Why is it hard to make friends after thirty?
A few years ago, I met Li Dali, a screenwriter in Beijing, for work. When I first met him, it was like a love-at-first-sight blind date in a romantic comedy movie, but without the "love". We brought our respective wives to dinner, and the friendship came out of nowhere.
Since then we have been together four times. We're somewhat friends with each other, but not quite. We'd like to deepen our friendship a little more, but life always gets in the way.
It's not uncommon for us to be like that. When you hit your 30s and 40s, there are a lot of new faces that come into your life through work, kids, and even Twitter. But the really close and good friends, the kind of old friends you made in your college days, the kind of buddies you think of first in times of crisis, are fewer and farther between.
No matter how many friends you've made, there's a sense of destiny that lingers in the back of your mind: that phase of making friends in your teens and 20s is basically over. Now, you're stuck with nodding acquaintances, or even people you can only call acquaintances.
And once you hit a major change in your life, like a move or a divorce, you suddenly realize how short on friends you are.
When that feeling hits, Zhao Shanshan can barely breathe. She is the executive director of an educational foundation in Beijing, and had just moved to Shanghai from Beijing a few months earlier. As she prepared to host her 39th birthday party, she realized she simply couldn't get a table full of guests, despite having 857 QQ friends and 509 Weibo followers. She said, "Thinking back to the various stages of making friends in my life, I realized that most of my friends were definitely made during my high school years, and when I was working my first job."
Luo Gao, a psychiatrist working in Liaoning province, realized after his divorce in his forties that he had been focusing on his career and family for years, and that his friends had faded out of his address book. Dr. Luo says, "It's as if all of a sudden, your wife disappears from the family photos, and you find yourself alone like never before." Now 56 years old, Luo Gao laments, "I couldn't possibly find a woman again even if I went to learn square dancing; I'd rather meet a few old buddies, raise my sorghum wine, and come on! The first time I've seen this, I've seen a lot of it.
Zhao Lihua, a professor of psychology at Peking University, found in a study of her peers that the closer they got to middle age, the fewer people they made friends with, and the closer they became to their existing friends.
She attributes this to the fact that we all have an alarm clock inside us that *** works hard at a certain point in our lives, say when we turn 30. It's a reminder that life is easy, so stop mingling around and focus on the here and now. She says, "You'll start to be fully engaged in the things that are emotionally most important to you, so you're no longer interested in going to all kinds of dinners and parties, and instead you're more likely to spend your time with your kids."
In the workplace, close interpersonal contact is harder to maintain because coworkers change so often. Last year, Liu Gliu Zi, a writer for the hit drama "Legend of Concubine Zhen Huan," met a woman named Precious during the show's pilot, and at work, they got so close that it barely took them long to learn about each other's fitness and dietary habits. When Liu Sizi moved to ask for a cup of coffee to refresh herself, she didn't even have to say anything, and Precious was already handing over a cup.
"But once the pilot was over, it was hard to stay close without that day-to-day contact." Streaming Violet said. The girls do meet up now and then to come out to Sanlitun for a tonic, but gone are the days when they would stroll together at 789 from afternoon until evening, then dive headfirst into the Nanluoguxiang bar.
Sparks fly in the workplace because of the competition, so people learn to hide their vulnerabilities and quirks from their peers. (Dealing with People sun) Professor Wang Qianfan said, "Friendships at work always have a transactional feel to them, and it's hard to say when socialization ends and true friendship is able to begin."
Promotions in the workplace and how much you get paid can also be troublesome. Mr. Zuo Xiao, an artist who lives in Songzhuang, Beijing, says, "If your friends make too much or too little more than you, it can feel weird." He recently invited a promising couple into his circle, but soon friends were disgusted with the couple because of their addiction to talking about money.
Adding children to the mix would make the muddle even harder to work out. Suddenly you're surrounded by a new circle of friends made up of parents, but the emotional ties of that circle are better than nothing at best. As comedian Guo Degang said at a performance in Tianqiao, "I spend the whole day with a bunch of grandchildren with kids, but I don't have dinner parties with them because it's not me who wants to get to know them, it's the kids who stick together. Why they stick together, that's no slip of the tongue, purely because they're all kids."
Bei Zhicheng, 44, a real estate businessman in Beijing, and his wife became friends with another pair of parents because of their children, who, at the time, were still good friends. But then the children cut ties. When the two families decided to have a kebab in their yard, Mr. Bay's son said, "Can I have my other friends over?"
External factors are not the only obstacles. Past 30, people experience a shift in their dating mentality, where the self-discovery of earlier years becomes self-awareness, so you choose the friends you surround yourself with more selectively.Ma Boyong, author of the 2004 book The Crisis of the Tudor: How to Make Friends in Adulthood, said, "When I was young, I made friends just because a glass of Tsingtao Pure Life would be on the table, while as adults, our the table is raised a lot."
Mr. Feng Tang, a strategic investment consultant living in Hong Kong, has even developed a fun percentage-based friend scoring system, with 100 being the best friend. When a new friend behaves in a way that annoys him or has no loyalty, Mr. Fung mentally deducts points for him. Nine times out of ten, he says, a new friend ends up with a score of 30 to 60 and then gets the hell out, which is just a little better than an acquaintance.
Feng said, "You meet a nice person, but once they don't call back once, drop to 90 points. Twice, immediately 50 points. If they're late within the first month of meeting them, another 10 points. But then there are people who get extra points for proper speech and behavior."
"By this stage of your life, you've encountered a lot of tiresome, even failed, relationships and are starting to struggle with taking responsibility and getting serious about your work, family and established friendships. So you become more cautious and careful about leaning in to make new friends."