If a “friend” is someone I’d feel totally comfortable asking “Hey, wanna hang out?” without a special occasion or agenda, then I have only a handful of local friends.
Basically, my goal for a community is to have at least 10 local “friend-units” living nearby. (Couples who live together only count for one friend-unit, because in practice hanging out with a couple is usually a package deal. Sorry, but if you usually make plans to spend time with Alice-and-Bob, then Alice-and-Bob are in practice one friend-unit.)
I have two friend-units in my current location (hopefully upgrading to three soon!) and it feels really fucking lonely. Two is not a good place to be. I have maybe four friend-units in the next closest city, and that still feels like too few.
I think ten is a good round number. I think with ten solid friend-units, you basically wouldn’t be lonely, even if you lived in a foreign country or a rural area; and I think with fewer than four or so friend-units, you’re basically going to feel like you’re in exile even if you’re living in a major city in your home country.
This is fascinating and let me know if it was personal/you didn’t want it reblogged, because -
if that’s what a friend is, I have no local friends. Asking ‘hey, wanna hang out?’ is scary and I’d have to be really really certain that 1) someone likes me and 2) my company is the most valuable use of their time. As a result, I tend not to ask it and so friendships that depend on it existing as an option tend to die. I can think of three or four people who I would feel comfortable doing this with, but none of them live near me.
I don’t feel sad about this at all. I have people who like me and I hang out with them in scheduled contexts where it’s very clear what I need to do in order to make my company the most valuable use of their time. It’d be cool if my friends-who-I-could-ask-to-hang-out lived near me, but actually I’d probably get stressed and overwhelmed and immediately start trying to create scheduled contexts in which we hang out regularly for a fixed amount of time. And once that was established I would take ‘randomly asking them to hang out’ off the table mentally and be much happier for it.
It seems like maybe people are very high variance in terms of how much non-scheduled social interaction they want to feel like is available to them? I would guess that you’re on the high end and I’m sure that I’m on the low end.
It was actually quite reassuring to see this and find out someone’s brain does the same thing as mine! I don’t even know how I can simultaneously alieve “it makes me happy when other people ask me to hang out” and “asking someone to hang out is absurdly presumptuous, why would you assume that out of all the infinite things they could be doing on Saturday afternoon spending time with you is somewhere close to the most valuable one.”
Unlike you I wish my brain would stop doing this, because it’s cool to have the option of being friends with people even if you’re not likely to run into them/have scheduled social interaction often enough to maintain a friendship through that alone. Currently my coping mechanisms include:
- having a party (“hey there will be several people there so the odds are good that at least one will be interesting!”)
- enticing them with a thing (“well I heard there’s this really good movie that’ll probably win like 10 Oscars so maybe we could sit next to each other while we both watch it”)
- making sure they don’t lose any time (“you will probably go to the dining hall sometime this week independent of me so what if I just arranged to be there simultaneously”)