The Law of the Diminishing Friend Group
One of the most common issues explored in therapy is that mysterious inevitable exodus of friends that begins subtly after a certain post-college age and continues all throughout one’s life. Especially in a pandemic, college friends marry, work friends move away, and childhood friends move on and may not want to be in your wedding.
A Bruise on the Hearts of the Left-Behind
The further one steps away from college, or any other social organizing principle, the smaller the diameter of their trusted friend circle tends to shrink. The commonalities that once made you close in the first place (being single, needing roommates, finding parties, being into the same books, movies and music) may dissipate and even vanish over time. People change politics, decide to marry and have kids after all, and grow to be more materialistic than we ever could have imagined, and may even become unrelatable. As we mature, we have less energy for frivolity, less patience for superficial fluff and more desire for the raw intensity of pure friendship. What we also unconsciously fear in losing our friends is the fear of losing that piece of us that goes away with them; that piece that we used to be with them, the one that laughed easily.
Get Offline
The antidote to such ambiguous loss is to move. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Nobody is judging you because Nobody is too busy judging themselves. Join a band and jam. Take a pottery class and try a wacky glaze. Go to a meet-up in Central Park where people need people. Fail at a cooking class and laugh. In the face of isolation, the key is to move, safely, and to keep moving and growing and maybe even be a little curious about why you have to be so good at everything you do, anyway. Your efforts to expand your social network may seem to follow the law of diminishing returns, but this will even out in time; initial fluff may just morph into real conversation, and when you’re really lucky, commonality.
Be brave. Be vulnerable.
There is this notion that expressing vulnerability is too heavy or makes you a social vampire. Friend, that’s just status quo to beat you down; that’s not true. People crave to go deeper, and when you open up yourself, empathy is induced in the other and people feel closer to you. But don’t just dump all of your drama and run away; own your struggle and talk about how you’re working through it. You can keep it light at first, while you vet each other’s personalities, but slowly reveal yourself to the world and see what returns are possible.
