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My third grade elementary school teacher taught us a jingle that is permanently grooved into my brain:
Make New Friends
But Keep the Old
One is Silver
And the Other Gold
It's a nice little philosophy of socializing suitable for eight year olds. It has some application for adults, but it is important not to apply it too wholeheartedly or literally. In the previous chapter, I specifically said you should reduce or eliminate contact with people who interfere with your ability to maintain an exercise program, and a consistent, healthy diet. You may have considered them your friends for a long time, but if they make it hard for you to satisfy basic needs like eating, exercising, sleeping and maintaining enough emotional equilibrium to earn the respect and love of others, at minimum, you need a break from them. Buried gold and silver can be dug up later, profitably. Bury those friends under your new life if need be; you can reestablish contact later.
Old friends, by contrast, who make it possible for you to make these changes and do their best to support you in those changes, are bright, shiny and valuable. Make more time for them. Get to know them better. Emulate them where possible.
If you've been deeply involved in a social circle that has interacted in a relatively superficial fashion for a period of years (drug saturated club scene, say), changes you make may result in a lot of those people disappearing on their own. If you've been a loner your whole life, you may have to scrape to find anyone to hang out with, ever. Your minimum goal, before even attempting to date, should be two friends, at least one friendship should have never had any romantic component in either direction (don't lie to yourself about this). You can tell if they are your friends by whether you can answer yes to all of the following:
If you do not have at least two such friends, develop them. If you have trouble doing this, get therapy with the specific goal of learning to develop friends. Try to keep the therapy focused on that goal and resist the temptation to consider the therapist your friend.
You need to have at least two friends for stability or you will be entirely dependent on one person, which is bad for both of you. Friends are crucial to daily happiness, a sane and composed response to unexpected or unpleasant news and events. Friends give you a different perspective when you are confused or wrong. They keep you humble. They help you learn to love yourself by loving you themselves. Expect this from friends. Offer it to your friends. Help your friends make more friends. Meet the friends of your friends. Even if every last one of them is married, these are the people who will help you with all the relationships in your life. They will help you get a new job when you need it. They'll set you up with a new date. They'll expose you to new ideas and fun things to do. Offer all these things to your friends.
Never stop making friends. Life will sometimes get too busy to maintain the same level of intimacy with all your friends, but when you do have the time, spend it with your friends, stay involved in their lives.
Many people go to college, graduate, and get a steady, well-paying job without realizing the benefits of being in school, and erratically employed. School and jobs that don't last long or pay well are both excellent sources of new faces, people one will have regular contact with and time to get to know, time you have little choice spending other ways. Since being friendly to people is, generally speaking, more entertaining that scut work (whether you are paying to do it, as in homework, or you are paid to do it, as in burger flipping), these are great environments for forming new friendships and relationships. Once you are stably employed, you will probably find you meet few new people, and many of those you work with have well-established social circles and are reluctant to get involved with people they plan on working closely with at a good job for the next several years. If you moved to this job after college, or if you never created such a social circle on your own, this can be a frustrating time for you. You have money, a car, and (probably) your evenings free, and almost nothing to do. You can either pour yourself into your work and deal with the consequences later, or you can try to do something about it now, before you are cranky, twenty years older and significantly less appealing as a person.
If you moved for this job, but had a social circle before, the key is to maintain a balance between contact with your old friends (whether through travel, phone or e-mail) and making new friends. If you rely too heavily on your old friends, you won't have time to reach out to new people. If you lose contact with your old friends, you will lose continuity and the sense of stability that makes it possible to take risks getting to know new people. Call, or e-mail, one of your friends who has already successfully been through this process, and get some tips from them. If you have never had much of a social circle before, you have a much more difficult problem on your hands. You will be tempted to try to solve all your relationship needs by finding a romantic partner and then spending all of your time with that person, which is very risky (they might be hit by a meteor, or a car; they might turn out to be disloyal or insensitive; you might prove to be incompatible; you will almost certainly stress each other out a lot). Please don't do this.
After you have done that, and are interested in something that hurts less and costs less in terms of therapy to get over it later, try attaching yourself to an existing social circle. Make friends with an outgoing, extroverted person at work. Try to get them to take a little pity on you and include you in their group activities, whether softball, movies or BBQs. I expect this to terrify you. The only thing that stops people from having some sort of social circle through all of college is overwhelming fear of some sort.
