The core struggle with maintaining friendships through adulthood is less logistical and more emotional
By GEETIKA MAHAJAN — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
My mom has beef with the popular American sitcom “Parks and Recreation;” she rolls her eyes whenever I turn it on because, as she says, “Nobody actually has friends like that.”
For those unfamiliar, “Parks and Recreation” follows a bubbly, often over-the-top enthusiastic Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler, as she and her coworkers and friends attempt to make their midwestern town of Pawnee, Indiana a better place.
Admittedly, it might be a little bit unrealistic — at least three of the final couples in the show started off as coworkers — but my mom’s disbelief isn’t centered around the romantic relationships in the show. Rather, it’s the idea that a group of people can meet as adults, well into their careers, and form the kind of close-knit, long-term friendships that are more common in grade school. I frequently see this rhetoric — Reddit posts, Vox articles and YouTube rants about how it’s “so hard to make friends as an adult.”
But how much validity is there to such claims? Of course, situational context makes it more difficult to find people as you get older than it was when you were a kid, but there are always avenues for connection. Every town has book clubs or workout classes (both classic opportunities to form social circles) — I even know people who have connected with other adults in online fandom spaces. Is it really that hard to make friends, or are you refusing to put yourself out there?
As we get older, we often forget that making friends is an act of vulnerability. To put it back in kindergarten context: suppose you ask someone to play hide-and-seek with you during lunch. If the two of you were to consider this a daily hide-and-seek appointment, you could call yourselves friends. But if your hide-and-seek buddy were to one day decide they would rather play tag or read, it puts you in a vulnerable position; you have come to expect their company, but they have found something “better:” essentially leaving you bereft.
In adulthood, the stakes are a lot higher than finding a lunchtime buddy. Putting ourselves in a position where we could potentially be abandoned as adults is a lot more intimidating because we’re conscious enough to question our self-worth and evaluate our loneliness. Oftentimes, we may opt to stay within our lonely comfort zones than be witnessed trying to cultivate a close relationship and failing. Close friendships require a kind of sacrifice that an era of nonchalance and indifference actively discourage — it’s a risk to show people that you care about them, knowing that they might not return the favor.
You also need to be okay with the idea that people may perceive you as awkward or you might make a joke that nobody will laugh at. Part of making friendships is accepting that long-term relationships cannot be sustained if your primary goal is to prove how smart, cool or funny you are.
To go back to the “Parks and Recreation” reference — remember that none of the core characters really liked each other at the start of the show; Leslie was too enthusiastic, April was too stand-offish, Ron was impossible to have a conversation with, etc. Developing friendships in adulthood means that people will perceive the full, flawed version of you, and you will be occasionally annoyed at them and both of you will decide that it’s worth it to keep seeing each other anyways. True friendship is not born of perfection, but rather a mutual appreciation of one another as people and as companions.
Friendship requires the same kind of sacrifice and tolerance people are willing to make to sustain romantic relationships — which is why arbitrarily prioritizing one over the other is doing yourself a disservice. If you want a friendship, you have to be a friend. But with that comes vulnerability and inconvenience and all the yucky stuff that adults like to hide from and children don’t really care about, which is why it’s so much easier to make friends in childhood. The biggest mistake you can make is convincing yourself that these kinds of friendships don’t exist when you grow up. They do; you just have to allow yourself to look for them.
Written by: Geetika Mahajan — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
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