5 ms·

"...Americans, who from my perspective seem to have trouble forming deep adult friendships." Uh...

bh23ha 17y ago
I'm not the only one, I hear this from a lot of immigrants both from the old world and Latin America. I can't really explain it.
- rdtsc 17y ago
  Imagine having a best friend like you had when you were 5. You could play in the tree house, play video games all day, build stuff, ride bikes all across town, stay over their house, do everything together, talk about anything, once in a while have fights and arguments but then make up. Well it's kind of like that even when you are grown up. The way the society is structured might help develop these friendships or might prevent them. For example, were I was growing up (in ex Soviet Union), the school was structured such that you could end up being in the same class with mostly the same people for 12 years. Not just the same school -- but the same class. So if you never move (more on that later), you would end up knowing the same 30 people very well. One or two of them might become your good friends. Now school is just one factor, the other is how transient people are. It used to be that people would be born, grow up and live most of their lives in one city. That means you probably will still have your fiends from since you were 5 living in the same city. In some countries, people move more, mostly because of jobs I guess. It is very hard to form deep friendships when you are moving every 4 years. Yes, you have many acquaintances but not too many friends. I thought about this quite a bit. By now I lived half of my life in the "old world" and half in US. I can still skype, chat and email back and forth with my childhood buddies, but it is just not the same. I think good friendships need real face to face contact. I am making friends at work, but there is always an apprehension and competitiveness involved. They'll never be the same kind of friends I had growing up. Or maybe I became a different kind of person (too apprehensive, too withdrawn) that nobody would want to be best friends with ...?
- dabent 17y ago
  I've heard Americans (I'm American) complain about it, especially with their neighbors. We tend to stay holed up in our McMansions with the AC/Heat on and watch TV. Or we are the lone passenger in our car, listening to XM with the windows up. People often just don't get to know one another on a deep level. We also tend to move around a bit, which makes maintaining friendships hard. Now, that's not true for everyone, but it's been a lot of my experience.
pw0ncakes 17y ago
Seems very accurate. After 22, my experience is that social life gets very compartmentalized. Your work friends are great to discuss work-related topics with, but most are not people you'd talk about deep philosophical questions (whether there is an afterlife, why we exist) with. And who listens to your problems? A paid therapist. And while this isn't true of prostitution in general, when high-achieving men hire prostitutes they tend to ask for the "girlfriend experience"-- kissing, cuddling, and conversation with an educated woman, because they aren't looking for sex, but for the untarnished intimacy they were able to have in high school. Americans are now paying for emotional closeness that was free in a younger, more innocent age when the stakes of even the littlest things didn't seem so high. The problem is that American society treats success and failure as proving signs of personal merit, so everyone has to create a veneer of uninterrupted and effortless success because to seem like anything other than a rockstar signals weakness and despondency. This makes real emotional intimacy impossible.

I'm not the only one, I hear this from a lot of immigrants both from the old world and Latin America. I can't really explain it.

rdtsc 17y ago
Imagine having a best friend like you had when you were 5. You could play in the tree house, play video games all day, build stuff, ride bikes all across town, stay over their house, do everything together, talk about anything, once in a while have fights and arguments but then make up. Well it's kind of like that even when you are grown up. The way the society is structured might help develop these friendships or might prevent them. For example, were I was growing up (in ex Soviet Union), the school was structured such that you could end up being in the same class with mostly the same people for 12 years. Not just the same school -- but the same class. So if you never move (more on that later), you would end up knowing the same 30 people very well. One or two of them might become your good friends. Now school is just one factor, the other is how transient people are. It used to be that people would be born, grow up and live most of their lives in one city. That means you probably will still have your fiends from since you were 5 living in the same city. In some countries, people move more, mostly because of jobs I guess. It is very hard to form deep friendships when you are moving every 4 years. Yes, you have many acquaintances but not too many friends. I thought about this quite a bit. By now I lived half of my life in the "old world" and half in US. I can still skype, chat and email back and forth with my childhood buddies, but it is just not the same. I think good friendships need real face to face contact. I am making friends at work, but there is always an apprehension and competitiveness involved. They'll never be the same kind of friends I had growing up. Or maybe I became a different kind of person (too apprehensive, too withdrawn) that nobody would want to be best friends with ...?
dabent 17y ago
I've heard Americans (I'm American) complain about it, especially with their neighbors. We tend to stay holed up in our McMansions with the AC/Heat on and watch TV. Or we are the lone passenger in our car, listening to XM with the windows up. People often just don't get to know one another on a deep level. We also tend to move around a bit, which makes maintaining friendships hard. Now, that's not true for everyone, but it's been a lot of my experience.

pw0ncakes 17y ago

Seems very accurate. After 22, my experience is that social life gets very compartmentalized. Your work friends are great to discuss work-related topics with, but most are not people you'd talk about deep philosophical questions (whether there is an afterlife, why we exist) with. And who listens to your problems? A paid therapist. And while this isn't true of prostitution in general, when high-achieving men hire prostitutes they tend to ask for the "girlfriend experience"-- kissing, cuddling, and conversation with an educated woman, because they aren't looking for sex, but for the untarnished intimacy they were able to have in high school. Americans are now paying for emotional closeness that was free in a younger, more innocent age when the stakes of even the littlest things didn't seem so high. The problem is that American society treats success and failure as proving signs of personal merit, so everyone has to create a veneer of uninterrupted and effortless success because to seem like anything other than a rockstar signals weakness and despondency. This makes real emotional intimacy impossible.