For most of my adult life, I’ve never really had that close, everyday type of friendship with someone other than a romantic partner. I joke that I don’t have any friends – but it’s more of an uncomfortable cover-up and slight admission of truth than it is a joke. Way back in high school, I abandoned a lot of my friends in favor of spending time with my girlfriend. Perhaps abandoned is too strong a word, but they certainly took a backseat to her and us. She and I stayed together through college, which meant I didn’t form a lot of new friendships – I didn’t need to. When we broke up, I leaned heavily on a few of my old friends, but almost immediately met someone else, my wife, and once again didn’t need to develop those friendships. Early in our marriage, we had a mix of friends (hers and mine) but as time went on, mine faded (for various reasons) and hers became the primary friend group. After the divorce, she moved away and I stayed friends with that group. We have a never-ending 11-person group text that I struggle to keep up with. In the early days of the pandemic, we did group zoom calls. Back when I still lived in the area, one or two of the guys and I would go to concerts together, and for a brief while one of my friends from that group and I would go to dinner ever couple of weeks. These are my friends.
Also after the divorce, I developed an entirely different set of friends – women I dated and got along with but weren’t a good fit romantically. There were a lot of them. The very first person I dated became one of my best friends – we talked every day, would go on hikes or runs, and go out to shows. When I got engaged, the friends once again took a backseat as we started planning our life together. She was a transplant to the Philadelphia area and most of her friends were in other cities. The plan was to build out our group in Philly and Bucks (my friends along with some new friends), and then travel to see her friends. That plan was short-lived. She left and moved away – and the best friend, the woman I first dated, sided with the ex and stopped talking to me. In a matter of days, I lost the two people I was closest with. Like a wounded animal, I felt the need to go away too – hide somewhere, heal, figure things out. I moved down to Memphis (where I had no friends) in hope of getting a new start – on everything. It was the TV show Cheers in reverse – I wanted to go where nobody knew my name.
Making friends as an adult is difficult. I’m fairly likable (at least I think so). I’m open and willing to meet new people. I can hold my own in a conversation. But it’s so much harder than when I was in first grade and could walk up to someone and say “hey, wanna be friends?” Say that as an adult and people just look at you funny. We carry around too much baggage to trust so innocently. We often suspect an angle. We’re guarded and jaded and often don’t have time for new relationships. Adults can be stupid, if not short-sighted.
Feeling at a loss on where or how to start making friends, I went with how I had been making new friends the past few years…. I wasn’t interested in dating (I honestly couldn’t stomach the thought of it), but I polished off the profile anyway. I tend to get along better with women than I do men. I don’t think I speak the guy’s guy language very well. I don’t care much about sports or video games or bro-ing it up. If I avoid my friends’ group text, it’s because I just don’t fit in to the conversation very often. That’s why the dating profile works – always a fresh start. The conversation is the thing. There were those women who felt I was meeting them under a false pretense – even though I was pretty clear, if not on the profile, in the early communications, that I was looking for friends more than anything else. Conversation was crucial, and more often than not, the “date” was a dud – no spark, no friendship.
That said, there were a few women with whom I became good friends. But… when the world went into lock down, so did I. I moved to Memphis partially in hopes of developing myself. I had been practicing being the person I wanted to find. I had been practicing being alone and finding ways to enjoy my solitude. The shut-down was an extension of that practice. I was writing and reading and exercising. I went on long walks and solo road trips. March through June were intense months of personal, inward growth. However, the math of being unemployed and paying rent wasn’t working and I gave notice at my apartment that I’d be moving out in September or October. At about the same time, my friend Stacy and I agreed that it’d be nice to spend more time together before I left. We started hanging out almost every night, chilling, listening to music going for walks around town. We took a few road trips down to Mississippi for Sunday blues or a weekend getaway. We walked her dogs in the park and went out for drinks at outdoor bars (you could still do that in Tennessee). She came with me on the morning I had to get the rental truck to move and we had a tear-filled goodbye. About a week later, she flew up to PA to visit for a few days – it helped with the settling in. Since then, we’ve talked almost every day, and we usually video chat at night.
