I have observed a trend of people shedding friends that don’t “tick all the boxes.” The boxes being someone who is dependable, loyal, trustworthy, accepting etc. I get the impulse, why keep people around who aren’t serving your needs or draining your resources?
The problem is that as an adult, deep friendships are hard to come by. When you’re a kid, most friendships come easily by a combination of proximity and interest. You’re in class with them, next-door neighbors, or both ended up at the same summer camp. School friendships provide a somewhat segregated association pool. You hang out with people the same age, often similar socio-economic levels and shared interests such as sports, music or drama.
This carries on into college or beginning careers. While there is a wider variety of majors and people from more towns to choose from, it’s also easier to have a narrower pool of interest: all graduate students in the same cohort of the same major at the same university living in the same housing. Relating is easy and almost automatic as you have many similarities already baked in. The dorms are all the same, you eat at the same places and everyone has the same required reading. Same. Same. Same.
Life intervenes and people go off to chase different careers or marry and settle down with kids. Maintaining old friendships requires effort. I see my college bestie only once per quarter, if we’re lucky. It has been once or twice a year sometimes, with several gaps of several years. We also have traveled different paths. I have kids and she doesn’t. She has a solid career and I drive carpool. Understanding and commiseration aren’t automatic anymore—it takes imagination and patience to understand the other’s now different perspective.
Don’t despair, adulthood brings the opportunity to have new, mixed friendships. I have more friends of different ages and backgrounds now. I hang out with a grandma whose grandson used to go to preschool with my youngest. The kids have moved on to different kindergartens now, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t hang out. I value her advice and experience.
One mom I met while our kids played together has a totally different take on most political things as me. It came from her wildly different life path than mine. Instead of rejecting her for having different conclusions than me, I got the opportunity to see the world through her lens. It was this allowance and toleration of differences that took our friendship past the superficial level. Even though neither of us will probably ever vote the same, we are in each other’s corners. Surprisingly, our friendship is closer to checking the boxes of trustworthy, loyal, there-for-you with a spare paddle when you find yourself inexplicably up a creek without one. She was the friend I didn’t know I needed in a time when friendships hard to schedule.
My conclusion is to not put pressure on modern friendships to perform at high levels. Appreciate other people on only one or two points of connection. This allows them the freedom to be their real selves. When you don’t require agreement, you leave air in the relationship that doesn’t smother them with forced conformity. Then when you least expect it, their difference in perspective, experience, or resources will be the very thing you didn’t know you needed.
