When you are an athlete (as I was all through high school and my first couple years of college), friendship comes fairly easy. Being a part of a team makes it incredibly easy to create bonds with the girls your are competing with, practicing with, and talking with on a daily basis. Sometimes it happens naturally, other times it takes work, but it usually happens nonetheless.
When the athlete portion of my life came to an end I became just another college student going to class everyday. At first I didn't give it much thought, but after a couple of months a startling realization dawned on me: I didn't have any close friends at college. I had aquaintances, people I would chat with in class before the professor showed up, study groups, and group projects, but all of my close friends were scattered throughout the state and not available to me on a day-to-day basis. It was a strange predicament and one I was not used to being in. Which got me to thinking....what does or does not enable a friendship to last? How are we able to maintain friendships with certain people and not others? And the inevitable: How do you go about building and maintaining these friendships?
If you ask me (and I know that you didn't, but I'm going to pretend like you did), relationships can sometimes be friendship killers. Or should I say, new friendship killers. When you are single the world is your oyster, in a sense. You can do what you want, when you want, etc., etc. When you are in a relationship you will usually commit the majority of your time to your partner and to activities the two of you can do together. This doesn't make outside friendships impossible, but if you are building a new friendship with someone it's not always convenient to have your other half around. It changes the atmosphere and whether you mean to do it or not, the majority of your attention is almost always more heavily concentrated on your partner. If your new friend is sans boyfriend/girlfriend/etc. this isn't always an ideal situation. And let's face it, no matter how good of friends you are with someone before you are in a relationship, once you make that commitment it is practically guaranteed that you will be spending the majority of your time with your partner than with your friends.
Married people, I feel, will more often tend to develop friendships with other couples, rather than one-on-one relationships. This isn't to say that people in a couple don't have friends they see without their spouses, but more often than not the group dynamic seems to be preferred. If my husband and I aren't going out by ourselves, we will most always seek another couple to hang out with. Not because we don't like each other's friends, but because it just somehow happened that most of the people we hang out with on a regular basis are also married or in a relationship. Perhaps this isn't a coincidence.
So if you're in a relationship, does that make the obstacle of developing new friendships harder to attain? I'm not talking about the aquaintances we interact with on a day-to-day basis like our colleagues at work or the girl who makes your latte at Starbucks every morning, but the people (besides your spouse) that you choose to make a connection with outside of your professional world because you genuinely like them and want to spend time with them.
Time is a fleeting thing in today's world. We dedicate at least 8 hours of our day to work, an hour to the gym, another hour to dinner, plus all the errands that seem to pop up in the course of everyday life. For some, this doesn't leave a lot of time for socializing. In the adult world, you literally have to make time to develop your friendships, they don't just happen on their own. For some people the effort is too great. For others, there just isn't enough time. But the simple fact remains that friendship is a crucial factor in our lives. Even if one is in a happy, healthy relationship, outside friendships are still crucial to one's well-being. In fact I'm pretty sure someone did a study about that.
Developing new friendships, and maintaining old ones takes work. And that work only increases as we get older. Life circumstances, professional circumstances, and the overall changes we experience as adults can all take a toll on our ability to keep and make friends. Friendship at any age is not impossible. Friendship when you are married is not impossible. Like everything else in life it just takes work.
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