Compared to my life here, she lives a very different life down in Tennessee. She has a handful of friends that she sees during the week – people that she’ll visit and hang out with. Being single during a pandemic poses some unique challenges: we constantly have to balance safety vs. seeing other human beings – physical health vs. mental health. Sequestering can be lonely. Stacy knows she needs to see other human beings. Last night she went out with guy she recently reconnected with. They used to hang out and go out dancing with a group a friends. Getting the text that began with a superficial “how’s it going?” followed by I’m heading out bummed me out. I don’t know anyone here and have nowhere to go. I felt like the kid with the broken leg watching his friends outside playing. Moreover, I had gotten used to our nightly conversations and I had gotten out of practice from the solitary things I had been doing in Memphis. I took her decision to hang out with someone else as a personal affront. I moped around the house. I thought about how she’d be unhappy if the roles were reversed (she has said she’s not looking forward to the day I branch out). I was bummed.
Suddenly, I was triggered back to how my engagement ended. My ex accused me of relying on her for all of my happiness. In moving to Memphis, I was determined not to do that again, and here I was – repeating the same “mistake” of relying too heavily on someone else for my social and emotional needs. Men tend to do this. Our social circles are small. We don’t call each other up or check in on each other or gossip. In May of 2019, Harpers Bazaar published an article about emotional gold diggers titled “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden.” It’s true. Since July, I had come to rely on my friend Stacy for all of my emotional needs. I felt the full weight of that reliance last night when she went out. I suddenly felt abandoned and unable to fall back on the tools I thought I had been developing during those months of isolation. I felt resentful. I felt petty. When we texted a little later, I was cold and dismissive. This isn’t me at my best – though I’ve never claimed to be above pettiness.
When Stacy and I first met I told her I was worried about what happens to a person when they pull up roots. I didn’t want to become a tumbleweed, but it felt like it might be inevitable. Today as we talked things over I pulled out a book of essays from Stephen Dunn – a book I gave to Stacy for Christmas. In a personal essay on gambling (one that I examined here), Dunn talks about how the true gamblers are willing to go all the way up to the edge. He says, “the great gamblers, and there are not many, don’t need anything. They simply wish to prevail. And we know how dangerous people are who don’t need anything. The purity of leverage.” Like Dunn, I’m not that kind of gambler. I too am “full of commonplace desire mixed with modest means.” Pulling up roots and becoming more self-reliant, for me, felt like a dangerous step towards not needing anything. I hated that I needed Stacy and she wasn’t there. I hated that I needed anyone. I heard my ex-fiancee criticizing me and calling me needy. I heard the author of the article calling me an emotional gold digger. It sucked.
At my age, I feel like I should have figured this out by now. Emotionally healthy adults have various sources of interests, friends, and fulfillment. I was doing fine on my own until I started investing time in someone else. I tend to give everything away – it’s a different type of gambling, a different type of currency. I go all in because it seems like it’s the only way to take risks, pursue discovery, and maybe find joy – and also because I find other people to be more interesting than I find myself. Unfortunately, that means not hedging my bets, not spreading my chips thin on lots of people, and pulling back on my investments in self. Last night, I felt like I had failed in my efforts to more fully develop myself. Last night I became painfully aware of how small my circle is – how reliant on one person I can be. I try to justify it as a sexy type of vulnerability – someone who recognizes that we’re all connected and need each other. Truth be told, I’m not looking to be fully independent – to be the one who doesn’t need anything – to be the one who can always walk away. I believe in, but fail at, effective dependency. Towards the end of the essay Dunn writes, “The realm of the unknown is contiguous to the realm of failure. The gambler, deep down, has made a pact with failure. He’ll accept it because it has interesting neighbors.” I invest deeply in a few people because I hope to find, along with authenticity, interesting neighbors. Sometimes I fail and effective dependency looks a little too much like regular old dependency – and then I think to myself, “I should probably get a few more friends.”