Why It’s Hard to Make Connections After School

When moving to a new city, especially if you have a full-time job, it can be difficult to find meaningful connections. Sometimes, even in the city you grew up in it can be difficult to continue cultivating the friendships you’ve had for so long.

Over the past 6 months of being in Austin, I’ve been struggling to find strong connections. It’s not that I haven’t interacted with a lot of people – I have. Literally probably hundreds. Some in small group settings, some in larger group settings.

For some reason, I haven’t been able to form any connections as close as the ones that I previously had in my home town. It’s been a frustrating time. I’ve always been highly extroverted and I’ve also always been highly activity-centered. Back home I was constantly the one making plans with other people, getting groups together, etc. But it seems something has changed since then. What is it?

Here are the three conclusions I’ve come to:

The older you get the harder meaningful connections become

As we get older, there are several things that happen. One of which is that we become more selfish. The longer humans live, by nature, we become creatures of certain habits, likes, and dislikes. Two toddlers care only about having fun and could do just about anything to attain that goal. As we get older, we become more specific in what “fun” is to us. We develop different passions and even come to different conclusions on the meaning of life.

While people with different likes and dislikes can still form lasting friendships, living life together can often become more difficult simply because the activities and conversation that one enjoys is completely different from the other. Good friendships can thrive from opposition but there also has to be some resemblance of similarity for it to work.

Working full-time causes laziness

Huh?

There is a much stronger tendency when we are working full time to “reward” ourselves with empty evenings. We work hard and are exhausted at the end of the day and don’t want to invest or have to work to do anything else.

The thought of planning something these evenings seems out of the question. You have work the next day, you can’t plan to hang out. Maybe on the weekend if you plan enough in advance. Your focus is on your work and enjoying life, you don’t want to put extra energy into investing in things outside of that.

In school, everyone was on the same page. Everyone wanted to hang out so there was much more planning. For those who were public schooled, they saw each other during the day and had plenty of time to plan. Most weren’t invested fully in the work that they were doing for school and would plan anything to get out of having to put extra work into it. So what if they stayed up a little late the day before. What’s the worst that could happen?

You’ve gotta be going after something together

This one is the largest factor involved and ties the other two together. It’s what I’ve come to realize more and more as I’ve been working to connect here in Austin.

If you’re not going after something similar, if you’re not involved in the same activity or preparing for the same event, the connection is forced and will require much more work.

I’ve realized that with every deep connection that I can think of with my friends from my hometown, it was either because we grew up from birth doing the same things or I was connected to them when we were preparing for something we were both interested in.

Some of those things were theater, Ultimate frisbee, Orchestra, etc. We were working on the same projects. Because of this, the friendship came as a result of being together by force. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to be together, it’s just that whether we wanted to be or not we were. With Ultimate, it was a common interest we had. We would gather to do the activity and because of this, conversations would come about.

In Austin, I’ve been trying to form friendships simply for the reason of friendship. I’m not really living life with the people. When you’re not living part of life with someone, there seems to be a cap to the friendship. The more activities you do with someone, the deeper and easier it is for the friendship to blossom.

There are many other factors that go into forming strong, lasting friendships, but really it’s a never-ending subject that is different or every person. These are a few of the things that I have noticed as I’ve been pursuing friendship but it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

My recommendation to you (and myself if I’m being honest), is to stop being lazy in the evenings. Start planning events for other people to join, and start going to things and signing up for things that will force you to be with people at least once a week. Once you’ve done that, find people you think you might connect with outside of it and do another activity with them. Get to know them in as many settings as possible.

You’ll form a friendship that will be deeper than would ever be possible if you force the friendship only for the sake of friendship.

“Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”… It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.” ~ C.S. Lewis