Social life

Social life vs. friendships. When M visited this past week, I asked her if she had managed to find any friends in her new town. She somehow adapted my question to answer in terms of her social life, as in needing to find more time for a social life - but never managed to answer in terms of friendships. Of course this got me to thinking, is there a difference?


I guess I would define social life as the broad milieu that includes friends, future friends, waning friends, colleagues, and generally speaking, fellow human beings. Friendships, on the other hand, are more pointed - people who like you, want to know you, respect you, are generally honest with you - no game-playing necessary. I suppose one's social life feeds one's friendships and vice versa.


My challenge has always been the great balancing act - that delicate dance of drawing people into your life with whom you both feel completely at ease, but who also help you discover new parts of yourself. In my 20s, less comfortable in my own skin, and just trying to figure out how to navigate adulthood, I drew similarly insecure people to my life. My friends were an eclectic crowd whose issues and flaws all manifested differently, but were somehow tolerable: the annoyingly cheap, but completely sincere D; the misfit S who was afraid to really connect to people, but who by-golly kept trying to try; colorful & assertive P had it all together, until you realized how fragile she truly was; M had a swagger that belied a weakness I never figured out; and of course, A, the lovely one who always had a boyfriend no matter what... I could go on and on. Me? I somehow managed to fit in and swim with the flotsam and jetsam in the Los Angeles cesspool known as "showbiz."


Enter my 30s, which forced me to define who I was and how I wanted to live my life. A lot of shift happened. My social life morphed as friendships were shed (some by my choice, some by circumstance, and some through painful loss that I may never understand). I found my one true love, and so many things fell in place when I married him. We merged our social lives together culminating with an unforgettable, fantastically fun wedding. Embracing the new reality of nurturing friendships in coupledom, we discovered as most people do, it's all the more challenging to "click" with 4 personalities (much less the 2 of "each other":)


Now in my 40s with yet 2 more growing little personalities in the mix, the complexities of a social life are exacerbated by even less time to make those friendships that grasp the paradox of feeling simultaneously at ease and challenged to grow. Somehow, it's more simple this way. With so little time, I've gotten very adept at sniffing out the bad fruit. I don't make room for negative energy, dead weight, or people with issues beyond my limits. And the most important friendship I have finally is the one with Myself. After 4+ decades of voyaging through the social web of relationships with all its eccentricites & "ego-centricities," at last I get it.