How Friendship Feels Like in Your 30s
When I was in my 20s, despite my introverted personality, I can say that I had quite a lot of friends. I’ve been lucky to have lived in several cities in the past so I have friends here and there. Entering late 20s, things were starting to change. Most of them were getting married and started families. Some of the others were focusing on their career. It’s getting more and more difficult to maintain the friendships even the ones that I thought were gonna last long. It’s difficult because we no longer found one another interesting. We had less and less thing or interest in common. It became less and less fun. On the other hand, each of us made new friends, although some of them would be “friends from work” — who were more likely to be colleague, but here, most likely you’d consider all of them as “friends”. That’s a consequence of living in a country where collectiveness is the norm. But you know what?if you’ve never been to this country, you’ll be surprised that even to people who they’ve just met the first time, many of us are comfortable to share some personal details of our lives — especially if you’re in a small town here. However, as I’m getting older and more life experiences (including life in a big city and abroad), I slowly become uncomfortable sharing my experiences with some strangers — just like you.
If you’ve managed to gain some success, you’ll find some people who seem to be interested in making friends with you, but then you’ll notice that they wanted something to you. It’s hard to find a genuine friendship.
So anyway, entering your 30s, you’ll realise that your circle of friends is getting smaller and smaller. It’s a lot more challenging especially if you’re single and live by yourself.
If starting a family is not an option for you, then one of the solutions would be making new friends with your neighbours, people who live nearby. Get involve in community activities. That should be your common interest with him or her — to contribute to your community. There’s this void of desire to care about and be cared from people who are close to you that needs to be filled. If you don’t find ways to fill that void, it will turn into loneliness. Loneliness can lead to depression, and everyone knows that depression can increase your risk of getting diseases.
Or maybe you can get a pet. But to be honest, I found it a bit weird talking to an animal. It’s more of a one way conversation.
Find a hobby, and find a group of people with the same hobby. There you go. It’s an effective way to get you communicate and talk to someone regularly while becoming more skilful and knowledgeable.
Friends on the internet?yeah, sure. What would you talk about?ohh, still your hobby. I see. That counts. However, I maybe old-fashioned, but nothing beats a regular face-to-face direct conversation in someplace nice.
So, how friendship feels like in your 30s?it’s hard isn’t it?everyone else is busy with their life, so you must get busy too with yours.
