| | Making new friends is a funny thing. It's so hard to know what the best approach is--probably because it differs from person to person, and is context dependent. Someone was asking how I liked it here at U of T, and one of the big differences is that I have to make my own friends--for about 9 years prior, I could kinda just assimilate friends by osmosis that Peter Lee had made. And since Peter was so good at the whole social thing, I never really needed to be. But now I'm 'on my own' so to speak, and it's a really strange thing to *want* to make new friends. Part of what is so strange is that I either don't trust my social intuitions, or don't like what they tell me.
Back in kindergarten it was easy. All you had to do is ask someone, pretty much anyone, 'do you want to be my friend?' and you'd get back 'okay!' And then you'd feel comfortable joining that person to play with blocks whenever.
Then, a few years later you start to realize that just doesn't happen much. Nobody really explicitly asks people to be their friend. That kind of explicit seeking isn't the normal way to make friends, so you infer, maybe it's because there are norms AGAINT it. It's just weird and off-putting. But that's fine, you've been with the same class of people for a few years now, so you have a bunch of friends already. And even if classes merge or new people show up, you see everone pretty much everyday at school, and just through normal interactions you get a sense of what people are like and very naturally start hanging out with the people you get along with best, first at school, then as you become better friends, elsewhere as well--birthday parties, etc.
But then, the world keeps getting bigger. Schools get larger and larger. You stop having a group of people you see all day every day. Life becomes a series of brief interactions with virtual strangers--to see your friends you have to actively plan to see them. But wait, how to make new friends now? The explicit approach has seeemed socially awkward ever since kindergarten. The 'regular interaction' framework that replaced the explicit approach has now diffused away once the artifical constraints of childhood were removed. That is to say that the world is so big and full of options that even if you kinda get along with someone, the chances of running into them again randomly are low. But how can you expect much better than 'kinda get along' in the brief and transitory interactions of everyday life? But it seems like kinda getting along is often too tenuous a relation to arrange to do something else again (it amounts to the kindergarten 'explicit approach').
One thing people do is to try and put back some regular-interaction constraints. Clubs and common interest groups are one way. But it's based on an activity, then all of your interactions are just that activity and you don't really get to know anyone. And if it's not activity-based, what IS it based on and what do you do? Well, okay, so it's not really that big of a problem, depending on the activity and the group of people. One thing I find kinda funny is being the graduate philosophy student union 'social committee'. Nobody else was going to do it, so I figured why not? I just never considered myself particularly social such that I would head/constitute a committee, but I guess that's just context/group relative. Well, I suppose I can do what I would normally do, and just let everyone else know.... play board/card games, go dancing, watch movies....
Anyway, I recently resorted to the explicit method, with email as the mode. It seemed to work okay: "It is always nice when someone wants to be your friend as opposed to your enemy!" For some reason I find the fact that I just explicitly asked in this manner really amusing.
I suppose there's no easy first order analysis that can lead to an optimal strategy. Friendship and making friends are funny things.
|
| | Posted 3/18/2007 2:32 PM - 8 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
