I was talking with a friend of mine on staff with IV in Charlotte who's wife just had their second kid. We were talking about the challenges of trying to have legitimate peer friendships while juggling work (in our case, very relational work) and growing demands of family.I think that my relational hey-day was probably college. When else do you have that kind of incidental time with people all doing the exact same thing as you?
The two single years in between college and marriage were harder places to find community Even in a church where there were lots of other single twenty-somethings, we were all scurrying about trying to make our way through degree programs or getting started with this new work thing.
Post-college, I think that the easiest time relationally was married, no kids.
In some ways, making friends when married got more complicated. The question wasn't just if I clicked with a guy. It was I had to click with the guy and I had to be able to at least tolerate the wife. And then my wife had to click with the wife and at least be able to tolerate the husband. Fortunately, we worked through this gauntlet with a number of great couples while in Richmond, Va, particularly at West End Pres.
But I think it got easier for me after I got married because for the most part women are just better at initiating with one another. Marriage for me meant that I got invited/tagged along to a lot more events, more parties, more places where people were hanging out.
Maybe I was just lame before and now that I had a super-cool wife, I got to ride her coat tails. This is one perfectly reasonable explanation (and perhaps I need to just deal with it). But I think that at least part of the reason is that men struggle to initiate with one another and with women...well, it's gets complicated and messy sometimes, but at least they get things off the ground relationally.
Then kids come along, of course, and they act as 6-pound, 8-oz wrecking balls through your social life. If the kid has to be in bed by 7:30, you've got to be there, too. There's laws about that sort of thing.
And now at ages 6, 4, and 3, our kids are starting to enter into the world of birthday parties and 2.5 soccer games every weekend, so our discretionary time is approaching nil.
I'm in a season right now of being very grateful for some close friends but also feeling how busy life gets and how hard it is to maintain friendships. Kelly and I had dinner with some friends last weekend. We started the e-mail thread trying to find a date back in April. That's six months, people. That's ridiculous.
I've always rolled my eyes at some people's celebration of relationships that they don't bother to keep up with but "can always pick up as if we had just talked yesterday." Seriously? What kind of community is that? It always sounded lame and shallow and lonely to me. But I'm starting to see the value of it. Maybe I'm just selling out.
Or maybe I need my wife to pass along some more pointers on how to get invited to the cool parents parties. I hear some of the really wild don't close down until 8:00 or even 8:30.
1 comment:
Although I can't relate to the post-college or married social difficulties of your post, I have definitely experienced a bit of the "close friends who don't talk much" issue. While I agree that it is no way to form community, it can be a valuable resource to have in an uncertain and quickly changing social environment.
I went to chicago over fall break to see 4 of these friends. 3 were from a camp I worked at this summer (one who i was a camper with 4 years ago) and one from my study abroad in Jordan. They were all people who I was in proximity with at one point, but the 500+ miles usually between us made it difficult to keep up with. However, we all picked our relationships back up as if we hadn't seen each other in weeks instead of nearly a year with some of them. The weekend was a constant stream of solid conversations that took advantage of the short amount of time we had together, but also included new shared experiences to build the relationship on in the future.
I agree that these sorts of friendships are not good to carry on at home, but if I get the job I am applying for I will be moving countries every 3 years or so and need friendships like this that are not geographically centered or always a constant presence (to complement the constant recreation of relationships in each new locale).
Slightly off topic from the general idea of the post i know, but i thought that one issue you brought up was really interesting.
ps - I hear you are teaching about the trinity this weekend, can't wait!
-Dack
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