{"id":13384,"date":"2025-01-22T01:25:13","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T08:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2c61d38f-9abe-11e8-99ad-ca52c1e5b2af"},"modified":"2025-01-22T07:47:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T14:47:04","slug":"why-friendships-need-to-go-deeper-than-coffee-dates","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.boundless.org\/blog\/why-friendships-need-to-go-deeper-than-coffee-dates\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Friendships Need to Go Deeper Than Coffee Dates"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHey, do you want to grab coffee soon?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a text that regularly lights up\u00a0my phone; it\u2019s one\u00a0I\u2019ve sent many times. When I\u00a0moved to the Chicago suburbs nearly nine months ago, shortly after finishing college, I knew two people in Chicagoland. Because my initial\u00a0concerns were adjusting to my new job and not freezing to death in the “mild”\u00a0winter\u2019s chill, that fact didn\u2019t bother me too much. I\u2019ll get to know people<\/em>, I thought. There\u2019s church, work, and tons of other stuff. <\/em><\/p>\n

There was church, there was work, there was other stuff \u2014 and there was plenty of \u201cgrabbing coffee\u201d with new acquaintances in the midst of it all. (Can we also briefly acknowledge how weird of a phrase \u201cgrabbing coffee\u201d is?) Yet as the months passed, I still felt like I only really knew those same two people. I\u2019d just left a campus in\u00a0a town where I felt like I knew everyone, and this sense of loneliness \u2014 of missing something \u2014 became heavier and heavier.<\/p>\n

What was I doing wrong?<\/p>\n

Coffee-Date Friends<\/h4>\n

Good news! I’m not alone in this eternal cycle of lattes and small talk. And thank goodness science is here to explain why:\u00a0In the 2012 New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article “Friends of a Certain Age<\/a>,”\u00a0Alex Williams references the \u201cthree conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.\u201d This combination of factors, according to sociology and gerontology professor Rebecca G. Adams, \u201cis why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college.\u201d<\/p>\n

But now college is over, and Williams writes that \u201cit\u2019s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.\u2019s (kind of friends) \u2014 for now.\u201d<\/p>\n

“Kind of friends” (see also: coffee-date friends): (n.) Those people with whom you set up a meeting at Starbucks (in a series of texts that include\u00a0an appropriately cheerful amount of exclamation points). They\u2019re the friends who ask about where you\u2019re from and where you went to school, and they try to find anything you might have in common. The coffee may be hot, but the conversation is lukewarm at best. Time together usually ends with\u00a0“we gotta do this again soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will you actually grab coffee again soon? Maybe. Or maybe it\u2019ll be a month or two, and after running into each other at a local diner, the process will repeat once more.<\/p>\n

I love coffee (I\u2019m from Seattle, after all). And I love a good conversation that\u2019s accompanied by good coffee. But if that conversation remains just that \u2014 a conversation \u2014 followed only by plans to do the same thing again and again? That’s a perfect way for C.D.F.\u2019s (coffee-date friendships) to start brewing \u2014 and never grow beyond\u00a0the four walls of the coffee shop.<\/p>\n

The Distinctive Difficulty of Adult Friendship<\/h4>\n

Of course, it\u2019s understandable how these friendships can become stagnant (or even fade completely). Williams notes when we grow older \u201cschedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

That reality has been a difficult one for me to grasp. Since starting my full-time, 9-to-5 office job back in January, I\u2019ve flirted with the idea of grad school \u2014 and part of me wonders whether the appeal of such a venture partially rests on the possibility of meeting those three conditions for close friends once more: friends to study late into the night with, friends I could walk to class with and have over to my place to discuss literature and art and music. Sure, we\u2019d get coffee together, but there was so much more life and learning and laughter outside of those hours inside Starbucks. And sometimes, I can\u2019t help but wonder and pray: Will I ever find that again, God?<\/em><\/p>\n

Trying, Working, Hoping<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s when these thoughts start worming through my brain that the words of Emily Langan \u2014 a communications professor at Wheaton College \u2014 are a unique comfort. She also recognizes the frustrating difficulty of building friendships\u00a0after college: \u201cFriendship in adulthood is harder than it looks,\u201d she said in an interview<\/a> with CT Women<\/em>. \u201cLong-term friendships are a rarity. The reason is that they take work. Most of the time something else becomes a priority, either out of necessity or out of choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Langan also offers hope for those of us pining who may be pining for a season of life that often seems long past. \u201cThe good news is that friendships in adult life happen in unexpected places,\u201d she said. \u201cYou always have to keep the radar out for expanding the circle, because you\u2019re never sure which seeds are really going to take off and become a more substantial friendship.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not giving up on coffee dates \u2014 but I\u2019m also going\u00a0to \u201cexpand the circle.\u201d I\u2019m trying to put in the work<\/a>. I\u2019m trying to invite people over for dinner, to go on a run with me, to do something that might not involve sitting across a table from each other and holding a paper cup filled with steaming coffee.<\/p>\n

Who knows what kinds of seeds might start blooming?<\/p>\n

Copyright 2018 Emily Lund. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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