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Hanging with the grownups
I was talking to my boss yesterday about how my friends tend to be older than me. I've always known this was a trend, but I didn't really realize until I was explaining it to her how particularly true it is right now. I still have a few friends my own age who live elsewhere, but not here. I have two Seattle-area friends who are 26 and two who are 29, and all the rest I can think of are in their 30s or older.
I made a graph a few years ago of the ages of my LJ friendslist and hypothesized that the age I would get along with best was around 30, but that social circumstances had led to my befriending the upper end of my own cohort and the lower end of my mom's. I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but current evidence certainly supports the part about me liking people in their 30s. I think that's how old most of my puzzle, yuppie-nerd, and poly-kink friends are, which is most of my friends. This might be why I didn't make many close friends in college--I had a lot of acquaintances, but the only person from Clark I connected with and felt comfortable around (and the only person I've really stayed in touch with since graduation) is Gerry, who's in his 40s. People my age tend to bewilder me. They're always texting right there in front of me while we're hanging out, and they never say what they mean, and there's so much drama. I realize that's a generalization--as I said, I do have friends my age elsewhere--but that was pretty much what college felt like for me socially.
There's also this distressing pattern wherein I have a friend who I believe to be close to me, and who behaves like we're close, and then out of the blue completely cuts me off and refuses to respond to my attempts to contact them. This has happened four times now with people who were important to me. I realize that the common denominator there is me, and believe me when I say I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I did and how to prevent it happening again, or at least predict when it's going to happen (and if you have any theories, by all means lay them on me). But they've also all been around college age. Four is not a sufficient sample size to draw conclusions, but it's enough to make me pretty much okay with not seeking out younger friends right now.
Even if my older friends do always tease me for being a baby. It's a cross I must bear.
I made a graph a few years ago of the ages of my LJ friendslist and hypothesized that the age I would get along with best was around 30, but that social circumstances had led to my befriending the upper end of my own cohort and the lower end of my mom's. I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but current evidence certainly supports the part about me liking people in their 30s. I think that's how old most of my puzzle, yuppie-nerd, and poly-kink friends are, which is most of my friends. This might be why I didn't make many close friends in college--I had a lot of acquaintances, but the only person from Clark I connected with and felt comfortable around (and the only person I've really stayed in touch with since graduation) is Gerry, who's in his 40s. People my age tend to bewilder me. They're always texting right there in front of me while we're hanging out, and they never say what they mean, and there's so much drama. I realize that's a generalization--as I said, I do have friends my age elsewhere--but that was pretty much what college felt like for me socially.
There's also this distressing pattern wherein I have a friend who I believe to be close to me, and who behaves like we're close, and then out of the blue completely cuts me off and refuses to respond to my attempts to contact them. This has happened four times now with people who were important to me. I realize that the common denominator there is me, and believe me when I say I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I did and how to prevent it happening again, or at least predict when it's going to happen (and if you have any theories, by all means lay them on me). But they've also all been around college age. Four is not a sufficient sample size to draw conclusions, but it's enough to make me pretty much okay with not seeking out younger friends right now.
Even if my older friends do always tease me for being a baby. It's a cross I must bear.
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And then when you get to 25 or so, you'll start being friends with the kind of 15-year-olds who tend to make friends with 25-year-olds, and so the cycle continues.
Or, at least, that's what happened for me. And it's when I noticed the second half of the cycle, having often got mistaken for a post-doctoral researcher while an undergrad, etc. that I started to think about it a little.
I never came up with any terribly satisfactory answers. I my case, I think it's an emergent phenomenon based on my dislike of people acting on prejudice. In our society, there's an expectation that people will hang out with others their own age, so if someone my own age interacts with me, I will be subconsciously wary they've picked me for that reason rather than on my merits; that worry is absent with someone of a different age.
Also, a few decades ago, even people open to friendships with those of widely varying age would have been less likely to form those friendships. But on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
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