It's hard to make friends as you get older. You either end up falling back towards old friends who you've known since you were younger or towards casual acquaintances who you might share a drink with. Or maybe you start a hobby and you meet people doing this. Maybe they're still casual acquaintances though. Maybe they only want to talk... about the hobby. Sigh.
I make a lot of friends as an academic. Or, maybe I get along with lots of people and we see each other at occasional conferences and on social media. With some, I find myself wrapped up in an extended conversation about an academic topic - or - I find they're not interested in extending the conversation outside of the limits of shop-talk. We never stray far from that. After years of talking, should we be ashamed to admit that we just don't know much else about each other? Do I send them a birthday card? Or are we just each others' eternal sounding boards? (There are worse things to be.) People stay at arm's length.
I never really did casual friendships. The deep or intimate relationships, the friendships where you find yourself texting the other person randomly mid-week and it connects to some old conversation you both had - these are the ones I have always sought. I figure that I'm always too intense for anything else. You call each other randomly to vent and you get each other. They cry and you lift them up. You carry each others' hearts along as you grow older. Your threads are woven as chosen family. They're golden friendships.
I've had the luck of having a couple of these friendships inside and outside of academia. I suppose I'm having a dry spell now for the first time in many years and it's a bit lonely. I remember really really connecting with some friends in grad school and one friend when I was a postdoc, but circumstances eventually shifted. People move or get new jobs. Maybe you discover that the person who you confided in doesn't need you as much you need them. Maybe that's gradual, but maybe it's abrupt. It's painful either way.
The hardest relationships to mourn have been those where I have let someone in completely. They were as aware of all my preoccupations as I was aware of their anxieties. It was easy enough to drift between personal struggles, humor, and then into questions about topics in linguistics. Is it healthy to make deep friendships with people you also have close professional ties with?
We're supposed to shrug here and pretend that we're not hurt when these types of relationships end. At least for my (former) close academic friends, I have this weird, robotic sense that I shouldn't miss them or that I shouldn't mourn things changing. What if I do though? We don't call it a lost love, as we so often reserve that word for other people, but really, that's what it is.
I find myself questioning what makes things persist or perish? I have a tendency to be a close listener with others and try to give people advice. So, I have ended up serving the role of "mental health pipeline" with past friends. When the relationship drifts or ends, was it because I no longer wanted to serve this role? Or was this the only reason that people wanted to talk with me to begin with? Am I loyal to a fault?
There's a myth that introverts don't need people as much as extroverts do. It's been my experience that we often need people more, actually, but we value quality over quantity. I'm prone to deep thinking and deep feeling, to people with questions. And when things end, I can't help falling back into old tropes about how hard it was to make friends when I was younger, back when it was supposed to be easier.
