No New Friends Pt. 2
Almost two years ago, I wrote about how I haven’t made any new friends since college. I had seen this as strictly negative: not only did I like my friends a lot, I also liked meeting new people. Meeting new people was also indicative of new experiences and new ideas; if I was doing different things and thinking different things I would necessarily meet different people. At that time, I had already resigned myself to the knowledge that I was unlikely to make many new friends, and I should cherish the ones that I had left. Good friends only shrank in number, and spending the requisite amount of time with someone new to call them a friend is near-impossible in adulthood. Rest assured, I’m still friends with K.
Two years later, I’m amazed how prescient my blog post was. All my close friends now are the same ones as they were two years ago. I have made some new friends, now that I had spent enough time with new people to consider them friends, which I had also accounted for. There isn’t much in terms of variety: the majority of them are from work, and then there are a few I’ve met through mutual friends that stuck around during the pandemic. My relationship with them consists mostly of sending them articles and memes occasionally as opposed to consistent meaningful conversation. I have a handful of friends that receive content from me on a daily basis, and have conversations with at least once a week. I have two times that number of friends who I send content to, but speak to much less, as well as a similarly sized group that I don’t send content to. In each of these latter groups, we meet up or call once every quarter, and find that proves enough to maintain our friendship. But that’s it. Those are all the friends I have.
I’m happy that I’ve made new friends since graduating from college, but my relationship with them is nowhere near as good as the ones I’ve known since I was ten. With time that’s perhaps a possibility, but one that’ll have to be evaluated as it gets closer to. Consequently, I’m left with the same conclusion that I was two years ago: these are all the friends I’ll have for the rest of my life. I was okay with it then, and I’m okay with it now. But I have some intrusive thoughts over the past little while that have given me cause to pause and reconsider.
Out of consideration of my health and wallet, I’ve decided to go sober, for at least a month. Sobriety will make it challenging to maintain many of the acquaintances that I’ve picked up over the years, those that always seem teetering on the precipice of friendship, but never quite arriving there. None of these people are counted as friends, but sobriety would be a death knoll for my relationship with many of them. I simply would no longer have the time or patience to spend with them if it weren’t for large drinking parties. Previously, this would have been utterly unimaginable, but now it’s a serious consideration.
In a similar vein, I’ve realized that I’m less interested in meeting new people these days. If someone is important to my friends and family, of course I’d love to get to know them, but I have no desire to interact with coworkers outside of the bare minimum to conduct work, and I have no wish to mingle with strangers at a party. Not that I’ve become busier with work or I lack the time, but rather I lack the interest. The thought of attending the friend of a friend’s party where I will undoubtedly have to shake some hands, receive some introductions, and do a lot of smiling has started to tire me out.
Through our usual generation and language gap, my father has recently repeated to me that I should stop spending so much time and money with friends, and instead direct my energies towards something productive. I’ve always chalked this up to a communication barrier or his penchant for solidarity, but my changing perspective to acquaintances has made me reconsider: do I need this many people in my life? Do I even need these many friends? I certainly don’t think the little clutch of friends I have left are too much to manage, but it’s the acquaintances, the friends of friends that I have a middle-of-the-road relationship with. I have no doubt that if mutual friends disappeared so would they. Is it time to start mindfully culling these relationships?
Two years ago, I encouraged readers to hold close onto the friendships that they had, because they would only diminish with time. But if I’ve known someone for five years now, and we’ve never moved beyond acquaintances or distant friends, will they ever? I’m not interested in reducing my real friendships, people I’d go out on a limb for, just the ones I feel no strong emotional relationship with, and cost me a lot of time. At this point, I still have many friends with whom I can spend an entire day walking around aimlessly, chatting about whatever and catching up. This is an interesting metric: if they are those I message on a daily basis, I can spend a whole day with them despite this because we have more shared experiences and common ground. If they’re friends I see once every quarter or year, then I can spend a whole day with them because we have a lot to catch up on.
Recently I watched Banshees of Inisheree with a friend of mine, after mutually agreeing to go sober and realizing that would result in the inevitable loss of a few friendships. In the movie, the protagonist’s best friend, with whom he goes to the pub with every day, has decided that he doesn’t wish to be friends anymore. Though the movie was dark comedy, it was clear that it had something to say about male friendships and loneliness, and both parties were greatly affected. In particular, the friend who wished to terminate the friendship was portrayed as a pretentious prick.
Month of sobriety notwithstanding, I arrive at the same conclusion I did a couple of years ago: true friendships are rare, and only get rarer as time passes. Hold onto what you’ve got, lest you become a friendless crabby person in old age. But those middling acquaintances that you’ve known for some time and have never blossomed into full-fledged friendships? Those people that you only ever speak to when drunk, not only because they are insufferable otherwise? Perhaps it’s worth letting those fade for the benefit of the ones that mean anything.
