Asking someone out on a date with friends and a romantic date can cause the same fear

“What kind of free time do you have besides spending time with your kids and working?” I ask.

Mia washes my hair as she cuts my curls and gets ready to start styling. There is no relationship quite like the one a woman has with her trusted hairstylist. Mia is the only one I pull close to her scalp, and it has been since I met her over 10 years ago. However, my heart was pounding as I tried my best to ask her out on a lunch date.

Because I’ve known her for so long and like her so much, I thought maybe it’s time to become friends. Not just artist-client friends and not just Facebook friends. But really friend.

“Oh, not much. I often go horseback riding with my friends,” she said casually. “We do it every Saturday. Me and my five best girlfriends. It was good downtime and our kids played together during the week. Really, we’ll all be together tonight. ”

For a brief and embarrassing moment of sadness, my gut twisted. I’m 41 and don’t know what it’s like to be someone who can call five of his best girlfriends over for a random evening. I don’t have a core group of female friends and never have – not even as a kid.

After hearing about Mia’s extremely fulfilling and happy life, I was blown away and changed the subject. She’ll never know how close I came to trying to start a friendship, and how failed I felt trying to get into her neat and orderly social life. that. When she finished brushing my hair in submission, I left her studio with a smile and a wave, hoping she didn’t catch up.

The anxiety of making new friends can be akin to the experience of dating potential mates. However, the second difficulty is still understood and appreciated by many people. Movies, TV shows, and the shelves of any bookstore are overflowing with examples and advice. Conversely, a lack of attention to the barriers of making friends – especially as an adult – creates the isolation and confusion that those of us struggling with this can feel.

“We have an epidemic of unrecognized loneliness,” Shasta Nelson, founder of GirlFriendCircles.com, a website for women who want to deepen their friendships, told The Detroit Free Press. Recently Advice column in The DailyThe University of Washington’s student newspaper, pointed out that freshman year of college is “one of the few times in life when it’s socially acceptable to be alone,” making the rest of us too embarrassed to talk about inadvertently.

But now is the time to talk about it – and get rid of the idea that it’s an embarrassing situation. This social epidemic is likely to get worse as the epidemic of our health declines. Progress in the battle with Covid-19 has opened a back to socialization.

With a new wave of group activism, social media is once again providing endless reminders of how overwhelmed some people are with friendships and close relationships. My own feed is flooded with photos of female friendships – large groups of women who seem to have known each other since time immemorial, their posts strewn with jokes and private hashtags signaling the Fort Knox’s impenetrability. The message to those who will be lovers is clear: We have all the friendship we need. Your attempt to infiltrate our lives is lovely, but unnecessary or undesirable.

When “Sex and the city” reboot and the special “Friends” reunion made the rounds, they reminded me more of how lonely I feel sometimes. The image of women living happily together, their friendship breaking all the twists of life, always seems so far away out there. Where are the shows about middle-aged women without that core group of friends and connections? Why are we interesting enough for occasional psychological analysis but the majority don’t deserve to be represented in film or television?

Paul Krauss, a therapist and clinical director of Health Advice for Life in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says middle-aged loneliness is common – as many as 36% of all Americans report in 2020 that they feel “severely lonely” – while the pursuit of friendship a lot of barriers.

“When you are young, there are many opportunities to bond and form friendships with people through school, sports and extracurriculars,” he notes. “As we age, we are more mobile and have more time constraints because of all of our responsibilities, such as paying bills and taking care of the family.”

Forging adult friendships also requires taking risks. “People often don’t want to put themselves out there because they have to be vulnerable,” says Krauss. We know scientifically how Friendship is valuable to our health – that might be part of the reason why the stakes seem so high. Now that the pandemic is receding, friendship and connection are always at the forefront of many people’s minds.

For Krauss, the strategies for making friends in middle age focus on intentionality and accountability. “If you want to make new friends, you also have to be intentional,” he said. “Ask yourself: Am I joining groups and looking for activities outside of my comfort zone? Are you wasting time and effort? Are you holding yourself accountable? ”

Accepting failure is also part of the process. “You have to accept failure in your way of making friends, because there will be times when you will not be,” he advises. It’s helpful to keep in mind that the setbacks that can lead to failure while we’re trying to make friends can be a lot less personal than dating. For example, the people you will be friends with are often too caught up in the details of their own lives to make room for others.

I may still not be ready to ask my hairstylist on a date with friends, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that for all the loneliness I feel, I don’t. alone in feeling it.

at Blogtuan.info – Source: nbcnews.com – Read the original article here