Adults don’t get friends

What is a friend?

When this question is asked, we already know what the answer is. It is, after all, a matter of common sense what a friend is. One can provide a wide array of traits, of roles that such an individual ought to fit: A friend is someone whose loyalty will shine bright in your times of need, or maybe a friend is someone you can confide in as safekeeper of your secrets, or perhaps there is nothing more to being a friend than to placidly coexist in a moment of time, melting away in the company. 

Whichever subset of characteristics is selected is a matter of personal preference. Some have much higher barriers of entry than others for the sought out title of friend — opting to reserve it only for a handful of lifelong compatriots, as opposed to your labmate you frequent twice a week for an hour and find, to his credit, partially endearing. Ultimately, bestowing the friend title is but an item of mental cataloging: You can arbitrarily divide all outside entities between those who have the friend title and those who do not. That, however, does not immediately materially affect interactions in a significant manner. Whether your dear labmate proudly bears the friend title on his forehead or you catch sight of the considerably less prestigious title of acquaintance instead will not directly change your greetings … so long as you don’t act on it.

That is, a friend does not exist until we act as if they are, indeed, a friend. A friend is a friend because we behave as if they are a friend, mentally or physically. What that means and who it applies to is up to you. Further, these definitions are not static: What we expect from a friend will be molded by our culture, experiences and, perhaps above all else, time. 

After all, would you say that your childhood friends and adulthood friends are the same kind of friend? What was it like to acquire a friend whilst growing up in comparison to where you find yourself now? Are the rituals, the contracts, the demands, the joys … equal?

Most likely, not in the slightest.

I cannot help but feel as if the kind of friendship that was solidified in the innocence of youth can, for most, no longer blossom naturally after you reach a certain mutual mental age. Not merely by the evolution of circumstances alone, but by what we comprehend as a friend — the very concept loses power in such meaningful ways to distort it beyond measure. Adults forget what a friend was, adding their clauses and conditionals until their genuine, pure ideas that once sparked have been artificially dimmed. 

That is to say, adults don’t get friends. They have loved ones, to be sure, and these can hold true, but we have strayed from our ideal beginnings. We have constantly recast our bounds of friendship, but at every step the image becomes hazier, for change of something comes at the cost of what it once was. Something important has been lost in the translations over time; in the maturing and realizing, something imperative about what a friend should be has blurred: priority. 

For the privileged, to be a child was a playful matter. Once they were deployed to the sanitized halls of elementary school, that was their whole world. Sure, they had family dealings, but friends were the focal point of their existence. Every pivotal moment of their life was achieved hand-in-hand, learning and growing in synchrony. For a child with such an upbringing, friends were no joking matter: They were their everything. Their laughs, their hurt, their pride and their shame. All revolved around these few companions, and as such the commitment was deeper than anything else there could ever be.

This all changes when adulthood arrives. At once, children are children no more: They must travel far and wide and invest their time for their studies or professions. They commit themselves to romantic partners and families. Their worries are interlinked with currencies and deaths, and suddenly there is not enough time for everything. There is no way for friends to be their highest priority anymore. Yes, we have friends here and there, but we would never dare sacrifice our careers or relationships for them. They are nice to have, but are, in the end, second place to everything else, to everything more important. When we choose, we do not choose our friends. We construct whatever definitions we prefer, but we do not act as if they are our world, and therefore, they are not. Friends are friends no more. Adults do not know of such wisdoms as true friendships.

While a sad state of affairs, it is hard to blame ourselves for growing up, for learning of what else exists in our not-so-small world. It is not as if one becomes jaded or closed off, but is cursed with responsibilities and the awareness of them. We know so much, we must feel too little. We can no longer afford such connections. 

But if genuine friendship is what we sought at our most primitive, when we had our essential needs covered and our wants were not so exposed, does that make it one of our purest desires? Maybe, in a world without worries, if we found ourselves in a place with childlike wonder, we could learn to be friends again.