A few years ago, I met Li Dali, a screenwriter in Beijing, because of his work. When I think about the first time we met, it was like a love at first sight blind date scene in a romantic comedy movie, but without the "love". We brought our wives to dinner, and the friendship came out of nowhere.
We all like Leslie Cheung's "The Wind Continues to Blow", and we all love the same line in "Across the Four Seas". By the time the scorpions were served, we could have done it so that you could say the last sentence, and I could take the next sentence. So much so that the wives had to forcefully interject, "Hey! You two good friends, are you finished?"
Watching Lee and his wife walk toward the MRT on Line 2, a thought flashed through my mind for no apparent reason: If I had known Lee and his wife in college, he would have been the best man at my wedding, right? That was four years ago, and we've gotten together four times since then, and we've become somewhat of a friend, 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 college, the kind of buddies you think of first when you're in a pinch, are fewer and farther between. The increasingly tight schedules and changes in priorities have made people more and more critical of their friends.
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 twenties is basically over. Now, you can only go to make some nodding acquaintances, or even can only be called acquaintances. And once you meet a major change in your life, like a move or a divorce, you suddenly realize how much you lack friends.
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 photo, and you find yourself more alone than ever." Now 56 years old, Luo Gao laments, "I couldn't possibly find another woman 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 his peers that the closer people approach middle age, the fewer people they make friends with, and the closer their existing friends become.
She thinks it's because there's an alarm clock inside all of us that goes off *** at a certain point in our lives, say when we turn 30. It's a reminder that life is passing us by and to stop socializing and focus on the here and now. She says, "You'll start to give your full attention to the things that are emotionally most important to you, so you're no longer interested in going to all the dinners and parties, and you're more likely to spend time with your kids." The scene.
But with the changes in the external environment of society, it has become more and more difficult to fulfill these three conditions. According to Wang Qianfan, a professor at Renmin University's Department of Sociology, this is why so many people meet their lifelong friends during their college years.