Why I'm Not A Good Friend

Self-awareness with a pineapple slice of loneliness.

I am 44 years old now, which means about two decades and change out of college. For context, I’ve also been divorced and remarried. I’ve moved five times as an adult. If you take all that information, and you care enough to make an assumption, you’d probably think that I’ve been in some friend groups, left some, and things are harder because I am a guy. You’d be right on most of that (I don’t necessarily think male friendships are “harder” than female friendships, but they operate on different ideas of ritual).

Probably the biggest confusion I’ve had as an adult is around friendship and how it weaves in and out of your life. I kinda knew I wanted to write things, whether or not it was my main income source, since I was maybe 13 years old. If you asked me at 13 what I thought I would write about as an adult, I never would have guessed that a primary topic would have been “friendship,” although in some ways it makes sense because I didn’t have a ton of close friends at 13 either, so I was probably ruminating about the topic back then.

Anyway, I have written a bunch about it. Personally I think a lot of adult friendship is about “similar life stage/moment” and there’s not much more to it than that, but I also think it’s pretty easy to look at friendship and say, “That’s a nice to have, not a need to have, as I carve out my adult path.”

Today I wanted to look at my own bullshit for a second. This should be fun.

Do I have friends?