You may want to innoculate yourself to the group before engaging in a large activity. If your new best friend, the extrovert (who will think of you as a minor acquaintance for a long time, if that) , is willing to play along, try to meet several members of the larger group as a group of three (you, the new person, and the extrovert) or four (two new people), ideally for a short period of time, say, over a beer or a cup of coffee. Listen very carefully to everything they have to say, try to compliment them each at least once, thank them for including you and express a strong desire to meet them again. Shake their hands when you meet them and again when you leave and use their names in the course of the conversation. While these are scary things to do, they are polite; they will help you remember them; they will help them remember you and like you; they will increase the likelihood that you will feel a sense of connection and closeness that will encourage them to interact with you at greater length and greater warmth during the larger group activity. If you can meet at least four, and, ideally, at least one in four of the people who will be engaged in the larger group activity, you have an excellent chance of thriving at the party, feeling like a member of the crowd and as at home as a loner like you is likely to feel at any such gathering.
If you have a severe phobia of any sort associated with meeting other people, or with those people interacting with you, or learning the details of your life, I highly recommend you do something to address this issue. Talking to a counselor, or sympathetic friend may help you better understand your fears, which may give you ideas for how to reduce it or work around it.
Don't identify with your fears. Try not to identify with your current preferences for socializing. If you once took a personality inventory or Cosmo quiz which told you you are shy, self-effacing, introverted, misanthropic, fearful of intimacy or otherwise inclined to avoid other people, remember that that test or quiz or evaluation largely reflects back to you how you think of yourself. You can learn to enjoy being around other people. You can un-learn your fears.
Unfortunately, you can also build an entire life-philosophy around why being alone is really for the best. If a few rounds of betrayal or bad treatment convince you that no one can be trusted and The Wise Person Walks Alone, you will never have the opportunity to learn otherwise. If your first experience of social groups bruises you when personal information circulates in an unexpected and unpleasant fashion, and you respond by deciding never to tell anyone anything you wouldn't be okay with seeing above the fold, page one of USA Today, you will not get the benefits of having friends, even if you know a lot of people and interact with them often and they think the world of you.
A friend of mine describes very succinctly how toddlers first play together: first they push each other over, then they take each others toys. New parents and other adults unfamiliar with this process are often horrified and try to put a stop to this behavior, which is occasionally necessary (if one child is much older or larger than the other or has acquired superior weaponry such as a knife, or if one child has substantially fewer toys). Generally, however, when pushed, toddlers push back. If Joe steals Jane's toys, he is ill-prepared to adequately protect his own. They relatively quickly come to some sort of agreement; violence rarely ensues. Some children will cavalierly play with all the toys and continue to shove each other around. Others will divide up the play space and stay scrupulously away from each other. Others engage in more complicated exchanges. These are all great strategies, appropriate to various situations in life. No one strategy should always be used. Unfortunately, some of us never learned to do anything but play by ourselves with our own toys. Sometimes parents guarantee this will happen (only children who do not have play partners in their neighborhood are at significant risk; as are any children primarily raised by those who can't tolerate rough-and-tumble play amongst the young). Some kids just seem to turn out this way. But if we can't learn to "play well with others", our job choices will be limited, our references will be neutral to negative, our ability to make and maintain friendships will be handicapped and odds on, we won't get laid much.
A larger-than-average, more aggressive than average or wilier than average child may be able to play with those toys she wishes to play with, whenever she wishes to play with them, whether hers or others. While the woman she grows up to be will look different than the above mentioned children, the effects are similar: limited job choices, neutral to negative references, limited friendships, difficulty with intimate relationships.
A cuter-than-average kid who charms his compatriots into giving him more than he returns, whether toys or anything else, again, will look a little different as an adult, but have a lot of the same problems.
The same rule applies for the smart kid; the obedient kid; the class clown. An unusual focus on deploying a particular strategy when competing with peers for grades, goodies or attention translates into problems in adulthood. The strategy doesn't even have to be hugely successful to cause problems; the kid just has to grow up doing one particular thing, and really only that one thing. As an adult, that grown-up kid will be very resistant to the idea that anything else works as well or better, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. If you see yourself in any of these descriptions, make an effort to seek out people who match the other descriptions, and learn how they do things. You will not be as successful as they are at duplicating their strategies (after all, they've been doing this for years), but you can learn a lot from them.
Finally, once your social life is rolling somewhat, and you receive a non-zero number of invitations in the course of a given year, try to accept every invitation you receive. You will certainly go to the worst parties you are invited to, but you are also guaranteed to go to the best parties you are invited to. Until you are forced to turn down invitations on account of being too busy, or definitively understand why certain groups are not for you, attempts to pick and choose which parties will be most beneficial to attend risk picking only bad parties and definitely reduce your opportunities to meet new people, and re-encounter friendly faces you have met on occasion already but would like to get to know better.
