So we were trawling through the internet, like most of us do on a daily basis (checking what our friends have been up to, catching up on the hottest trends, searching for funny videos of cats etc.) when we stumbled upon this rather interesting article asking Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? and it really got us thinking…
Yeah, yeah – we know – maybe we should leave the thinking to the experts (it only ever gets us into trouble) but we couldn’t help but feel a little intrigued. Is it really that difficult making new friends over 30?
Well, now that I’m asking myself that very same question, I’ve come to realise it’s one of those hazy yes-and-no sort of things: it all depends on how you look at it.
Of course, the friends you make in your early days are perhaps the ones that resonate the most when you think about genuine friendship. They’re the ones with whom we shared our first experiences; skinned our knees with, fought, cried, and shared meaningful/meaningless conversations about the opposite sex with. In short, those are the kinds of friends we’ve come to compare every other friend against since – and they always seem to come up short.
On the other hand, it’s important to acknowledge that we were very different people back then. Our expectations of friendships were maybe romanticised, or a little bit naïve to say the least. So it’s very useful to manage our expectations of potential friendships now we’ve grown a little bit older, gotten more socially experienced and, hopefully, a little bit wiser.
Or maybe the idea of finding it difficult to make new friends as you get older is an existential dilemma (we told you it got us thinking). And if that’s the case, then there are plenty of real-world tools at our disposal to use against it, like Mixing Out!