Close Friends are Harder to Find
When you’re in elementary or high school, you’re surrounded by kids. So, typically you have a number of potential friendships just waiting to be made. Once you graduate from high school, you’ll undoubtedly leave most of those friendships behind. You’ll probably retain your close friends, but that number could thin out as you move along on your own path through life. Even if you retain a few close friends, your friendships are going to be strained unless you keep at least one common denominator.
For example, what if you attend a college in Ohio? And your friends spread out and sign up at colleges in Colorado, California, or Florida? You’ll suddenly find that the old adage, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”is more true than you ever knew. But, after awhile, absence tends to loosen the ties that had previously bound you and your close friends together. Because, your different interests have taken you and your friends to different places on this earth. Thanks to modern technology, you can still keep call them on a landline phone or more conveniently on your cell phone. You can FAX them, chat on the Internet with them, page your close friends, and even sit down and write them a long letter by hand. Keeping in touch on a regular basis helps close friends remain close. But, if you lack things in common, then the heartfelt feelings you once had are still, sadly, most likely going to fade over a period of time.
Once you emerge from college and head out into the working world, you’ll again be surrounded by several people in your new job. Out of this crowd, you can make at least a few close friends. If you find someone who shares some of the same interests you have, that is. Interests that are outside of the working environment. It’s easy to make “friends” at your place of employment. These “friends” are usually people who you like, and like you. Besides working at the same place, you probably have some other things in common at work. Otherwise, though, most friends you work with can’t be defined as being “close friends.”
So, by now, you probably don’t have any “close friends” from your high school days. You may have a friend that you trusted enough to confide in during your tenure at college. And here you are, out in the working force, where you may develop a close friendship with a co-worker or two. But, close friends are still harder to find.
To illustrate this point, a group of sociologists from Duke University and the University of Arizona took a good hard look at data that was collected from the General Social Survey. What they found was rather surprising. Rather disturbing in a way. They found out that about two decades ago, in 1985, every American had an average of nearly three close friends. Today, every American only has an average of two close friends they can confide in. Approximately a fourth of the people who were surveyed responded they had no close friends at all.
The study also revealed that the few close friendships we do have are more family-based. Americans tend to rely on people in their family tree for trusted friendships more than having deep relationships with outsiders.
To narrow the close friends we DO have down further:
1. It’s been determined that fifty percent of Americans have at least one close friend who is another race.
2. A whopping eighty percent of the survey respondents said they only confide with close family members. Ten percent of the respondents only confide in their spouses.
3. And, Caucasians and educated Americans statistically have the most friendships overall.
So, maybe age has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s just a statistical fact that close friends are harder to find.
