Tuesday, September 25, 2012

On Friendships and Community

Today, I went to book club to discuss:

MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend 
by Rachel Bertsche


Any of my friends, both far and near, would not be surprised by my interest in this.


A year ago, when I first moved to San Francisco, I didn't know a single person in the city--all of my best friends from school had moved to New York, and my boyfriend at the time was working in Frankfurt. I met most of my first friends through MeetUp.com, joining groups with names like Just Graduated College and Moved to San Francisco and Real Girlfriends of San Francisco. I also Googled "How to Meet People in a New City", "Speed-dating for Friends", "Social networks for making new friends," and created accounts at sites like Girlfriendsocial.com.

Does this sound desperate?

The NYT recently posted an article about the difficulty of making friends as adults. Compared to the relative ease with which we naturally formed strong bonds as children and adolescents, developing new friendships as an adult grows harder and harder. Competing priorities (children, spouses) take over our lives, we become less trusting of strangers and more jaded, and standards for friendships grow ever higher as we hone in on the set of characteristics and interests that attract us most. An excerpt:

"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"

It's an interesting time in our society for building friendships and communities. Technology, the internet, and social media have made it easier than ever to stay connected, yet as we devote more and more time on maintaining these connections digitally, this virtual connectivity comes at the cost of real-life connectivity. Could this be making us lonelier?

We now live, more and more, alone. Merely a few generations ago, we moved from our parent's home to a home with a spouse with a short hop of years between, and we stayed close to our parents, moved around less, probably lived in the same neighborhood as our childhood playmates and college buddies. We took part in church, belonged to a community. It is this community that facilitates proximity, which in turn creates repeated, unplanned interactions and the encourages us to confide in each other.

I'm not saying that I wish I lived closer to parents, never left my hometown, belonged to a church community--those are all choices I willingly made that I could at any moment overturn. As the article stated, this is the price that I've paid for independence.

Yet, I still wonder a why it is so hard hard to find the close friendships I crave. Furthermore, I wonder why, if loneliness is such a common sentiment in our modern society, it's so stigmatized to admit that you don't have as many friends as you'd like, that you're openly searching?

As Rachel Bertsche said, “Popular culture has made it okay to yell ‘I need a man!’ from the rooftops, so why are we still embarrassed to say ‘I want a best friend?’”


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Notes, interesting lines from the book: 
1. "In order for someone to move from girl-date to friend... we need intimacy.... Friendship intimacy starts with self-disclosure and reciprocity... In order to move from regular friend to a best one, I will need what researchers call social identity support. That is to say, my best friend is someone who will reaffirm my social role in society"
2. "Research has found that both men and women get more emotional satisfaction from their relationships with women. Studies show that men think their wives are their best friends, and women think their best friends are their best friends."
3. "Most of us need to meet with somebody twice a month for three months before we will consider them a friend."

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