I got some really awesome and thoughtful questions on my Ask Me Anything form-- THANK YOU. Several of them revolved around adult friendships, and I thought this would be SUCH a fun topic.
Some people were worried that I do not have friends because I don't write about them, and I really DON'T write about friends, but I DO have them, I promise. They just don't seem to be up for public consumption, you know?
I tend to think of my friends in categories-- does anyone else do this?
We have couple friends that we see for dinner (a rotating cast of double dates, as it were). I have friends I love to see for lunch, coffee friends, work friends, exercise friends, dance mom friends, etc etc etc. We are lucky to have lived here as long as we have because we have DECADES OLD FRIENDSHIPS just by virtue of being grad school friends or school parent friends-- getting old is really lovely in that way. Especially because we have out of town friends and back home friends and college friends and childhood friends-- you get the idea.
But! Except for maybe saying I did XYZ with a friend, I really don't write about them here. I do talk about seeing blog friends because, um, blog friends BLOG -- they are up for public consumption.
This was a little different when the big kids were little and we had a group of people with kids the same ages and we all hung out all the time with the kids. As the kids got older (and as we kept having MOAR kids), this group sort of naturally disbanded. And! Without the bond of kids in common, the grown up friendships shifted, too. which isa. thing that happens all the time with adult friendships. Some are strong enough to survive kids not being friends anymore, but I think some are not that deep, as the kids says.
I will say that I am very intentional about scheduling things at the monthly level-- date nights, lunches, coffees, etc. I am less good at the spontaneous meet ups, but that's because my calendar is a shit show.
One thing I am really bad at is book clubs. I am a serial book club drop out. In theory, book clubs are a great idea for me-- I love books. I love talking about books and having snacks. But somehow I never stick around in actual book clubs. I have no idea why this is-- I think I don't like a prescriptive reading list and also it is not easy for me to change my mind about a book or a character. If I loved a book and then a friend hated it, I am not going to be able to let that go. I am on the campus common read book selection committee at my university, and this is the perfect kind of book club-- high stakes and contentious and filled with other big old book dorks.
So, yes. I do make time for friends in an intentional way. When I bust out my big old monthly planner to lay out the month ahead, I have a little square on the side of the spread where I keep track of my social plans because I want to make sure that at least once a week I am filling my social bucket. It can be easy to not set aside social time when I am super busy, but people are always a good use of time.
 |
| drinks with friends last weekend |
