I'm Only Here for the WiFi (15 page)

We tend to trick ourselves into thinking that these relationships are meant to last forever. Because school-based relationships fly so fast and free (and can go from a midparty introduction to a mushroom-induced philosophical all-nighter in a matter of days), they seem to have a kind of rare charm. Yet even the most free-spirited friend is liable to get a Boston Terrier and move into a one-bedroom with her boyfriend at some point, only seeing you at the occasional brunch, which is spent mostly talking about your respective jobs. One after the other, these people are going to start splintering off, going their own ways and generally making the best decisions for themselves, which do not factor in the pinky-swears to “keep in touch” that they may have made with you at some point. While you are certainly going to keep a few select friends throughout your twenties and beyond, it would be irrational to expect the majority of them to stick around.

Few things, it should be said, speed up this process more palpably than moving away yourself. If, after you finish school, a faraway city (or even country) is your destination of choice, get ready to learn with shocking swiftness that about 80 percent of your “friends” would be more aptly described as “party acquaintances with whom you spent a lot of time because you both liked smoking weed and lived within two miles of each other.” The rate at which people will drop out of your life if you choose to move
away is sad at first, and then makes a somber kind of sense. Yes, it's kind of sad to realize that the investment of a Skype session every now and again is too much for most of the people you'd once considered very close, but how many friends does one person really need? You'll be making new ones in your new city anyway, and it wouldn't hurt to update your definition of
friend
to “someone who cares about me even on the rare occasion that it is not perfectly convenient for her.”

While you're often tempted to go to Herculean lengths to maintain some of your long-distance friends whom you once really loved, it can be pretty pathetic in its returns on investment. If you are becoming the person who makes constant, unmistakable overtures to bond with an old friend—whether through prolonged phone calls or attempts to meet up in one of your cities—and aren't getting too much in response, it's time to call it what it is: friendship masochism. The truth is that some of these people, no matter how much you may have adored them when proximity wasn't an issue, are just not going to stand the test of time or distance. Keeping close with them, if that proves to be depressingly one-sided, is only allowing yourself to get caught up in the scraggly cobwebs clinging to you from the city and social pool you initially tried to leave.

No matter how you end up fracturing off from the warm cocoon of your original social group, though, it's safe to say that you will find yourself as a young adult at the beginning of a life
with no real clue as to how to make new friends. It's isolating and somewhat terrifying to realize that if you don't play your social interaction cards right, you could end up becoming a recluse who only leaves her apartment on the rare occasion that she needs to restock the Fancy Feast. Acknowledging that you need to get out there and start carving out your own adult friendships is scary, but necessary. (If you think that this is sad, consider the alternative: You've stayed exactly where you have lived for all or most of your life, and remain closely intertwined with the exact same group of friends you've had for years and years, never exploring life beyond the tristate area or dating options that don't involve people who have already slept with half of your incestuous social group. Is this really preferable? No. The answer to that question is no.)

So where do you find a friend? What is a friend? How do you friend? Up until your early twenties, friendships were something that just happened naturally. You kind of met people, and suddenly there were a million and one circumstances in which you kept happening to see them, and always an opportunity to make things easier on everyone by adding drinking or costume parties into the mix. Nothing was defined too clearly, there was little pressure, and you didn't even have to arrange the times you saw each other. Something was going on all the time that you could attend or get involved in. You never needed a process of having to initiate repeated, prolonged contact. Now, think about it: You
literally have to ask someone out on a friend date. You need to work through an entire process to go from meeting a total stranger in some adult context like work, public transportation, or masquerade orgy to making that person someone you could invite to your wedding some day—and the process must be followed fairly strictly so you avoid looking like a giant creeper. The steps to attaining adult friendship, at least in my humble experience, are as follows:

1.
 Meet a new person in a nonthreatening but still legitimate setting, such as happy hour, a meet-up group, or work.

2.
 Begin a conversation with her over something benign and universal, such as a mutual project you may be working on, your dislike of the music that is currently playing, or your disapproval of that woman over there's choice to wear leggings as pants.

3.
 Have a discussion that incites within you an overwhelming feeling of OMG we are fucking soul mates, I bet she hates Keira Knightley just as much as I do.

4.
 Not know what to do with yourself because this isn't like trying to pick up someone in a bar for the ostensible purpose of going out on a date/having sex, which has an established protocol.

5.
 Be unsure as to whether or not it would be weird to propose hanging out.

6.
 Feel as though you might want to clarify that this isn't a
sexual thing, that you just kind of want to become super good friends with her because she's awesome.

7.
 Clarify that there's nothing wrong with wanting to date her, and if you were interested in her gender, you would totally be down to asking her out, and you're not a bigot or anything.

8.
 Realize that you may be overthinking this, and you probably don't need to clarify that your interests are purely platonic in the first place.

9.
 Continue the discussion and become, as the minutes pass, all the more convinced that you two are totally meant to be friends.

10.
 Muster up the courage and quell the small voice within you that is whispering about how much of a weirdo you must come across as.

11.
 Ask if she wants to hang out sometime. (This step is made infinitely easier if you are both a bit lubricated socially, and have had enough drinks to be in that phase where everyone you meet is your new potential best friend. If that's the case, both of you will promptly tell each other how wonderful the other one is, how excited you are to hang out, and how honored you would be if she would be the godparent to your firstborn child.)

