Looking for friends

I’ve been thinking about friends a lot lately. Actually, I was watching Desperate Housewives today and Lynette told Edie that if she wanted to be friends then she had to be a better friend to Susan. To whit, she said that she had to listen to her problems and pretend to care. Or something like that. It was kind of funny because Edie wasn’t even willing to go that far, but I’m digressing.

Desperate Housewives aside, it does seem that all over TV and the movies there are adults with lots of friends. In my experience, it’s not that easy to make friends once you are out of school. When you’re in school you’re going to classes with people, you have a lot in common, you may be living on campus with them or at least seeing the same people for hours a day. It’s easy to have things to talk about and natural to spend your leisure time together. And you HAVE leisure time. Once you’re out of school you don’t have nearly as much time to do fun things with friends. It’s all drudgery. LOL Okay, maybe it’s not all drudgery, but it’s not all parties any more either.

It seems to me that it becomes a lot more difficult to make friends after you’re out of school. I can probably count on one hand the number of good friends I’ve made since I left college and some of them are strictly Internet people.

Isn’t that a strange phenomenon? To have Internet friends? By which I mean people that you may never have met in person. I have a couple of friends like that. I’ve even entered into business relationships with one of them.

I really don’t have many friends where I live now. I still have a lot of old friends. I keep up with my best friend from college. I stay in touch with my best friends from one old job -- they were great friends. I stay in touch with a couple of other people. That’s about it. But it’s not as easy to talk to friends, even old friends, about things as it used to be. We all have our own lives and worries and concerns. Even if I call up and ask them what’s going on they don’t usually dig down deep and tell me their innermost thoughts. I may send them an e-mail to tell them what’s happening with me but no one has the time to devote to friends now that they did before they were married and had kids.

I figure that most people have the same basic concerns: love problems, money worries, family squabbles, and self-doubts (“Why don’t people like me?” Why am I so ugly?” “Am I going to Hell?” “What’s wrong with me?”). There are other things that come out of nowhere -- the car accident, the tornado, a death in the family. But most of the time I think people go along worrying about similar things. It’s so good to have friends to talk to about these things. It’s just hard to find friends and develop friendships once you’re living the kind of life where you have to work everyday and you don’t see your old friends very often.

I know what all the common wisdom says -- that you’re supposed to go out, get involved and meet people. But that’s like telling people to go out and start dating. It’s always easy to tell people those things if it’s not you that has to do it. Of course you can make friends when you meet people but, contrary to what popular television says, I have a theory that most people you meet in the grocery store aren’t there to make friends or find dates.

So, how do you make new friends in the real world? Friends that are real, flesh and blood people, not Internet friends. I’d love to find out.