On Adulthood Without Friends

I often see confessions online from adults saying they have no friends.

Then I suddenly thought about it.

Wait, I don't think I have any either.

And then I wondered,
is not having friends actually a problem?

My conclusion was almost the opposite.

Maybe the absence of friends in adulthood
is actually more natural than we think.

When we went to kindergarten or school,
we were bound together in the same space with people our own age,
living by similar schedules every day.

Within that, we developed a sense of sameness and intimacy,
hung around with someone nearby,
shared trivial conversations,
created secrets,
and called that person a "friend."

Looking back, childhood friendships depended
as much on the environment
as they did on individual social skills.

But when you become an adult,
that environment disappears.

There's no reason to see the same people every day like in school,
and everyone's life schedule becomes different.

Some people spend most of their time at work,
some build families,
some move to other cities,
and interests, living standards, and life goals gradually diverge.

And in adult relationships,
things that were hazy in childhood show up.

Job, income, social position,
interests and competition,
time and money,
what you can and cannot expect from each other.

Of course, not all relationships move only on those terms.

But it is true that relationships can no longer
exist as simply "spending every day together because you like each other."

Maybe that's why
relationships after becoming an adult look a little different.

There's someone you talk about work with,
someone you share hobbies with,
someone you feel comfortable with even if you only see them once every few months,
and someone you suddenly reach out to only when things get hard.

What was one person's role as a "friend" in childhood
has been divided among several people in adulthood.

But we still judge
our current relationships by the standard
of what friendship looked like in childhood.

We need to see each other often,
share many things,
be on my side,
have known each other for a long time,
and only then can we call someone a "friend"
by knowing the ins and outs of each other's lives.

By that standard,
the saying that adults have no friends
doesn't seem strange at all.

It's more likely that the form of relationships has changed
rather than relationships disappearing entirely.

So I don't think we need to interpret the statement "I have no friends"
as necessarily reflecting some personal flaw.

Some people have many friends,
some spend time deeply with one or two people,
and some have almost no one they would call a friend.

Neither of these
is inherently a wrong way to live.

Maybe what we need to reconsider
isn't whether or not we have friends,
but why we feel like we're living well and normally as adults
only if we have friends.

It's not that having no friends is strange.

Rather, I've come to think that
applying childhood standards for relationships
straight into adult life
might actually be the strange thing.