A lot is made of whether men and women have substantially different communication styles, and whether men and women can ever "just be friends" without some horrible misunderstanding or at least winking and nudging going on.
I want to begin by acknowledging that when one only has sex with a particular gender, then being friends with a member of that gender without getting involved the the jungle of possible attraction, arousal and rejection is inherently difficult. Heterosexuals being numerically dominant (and, as a nearly inevitable result, somewhat oblivious) have probably confused that problem with the problem of communicating with someone of a different gender. I question whether there is any more to the difficulties than that.
However, in the interests of learning something from all the fireworks, here is a series of relatively well-documented phenomena, typically (but not always) gender-associated, that could lead to communication and other relationship snafus:
I think it's relatively obvious to most people that if you put two very emotionally labile people in a room together with some stimuli (either self-generated or externally imposed), chaos will ensue quite rapidly, even if the people involved report a strong bond. Translated, that means that if you stick a couple of people who respond emotionally quite quickly, and who can change emotions quickly together, you're going to see at minimum, a rollercoaster and, more likely, a multi-car pileup. Culturally, we expect women to be more emotionally labile. Who knows if it's even true, much less anything deeper than socialization.
If you put a couple of non-affiliative, introverted people who speak slowly, and can barely understand themselves in a room together, it's going to be hard to come up with any stimulus short of a bar fight that will get them to even notice each other. Even then, it's a little iffy.
From these highly non-scientific thought experiments, I conclude that same-sex relationships can suffer all kinds of problems, some of which look suspiciously like man-woman-can't-communicate. I don't find it useful to generalize along gender lines when thinking about friendships. A number of relationship therapists have asserted, with varying amounts of support, that thinking about gender differences is one of the most effective ways to erode connections across genders. Let's just leave this whole gender thing alone. Instead, give some thought to how the above list (and whatever you care to add) might impact a relationship, estimate where you lie on those continua, and cultivate an adaptible attitude.
Having dismissed, out of hand, specifically gender concerns about communication and friendships, I'm now going to say that friendships have a lot to do with how successful you will be at beginning and maintaining romantic relationships. We learn to play well with others first with friends and siblings. The only child is at a disadvantage, one that can be mitigated with judicious use of day care and arranging for frequent play dates. If you have a child (and only one child), do your part to help their future social life by making sure they have frequent, regular contact with other children of an appropriate age.
Over time, play dates arranged by a parent become visits to other kids' houses, sleepovers and illicit escapes from school together to roam the streets unsupervised. Your ability to survive the banging around of childhood friendships (not to mention sibling rivalry) prepares you for the all-important ritual of being roommates after moving out of your parents' house.
Being roommates is when you first learn just how evil other young people, in particular, those you thought your friends, can be. This is the process that will enable you to perceive the lover you move in with as being considerate, reasonably hygienic and mostly sane. The roommates will lower your expectations enough from your parents actual adult behavior to enable you to cope with people your own age, who are really very happy to finally get a chance to act like the little monsters they are. If you've never participated in this process (I did only to a very limited degree, and let me tell you, I'm still a finicky person, much to my chagrin), you can barely imagine what it is like to think to eat over the kitchen sink because you own no (clean) dishes. Certainly you are still accustomed to being able to see the floor, as opposed to a layer of empty pizza boxes, old newspapers and junk mail.
Being roommates also helps you hone your negotiation skills. As you learn ways to get your roommate to not touch your stereo equipment, no, not even with that empty, milk encrusted glass that just wants to sit on top of the speaker, you are learning ways to get your needs met in a future relationship. If you can get your roommate to flush the toilet, you'll figure out a way to get your future spouse to put the seat up, down or whatever it is you want -- or you'll learn a way to cope with it the way it is. Most important of all, you will figure out exactly what it is you need, as opposed to what would be nice to have.
If you were unlucky enough to have avoided all of the above life lessons, you probably have issues with which way the toilet roll goes on the holder, how the toothpaste is squeezed out, where dirty dishes come to rest, and whether the butter stays in or out of the refrigerator. Not only do you have issues, you think you are right, and that it is reasonable to bring the person you live with, or love with, around to your point of view. Before you get too attached to that idea, go talk to some of your friends who've been through the process, and think very hard about how important each of these little things is to you. Prioritize, tackle them in order, take your time and pay attention to feedback.
If you went through the usual stages, or if you at least know about the range of human behavior, you'll find it much easier to acclimate yourself to being with one particular special person, even when they are right there in your own space. Partly, that will be because you had so much practice acclimating to other people. It will also be because you have a greater capacity to understand that individual's nuances -- you will notice how they are unique, because you will have seen so much other variety.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated November 19, 2003