What kind of friender are you?

Dear frienders and friendeds,

I am also interested in Julia's question about the optimal number of friends, but I am constitutionally limited in the actual number of friends I can have, so it's kind of a moot point for me. I am never going to be the kind of person with 900 facebook friends, so I will always be partial to philosophies of friendship that emphasize quality over quantity. However, I do think that there are some sociable people who can have both (like my grade school best friend, whom some of you might have met), but that it takes a certain inborn disposition to be able to balance the two, and it's one that draws people to you rather than vice versa, so that the burden of maintaining the friendship falls disproportionately on other people and spares you. Alex has always seemed to me better at making friends than most people, so maybe she can explain how it's done.

There are many friendship styles that interest me, but what most fascinates me is the serial monogamist best-friender--the person who has extremely intense friendships with one person at a time, throws herself completely into this relationship, kind of like Julia's boyfriend-obsessives (I hope you were not referring to me, ahem), and then abruptly "breaks up" with the person over some petty thing, and moves on to throw herself into a new all-consuming friendship. What drives this kind of behavior?

I am a possessive friender, which Alex tells me is the result of being an only child and being unwilling to share my things, including friends, even into adulthood, so I can sympathize with the serial monogamist best-friender's desire to keep her friends separate. But the appeal of the single "best friend" seems to fade for most women by late adolescence, though it's the source of a lot of very amusing drama before then. When you are nine, and you want to build snow forts, there are a lot of nine-year-olds to share that interest with. But when you are 29, and you have a career, a family, and a fairly differentiated personality and set of interests, it's probably hard to find the one person who will satisfy all your social desires. So why are there still women who try? (Maybe men too, but I know nothing about male friendship.) And by 29, haven't they already had such a long series of intense best-friendships that fell through that they see that new ones are also doomed to fail?

I also suspect that the obsessive boyfrienders of Julia's description are people of this tendency, who have channeled their desires into having boyfriends who are everything to them rather than friends. This is probably more widely accepted since the idea that love makes one out of two or some such thing is one that floats around in our culture, but it seems to be common sensically true (and also, Edward Laumann agrees) that very few couplings can last without social support and restraint. Possibly some of the drama of childhood best friendships is the result of their unrootedness in friendship networks--there is nothing at stake when I break up with my fellow snow fort builder when I am nine, except perhaps the snow fort in progress, whereas if I decided to break up with one of you, it would have unhappy repercussions for everyone else we are mutually friends with, so there are now more incentives to reconcile than in the past. Networks also help you stay in touch with people without direct communication, since mutual friends can convey what the other friend is up to, like when Friend 1 plans her wedding, but only tells Friend 2, leaving Friends 3 and 4 to find out indirectly (ahem!). So, maybe it doesn't matter how many friends you have per se, but rather how rooted in friendship networks you are--in other words, how many of your friends are friends with your other friends? This still doesn't explain the serial monogamist friender, who remains a freak of social nature in my book.

As to making friends in adulthood (have we all finally decided that we are adults? hurray!), I think it's 1) hard and 2) harder in DC, where everyone schmoozes all the time without any purpose in mind. (Amber, who also lives in DC, has talked about this problem with Belle.) I have met many people in DC while inebriated and consuming small cheeses on toothpicks, but, all told, I've made about one new friend, and that person befriended me. My mother was worried about this for a while, and would call me every week and ask if I'd made any new friends yet, but I haven't been that unhappy about it. For one thing, I think having a full-time job takes up way more time and mental energy than college classes did. I can see no one socially for an entire workweek and not even notice (though not because I work extremely hard, as those on gchat have noticed). I don't know if you all find your job situations similar. Moreover, I have Seb, and now Alex, and thanks to teh internets, I can remain closely-involved with my pre-adulthood friends (that would be you) in a way that suits me best anyway (I am not greatly in need of much physical hugging), so I haven't felt a great void in my life since moving here. If I did though, I'd probably be screwed, because it looks like the only way to meet people outside your job is through really lame shit like Oprah's book clubs and the gym, and my gym is full of middle-aged women with eating disorders. I know that all of you make friends at work, but I don't know how you manage this, because I am intimidated by everyone at my job and prefer to hide from them. So maybe I haven't given friendship in adulthood the kind of effort it requires, but I think my approach to avoiding it has worked ok so far.

And, finally, I think it's at least extremely difficult to be friends with men without the intercession of some kind of desire, but that doesn't mean that the presence of such tension must necessarily undermine or undo that friendship. Much as I like a little eros in my education, I like some of it in my friendships as well. When Harry Met Sally is stupid--just because your intentions are ambiguous or change over time doesn't mean you have to act on every desire that arises, or choose between jumping into bed with someone and never speaking to them. Why can't some friendships be left complicated or incommensurate?

--Rita

On second thought, I should add that, while I have made only one close friend in my post-college life, I have made many casual friends through my blog, which I guess is weird and untraditional, but amazingly useful for introverts.