Making friends is hard

And other news you can use

Credit: NBC

I have a large and ever-growing pile of drafts here at Nuclear Meltdown, so I’m doing an off-week, quick(ish)-hit post today. If you don’t like one topic, keep scrolling because there’s other stuff below! And subscribe!

You can’t make friends by drawing circles on a piece of paper

Author Rhaina Cohen has a new book out on “reimagining life with friendship at the center.” I haven’t read it, but she has a piece in the New York Times this week in support of the book, and I had to chuckle at the suggestions offered for centering friendship in one’s life:

Get a piece of paper, write your name in the middle and draw circles that represent the most important people in your life. Closer relationships — like a dear friend or romantic partner — should sit closer to your name, and relationships that take up more space in your life should have a bigger circle. If you’re left with one enormous circle for a romantic partner and small bubbles in the distance, it’s a sign that the romantic relationship may be taking on too much significance.

Consider establishing a routine to ensure you see your friends regularly. A close friend and I have a standing date every other week to hang out at her house after her baby goes to sleep. A pair of best friends I know dedicate Friday mornings to coffee and conversation together, a ritual they now consider sacred.

I don’t know Cohen or her work, but it sounds like her project is similar to mine here; both aim to alleviate isolation and the myriad burdens of being alone.

But I’m once again struck at how what I’ll call the “friendship-first” cohort seems incapable of conceiving of a world in which people just have no friends in their lives. And if you don’t have any friends around, drawing circles to conceptualize your relationships isn’t going to be much help. You’re not going to be able to establish a routine to see your friends if they don’t exist, or if they all live 1,000 miles away.

Now, maybe you’re thinking such people are just losers. But this is a widespread problem, with lots of research and reporting showing that people — and men in particular — have fewer and fewer friends. In reality, I suspect the numbers undercount the problem because it seems to be common knowledge that especially older men have no friends; here’s John Mulaney joking about it on SNL several years ago. Here’s a TikTok about this I saw just last night.

I have a little bit of first hand experience here. When I moved from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles in 2014 for work, I didn’t initially know anyone. But I wanted a social life, so I constantly went out and did stuff. I went to art openings and comedy shows and concerts. I favored small events — e.g. a “film festival” with only half a dozen participants, an “art sale” of unknown photography in an attic, etc. — and I tried to volunteer for a local film society (it imploded after I went to one meeting). I had a lot of interesting conversations and a lot of fun. I once saw Bill Burr do a standup set in a space the size of my living room. But none of these activities produced any lasting friendships. Not a single one. In the end, my social circle in L.A. was based mostly on reconnecting with people I knew in high school and college.

Maybe I’m just uniquely bad at making friends. But at least anecdotally I’d say my experience is pretty common. Most people I know who A) moved to a new place sometime after their early-to-mid 20s, and B) were already in relationships at the time, have struggled mightily to make lasting friendships in their new locales.

So I ask the friendship-first partisans: How do you make new friends when you’re busy with work and family? How do you make new friends when you can’t use dating as a way to expand your social circle? How do you center friendship when our ideas about work push the most talented and ambitious people to constantly hop from city to city chasing greener grass?

Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe the world should work differently. But I’m just not convinced that the problem for most people is having a huge group of (local) friends that they just don’t see enough. I think the problem is more the absence of (local) friendships in the first place.

Can I interview you?

Some of my most popular posts on this blog have been interviews with people who have managed to turn their families into some sort of village. I’d like to do more of these posts. So I’m putting a call out for folks who have or are building a village-like community — whatever that means to you. I’m interested in families that live together across multiple generations. Families that run businesses together. Families that have unique child- or elder-care arrangements. Families that come from cultures where the family-village is still common, etc. The sky is really the limit, but if that’s you or someone you know, leave a comment or shoot me an email: james.dalrymple52 @ gmail dot com.

On a somewhat related note, I recently connected with the creators of Hearth Matters, a nonprofit that describes itself as building “a world where mothers and householders are empowered with the respect, knowledge and resources necessary to create nurturing homes, and every child receives the essential care they need to thrive.”

They told me about their efforts to help people — often moms and the folks we used to call “homemakers,” though that term is now fraught — be both household managers and contributors to family finances at the same time. There’s no way I can do the project justice in a few sentences so I’ll return to it later in a longer post. But the idea is to think critically about how everything from regulations to housing to culture intersect with domestic life. They’re also looking to connect with potential collaborators, so if that’s you click on over and get in touch.

Yes, you should get married

As some here probably know, Brad Wilcox — professor at UVA, fellow at both the Institute for Family Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, etc. — has a new book out this week called Get Married. I haven’t read the entire thing yet but I have started and it’s fantastic. I’ll write more about the book later, but I wanted to mention it now when it’s fresh. Also, in support of the book, Brad has written articles for a bunch of outlets on why marriage matters.

The wild argument that elite culture isn’t anti-marriage

That marriage and family have experienced a public relations disaster over the last decade seems pretty self-evident to me. So I was surprised to read in the New York Times recently that actually, everyone is very pro-marriage. The real problem, I learned, is that people want to get married but “a good man is increasingly hard to find.”¹

A core assertion of the piece is that elite culture is not actually antagonistic to marriage. I drafted a lengthy rebuttal to the piece’s arguments, but I don’t think I need it because literally just yesterday Slate published a Q&A titled “In Defense of Divorce.” In the piece, the interviewer states, “your book is obviously a defense of divorce, but it’s also, in some ways, an attack on marriage.”

The interviewee then confirms: “I am anti the legal structure of marriage.”

That’s pretty clear.

If that weren’t enough, consider also the recent deluge of news coverage on polyamory. The Times itself has published a buzzy story about a mom who opened her marriage to have “a big sexual adventure” and find herself, a list of helpful tips on where the polyamorous should live, and a piece that floats polyamory as a means of fixing a broken marriage.

I’m not arguing against divorce or polyamory here. They have their place. My point is about the media; the way these topics are framed represents a pattern of hostility toward boring old monogamous marriage. We literally have a person in a prominent web magazine saying “I am anti the legal structure of marriage.”

Look, being anti-marriage is fine. I disagree with that position, but it’s a reasonable and defensible position to take. I’m happy to sit around and debate the pros and cons of marriage late into the night. In fact, as a person who enjoys debating, I’d love to do that. It could very well be that I’m wrong.

But you can’t have that debate if you deny the existence or influence of the anti-marriage viewpoint. In other words, I don’t begrudge the Slate piece for being anti-marriage. It’s honest about what it is. But I do begrudge the Times piece for implying that the Slate viewpoint isn’t widespread and powerful. That viewpoint is literally everywhere².

What we ultimately have here is a motte-and-bailey fallacy. There’s a tsunami of content from powerful institutions arguing that marriage and monogamy are outdated (the bailey). But then when push comes to shove, the same institutions retreat and make the much more modest argument that in fact marriage is great but just kind of hard at the moment (the motte). And that seems rather disingenuous. Let’s just have the debate and be honest about where everyone stands.

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1. I found it ironic that the article used this quote, which is an allusion to Flannery O'Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” O’Connor was a devout Catholic.

2. One might argue that there are counter narratives, such as Brad Wilcox’ book that I mentioned above. But I think Brad would be what Peter Turchin might describe as a “counter elite.” In other words, there are powerful voices advocating for things like marriage, but those voices are acting in response and opposition to mainstream institutions like the Times, Slate, etc.