How do you deal with friendships when you are a grown up?
When you’re in college, friendships are so easy. Everyone lives and works in the same place. You all live in dorms, you all go to the same buildings for classes every day. It’s so easy to pass a friend and stop them in the hall, to grab lunch with them quickly, to drop by their room at whatever godforsaken hour you feel like. There was an easiness, an informality: everyone was so accessible and spontaneous.
Now time has pushed me on. I graduated from college almost 5 years ago, and though I’ve clung to some semblance of that lifestyle on and off by hanging out excessively with grad students, it really is all just a farce. Now I work in Boston, I live in Boston, all my old college friends are far away, completely inaccessible in their serious jobs in NYC, California, wherever. There is no one anymore who will drop by my window in the middle of the night, no one whose window I can drop by.
And then I wonder, how do friendships work, when you are all grown up and wokring in the real world? Is it all contrived? All through work and lunch hour (not that anyone actually has a lunch hour here)? Where did the easy hanging out capabilities go? Now it seems all planned — meeting for dinner once in a while, going out to do something once in a while. Everything seems so terribly and painfully contrived.
Is this the reason that people pair up and most of them end up just settling for someone? After they get too accostomed to them? Because the easiness and mischief of accessible and spontaneous friends is a thing of the past?
I have a friend that I love more than almost anybody in the world. His path and mine are completely, utterly, separated and have been for years. And yet I miss him every single day of my life. I can’t just make time to hang out with him because he consideres it too contrived, and I hate the contrived feeling to it too. And yet — I miss him. I want him back in my life desperately, and I don’t know how to put him there.
You guys have common interests, so why don’t you try to pursue them together? Dancing may be a good idea. Also, what’s wrong with contrived? You make time for the people you care about. Go have a chai someplace, chat, and enjoy each other’s company. Awkwardness doesn’t last long between friends who really care about each other.