On friendship
The older you get, the harder it is to connect. When you’re a kid, you share so many of the same experiences and views as your peers that it’d be bizarre if you didn’t make friends. There’s bound to be someone else in the class who supports your footy team.1 But we diverge and crystallise like snowflakes from a cloud, and our combination of genes and memories grows weirder and more distinct every day.
Do you ever meet someone and know within minutes or even seconds that you’ll never be friends with them? We intuit this from their appearance, speaking patterns and favourite Beatles album, but these trivialities usually map a fundamental divergence in world views. And the more we think and read and travel and drop acid, the more nuanced and rare our perception and interpretation of reality becomes.
All of which means that by the time you’re an adult, finding someone new who truly ‘gets you’ is painfully uncommon. And we’re constantly growing further apart from our existing friends — especially when we no longer share the same day-to-day experiences of school, work, share houses and so on. The upside being, of course, that when you do really connect with someone new, you get a sense of miraculous serendipity, as if you’ve stumbled upon an oasis in the middle of a desert.2
Making friends and falling in love are the same process at different levels of intensity. I think that the wonder and joy they make us feel stem deep down from the shock of realising that we’re not as dreadfully, terrifyingly alone as we feared we were.
