I Want My Friends To Impose On Me

Never hesitate to call me, to talk to me, to impose yourself on me.

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

It’s hard to make friends as an adult.

When you’re in school, it’s much easier to make friends, of course. You’re shoved in a building with the same people five days a week for most of the year, so you’re bound to find a few people with whom you share some level of weirdness. Inevitably, you become friends.

Maybe not friends forever, but still. These are people that you often spend a dozen years with, including most of the worst years in terms of awkwardness and growth. You may grow together, you may grow apart, but you are stuck with each other, so friendships are more or less inevitable. Even those who are unpopular almost always have a few friends.

When you become an adult, it becomes much harder to make friends. In college, you may or may not share classes with the same people each semester, so it can be a bit more difficult. Still, there are common areas where you can often find people who share your interests, and there are clubs and extracurriculars that can give you more opportunities there too.

Still, when you wind up at a job, whether out of high school or out of college, it all goes downhill. Work is a good place to make “work friends,” but most of the time, you wouldn’t hang out with them outside of work. Even if you would, there are often power imbalances that make that sort of thing difficult — you might love your manager, but socializing outside of work can be difficult in many ways.

So, you are often stuck with the people you were friends with in high school and college whether you like it or not.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course — people who have seen you grow, seen you in your awkward puberty and weird teenage years, can be some of the most ride-or-die friends you’ll ever have. They’ve seen you at your worst so many times that they know what to expect, and they know you’ve seen them at their worst in turn.

In the same way, people you met in college, over a pick-up game of basketball or D&D, perhaps, often share the interests you developed as a young adult and nurtured throughout your later adulthood. When you discover that you love board games or…