Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Friday, Feb. 4, 2005. Where was I? Friendship, before I got so full of myself.
Friendship broadly and specifically. Now, as an adult, as a man, as an American. Marriage and. … Work and. … It’s a theme that could be developed in occasional Bricks.
I have no answers and not much in the way of conclusions. What I know is that friendship gets harder with age and with family. In the latter case, I mean a suburban American guy like myself has a harder time making friends, keeping friends and even defining friends once he is married. He can have “couples'” friends, and if a parent, there’s always the parents of children’s friends (though I understand when the children move on for whatever reasons, the friendships also dissipate). Yet women, even likewise “encumbered” by marriage, continue to have friends for lunches, for poker.
But we Suburban American Guys of the late 20th and early 21st century don’t even have weekly poker games or meet for beers after work. More urban, working guys do, along with bowling league. But we S.A.G.’s go home, have dinner and crash with the TV before going to bed on most nights of our week, with weekends spent with the spouse we don’t see nearly enough of. Not to mention chores, errands and projects.
(I don’t know about including golf in this equation.)
The age part: As bachelors, we guys got together to avoid night after night of TV, for movies and sports, either watching or playing. Those friendships fade quickly and slowly, depending on circumstances, upon marriage. Thankfully, I still see or e-mail or phone old buddies with reassuring if not frequent regularity. Not like before, though.
As a corollary to that is these bachelor friends often were work friends for us SAGs. We Sags build our careers city to city, and work mates are those whom we know best and quickest. And they understand when I — or they — move to another job.
I realize this book — “Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Robert D. Putnam — covers this, and I do not want to replay its theme and arguments. Actually, I ought to find it and read it. Its theme probably is similar to this one.
So, I’ve been starting to work on this, building friendships. It’s slow. Confusing. You finally meet up at a coffee shop with somebody cool you’ve known for years yet it’s not been quite a friendship, and it’s in a way more awkward than a first date. With a date, you know precisely why you’re there (so don’t blush). Making a second such play-date is difficult, and often there’s not a third. (“Play-date,” like for a child, seems to fit this.)
Thank you, conscience, for reminding me about religious organizations and volunteer groups. Those are the groups from which I will draw for the play-date project. If folks in town take a call from me this year, having read this, they’ll see it as conniving? Maybe it’ll just be the first conversation topic. -30-
