manageable between actual friends can result in battles of cataclysmic passive-aggressiveness that no one should have to endure. Family friends are wonderful, but these friendships must be treated with caution.
Going-Out Friends
While they may come from all over your various social engagements and daily activities, going-out friends are, by definition, just that—the people you do most of your partying with. They are friends who seem to exist only in the context of drinking and/or staying out really late, and don’t serve a much deeper purpose in terms of sharing ideas, secrets, or opinions about the world around you. Unlike work friends, you are not required to see them every day and accept the shame that comes with acting like a humongous mess in front of everyone at the bar last night. And unlike your old friends, they do not come with an entire subway car full of baggage from your shared history together. They are simply people with whom you can let your hair down and have a good time. Though, as we all likely know, it is often far too easy to get sucked into the trap of seeing too much of your going-out friends—a group that often includes people who are tap-dancing along the borderline of a serious substance abuse problem—and this can end in an imbalanced life full of unfulfilling sex and coke. It is best to keep them on the periphery of your social life, where they can do the least harm and provide the most benign amusement.
The key, it would seem, is branching out as much as possible and starting friendships with people you wouldn’t normally run into in your daily life. And while making the effort to actually get to know people, such as your cooler-than-average barista or the friend of a friend who always brings a nice bottle of something to house parties and has good facial hair, can be intimidating, it brings with it a vastly expanded network of people to call friends. I think we’ve all seen what can happen to people who don’t take the time to expand their horizons when it comes to friends as they get further and further into adulthood, and they generally seem to retreat into their children, through whom they live vicariously, and convince themselves that having something resembling an active social life is a luxury that they simply cannot afford. As someone whose parents have always put a high premium on developing a diverse circle of friends and were curious when it comes to finding new people to hang out with, I remain convinced that collapsing in on yourself is not the only option.
ADULT FRIENDS VS. KID FRIENDS
Hell, even the Internet is a rich source of finding platonic soul mates from around the world. I have been told on more than one occasion that the friends I have acquired and maintain online—and not only the ones I haven’t yet encountered IRL—are somehow not “real” friends. I stand firmly in the opposite camp, however, and have tangible proof in my many solid connections with people whom I simply started talking to regularly because their blog was hilarious and/or incredibly intelligent. Better still, this option doesn’t even require getting dressed and leaving the house (always a plus in my book). With the advent of the Internet, you have no excuse not to find people who share your interests at every turn, and continually expand your options when it comes to doing things together.
The idea that friendship is something that stagnates in adulthood is easy to understand. People are less open to starting new things, much more consumed with their professional and romantic lives, and less certain about what it means to “hang out” with someone when it is no longer acceptable to constantly binge-drink at every social occasion. The truth is that making friends is more difficult when you are a grown-up, because with every day we get older, we get more rigidly set in these social lanes that the world around us seems convinced we should never abandon.
But the world is also full of potentially awesome people who love all the same weird movies and erotic fan fiction that you do, and there is no reason to deny yourself the pleasure of their company just because you think adults aren’t supposed to meet new people if they’re not trying to bone them. Falling in love with a new boyfriend or girlfriend can be thrilling, but so can falling for a new best friend.
Chapter 8
GROWING UP
Or, Making the World a Better Place by Doing Something Other Than Suckling from Society’s Ravaged Teat
Responsibility is a strange, ugly word. It conjures up in even the most balanced, rational person horrifying images of being expected to do things, day in and day out, that are both un-fun and provide little personal reward. It means taking the high road when you want to take the lowest emotional road possible; it means making decisions that come at great personal cost to you and may not be immediately beneficial; it means admitting you are wrong when all you want to do is plug your ears and scream about how you’re a princess and princesses never apologize. When we pictured adulthood, it was usually some endless rainbow-hued mosaic of getting to choose your own bedtime, eating cake for dinner whenever you felt like it, and having sleepovers at any and all times (and we didn’t even picture the sex that went along with this imagined stage of life!). “Responsibility” was always the gray, sad-faced cloud that hung over everything we were going to do with an audible “womp, womp” and occasional downpours of unexpected bills.
And yet every day, seemingly without warning, we take on more and more of this responsibility. We become indebted to those around us—both metaphorically and, in the case of cruel, terrifying banks, literally—and shoulder more burdens than just our own. We have significant others we have to take into consideration, family who expect to be given presents in return at Christmas (I know!?! What?!?), and friends we have to make more than a little effort to go and visit at regular intervals. It’s as though a life of full-on adulthood and maturity sort of constructs itself around you, while you’re still in the heady throes of “Oh, my God, I can drink whenever I want and eat however many tubes of Pringles my body will allow!” It’s something that we don’t choose—it chooses us. (You can have that one for free, motivational poster companies.)
If we ever needed a perfect example of expectation as opposed to brutal, brutal reality when it comes to entering the once rosy-seeming era of being a grown-up, consider the whole mess of student loans. There we were, idealistic and fresh-faced, ready to get all this book learnin’ so we could be well on our way to a nondescript job that fulfills all our emotional and
financial needs while reaffirming that we belong to an educated, superior class of society because we made the temporary yet crucial investment in a college degree. And then there was the whole part after the fact, after all that Pell Grant money got siphoned off into bottles of Rikaloff and Mad Dog, when no one gives a fuck about anything you did unless it was engineering or computer science, and you’re basically just going to have to work at a restaurant and live with your parents for a while, and put an egregious amount of your weekly earnings toward repaying a debt that you refuse to even acknowledge the full extent of.
Our lives in the real world have started off with about as cold a bitch slap as one could possibly ask for—in the financial department, no less, where we are least equipped to deal with it—and yet debt is but a drop in the bucket against an ocean of all the things we have to learn. Regardless of whether we want to catch up to those around us and build something out of our Credit Cards Gone Crazy lives, we’re going to have to eventually fashion ourselves into something resembling a coherent, responsible adult.
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