12.
 Get a tepid-to-excited agreement to your offer to hang out.

13.
 Actually hang out.

14.
 Start working her into your schedule; depending on her involvement in your life (such as a coworker or neighbor), this may either be extremely easy or nearly impossible. The number of adult friendships that have been rendered unfeasible through conflicting schedules is incalculable but undoubtedly very high.

15.
 Potentially start a new and wonderful friend-romance with your friend-partner found in the tense throes of adulthood.

The thing about developing friendships as an adult, though, is how awkward the first steps of solidifying the bond can be (even after you've jumped the first hurdle of opening conversation with a complete stranger). No one really warns you that, when you're outside the social beginner mode, which is being in constant proximity with people your own age who share many of your more obscure interests, developing an emotional connection with someone is a difficult process. Much as with starting a romantic relationship, it is something that has to be eased into (tee-hee) and treated with a kind of cautious respect, lest you seem like a crazy, friend-starved hyena who has latched onto his emotional femur and begun gnawing away with impunity.

There is a delicate balance to be struck, one in which you are neither too invested in his attention, nor infuriatingly flaky about following up with things. The idea is that you are now a responsible grown-up who is capable of being emotionally forth-right
and reliable, and yet no one likes the feeling of being friends with a walking day planner who wants to rush into the “close enough to expect frequent calls” stage of things. And unless you work with each other, the chances of things just evolving naturally are slim to none. You aren't seeing each other all the time, you don't have a ton of mutual people to discuss and dislike together, and your day-to-day activities are likely unrelated. (Hell, even your incomes are probably pretty disparate, which in adulthood may be as strenuous on a friendship as having sex with someone's sibling.) If you are meeting people just while you're “out,” the “keeping things up” process is going to be an uphill struggle.

And yet, even when a friendship manifests perfectly, those around you will often still have trouble accepting that adult BFF-dom can start in the most unexpected of places. Speaking personally, I once made a very good friend while out in a bar. She happened to be on a date that was going particularly sour, and being that I am a selfless person with a soul and a moral compass that can only be compared to those of Jesus Christ himself, I swooped in and gave her someone to talk to outside of the socially obtuse and rather lecherous man who was foisting himself upon her at every turn. I am fully aware that this puts me firmly in the running for Greatest Cockblock in Human History, but I feel I did the right thing, given the circumstances. In any case, before the night was through, we had talked at length over
drinks and exchanged numbers, only to end up becoming very good friends. For us, the process seemed as natural as it was serendipitous. Sure, you don't go out to bars cruising for friends every day, but when it happens, it's certainly a nice surprise.

But many of our friends remarked on how strange it was that we met
just like that.
They expressed a vague fascination with our ability to strike up a friendship with a total stranger with whom we had, at least at first, nothing concrete in common. It seems like the kind of thing that happens in movies, perhaps, where everyone is attractive and charismatic and full of interesting quips about any situation, but not in real life. To us, our friendship was a pleasant bonus on an otherwise average night out. To many around us, it was a vague yet palpable admission of something more sinister. (Most of the more judgmental people are likely assuming that we met on some message board for people who have some horrifying fetish, and, frankly, I'll let their minds wander.)

Whether we realize it or not, though, almost immediately after finishing our schooling (and the cocoon of forced interaction that goes along with it) we become fairly closed-minded about what a friend group is supposed to consist of. Aside from the idea that there are a finite amount of sources from which to draw your meaningful relationships, there is also a definite caste system that begins forming around you, outside of which you are not really meant to socialize. What kind of job you have, how old
you are, what kind of money you're making, what part of the city you live in—they are all invisible checkmarks down a list that hovers above all our heads, telling us exactly the kind of people we are expected to be hanging out with.

And even if you are the kind of person who doesn't allow these things to influence your decision making when it comes to potential buddies, that doesn't mean that everyone else isn't going to be making these subtle judgments. You only have to stray several standard deviations away from your professional and lifestyle lane to realize how strict everyone else's social code may be. If you are working a prestigious, high-pressure job, making a good amount of money, chances are you aren't going to maintain your friendship with the guy who works at the coffee shop and uses his spare money to buy fancy whiskey and new Moleskines for his tone poems. While it can sometimes be based in practical things—such as people who work in food service having nearly opposite hours to those who work office jobs—a huge part of it stems from people putting themselves into small niches of society and believing, on some level, that leaving that niche would constitute a kind of betrayal. We can recognize that it's stupid and petty, and yet so many of us end up participating in it without even realizing what we're doing.

Of course, there will always be the good friends from our past with whom we remain in close contact—but that takes just as much effort, if not more so, than meeting new people while out
and about in our adult lives. If you're not willing to put in the time for regular Skype sessions, to make treks to their important events, and/or just to visit them from time to time, or to keep up with what they're doing in life with genuine interest and care, they are not going to magically stay in your life forever. We all know the friends who, despite being awesome parts of our life at one point, made absolutely zero effort to continue being there for all of life's changes and events and thus sort of faded into nothingness. If you want to be able to overcome the naturally different directions you're being pulled in by life choices, geographic location, and social status, you're going to have to make it work yourself.