The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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I'm in my mid twenties, and I've recently realized that all the friends I've made after getting out of high school have been of superficial/situational type. I've had gym friends, with whom I'd hit the gym with. I've had party friends, with whom I'd hit the bars and clubs with. Then I've had hobby X/Y/Z friends, with whom I'd do those hobbies with. Those relationships never went beyond those common interests, and once either I or them stopped participating in our common interest, our relationship would fizzle out. I have the opposite experience with my childhood friend group. We barely have anything in common nowadays, but I know I can call any of them up and ask for help or talk about something absolutely random. I've never achieved that level of trust/closeness with friends I've made as I've gotten older. Is it what adult friendships are like or is it just me not being able to navigate social games? On one hand, I've been thinking it's on me - I've realized that all these new friendships require effort to maintain and progress. If I don't invite my gym bro friends to do other things with me, then our friendship will stay at the gym bro level forever. On the other hand, it seems a lot of people take that passive position, so always having to be the one that organizes things feels forced and doesn't grant much confidence in that relationship.
Kinda like with dating, its a numbers game.
I will usually try and invite new friends along to other activities. I give them one to three invites depending on how much I like them, how good their excuses sounded (or whether they even responded), and how much advance warning my invites had.
Just showing up and being there is such a big part of adult friendship. We all get very busy lives, especially when you have kids. So I try and select for the people that can make it out to things. I think it tends to have a bunch of knock on effects too. These people tend to have their lives together. If they actually want to hang out with you they make it out too, so good vibes.
Once I have made a friend I'll usually try and keep them by just repeating the intitial thing, invite them to stuff. For long term friends I give them more chances to flake out. Anytime I go a few weeks without a social event I'll reach out to someone I haven't seen in a while.
I think if I had a party and all my friends could magically make it, and I wasn't concerned about logistics I could get about 20 people to show up.
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