1. Is there any difference to the way you make friends now, compared to when you were a child?
I'm more careful with who I call a friend. I don't call anyone who is friendly at first, a friend. There are many hypocrites these days. I wish I was still in kindergarten. Well. When you’re a child, you can just end up sitting next to them then you become friends but as you grow, you start to notice things in people like their personalities and how they act around people. As you get older, you look for people with characteristics that are much like yourself. Birds of a feather flock together, anyway. Often, I make new friends with a ‘friend of a friend’. It’s easier to find someone who you’ll enjoy spending time with because you can look in many different places.
2. Do children and adults make friends in the same way?
It takes a lot longer to form friendships as an adult than as a child. Children’s friendships are intense and are often formed around a simple enjoyment of one another’s company. As adults, we tend to be more wary of other people and less open about ourselves. It is because of this that friendships are formed over a longer period of time and are built around shared interests. As adults we are less quick to open up and talk about our personal feelings to other people unless they are already our friends, so it’s harder to get to know each another.
3. How is the way people make friends today different to the way people made friends years ago?
New technology such as the internet has made it a lot easier to find others interested in the same things as you. Many people ‘meet’ online and get to know each other there before hanging out together in the ‘real world’. In this way, the act of making friends is becoming more and more deliberate. We can also travel a lot farther and ore quickly than ever before, so it’s easier to visit people and build relationships by spending time together. In the past, being isolated from other people was a big problem when it came to meeting new people.
4. Do you think it's easier to make friends today than it used to be?
In one sense the answer is yes I do, because it’s so much easier to find people you want to get to know. However, our lives today are a lot more highly pressured than they used to be and we are sometimes so focused on our own worries that we become self-centered. Some people say this makes us less friendly and open than we used to be. Local communities used to be more like a large family, with everyone looking after each other. Today, we generally don’t trust other people that much and so it can be harder to make friends.
