Many young adults enjoy this emotional depth along with an abundance of free time, before family and career responsibilities pick up in midlife. And with age comes longer-standing relationships this shared history can enrich friends’ understanding of one another. Adults tend to have stronger cognitive, social, and emotional skills, which allow them to better empathize with, offer advice to, and otherwise support friends. O f course, adult friendships have plenty going for them. Darragh remembers their hangouts as endless “free play.” They took familiar containers, such as a sleepover, and invented complex rituals within them. RMS became close past the age when make-believe is the norm, yet, in their middle- and high-school years, they preserved young kids’ overarching approach to friendship: Keep one another company for large stretches of time without a preset agenda. I’ve seen this exuberance myself, such as in my friend’s 2-year-old, who exclaimed the name of his friend while rushing to the front door to greet him. Laura Goodwyn, a middle-school counselor in Arlington, Virginia, told me about a group of students who all dressed the same and assigned one another familial roles such as “mom” and “son.” A seventh-grade social-studies teacher in Rex, Georgia, Ogechi Oparah, described students who begged to sit together in class because they couldn’t bear to be separated. Spending so much creative time together can produce intense ties. Read: The six forces that fuel friendship Doing this with a new playmate is a “high-risk strategy”-maybe they’ll shut you down-but when your ideas mesh, you get to invent something new together. After analyzing more than a decade’s worth of recorded conversations between children and their friends, Parker noticed a common dynamic: If one kid introduces an unexpected idea, the other must riff to make it work. But this is not just a pastime it’s a vulnerable way to connect with someone, Jeffrey Parker, a psychology professor at the University of Alabama, told me. For many children, all they need to entertain themselves is shared space, the right companions, and their imagination. ![]() Kids’ time together is often dedicated to play. ![]() Even after the bell rings, many students head to playdates, sports teams, or clubs. Whether at playgrounds or school, children spend most of their waking hours surrounded by peers. It helps that kids have few responsibilities, and that their lives are set up to foster connection. It’s practically “the job of childhood and adolescence,” Catherine Bagwell, a psychology professor at Davidson College, in North Carolina, told me. L ittle matters more in a child’s development than making and maintaining friendships. Continuing to embrace a childlike approach to friendship into adulthood can make for connections that are essentially ageless. Though friendships naturally evolve as we grow up, they don’t need to lose that vitality. Like Simmons, many adults do away with the unhurried hangouts and imaginative play that make youthful friendships so vibrant. “How creative can you get when the premise is two couples are meeting up for mini golf from 7 to 9 p.m.?” she wondered. And compared with the lush world of traditions they had growing up, the typical ways they now spend time with their other adult friends feel stale, Simmons told me. Their friendship still feels special, but they spend much less time together. Simmons, Darragh, and Lodge, who are all now 29 years old, still gather at least once a year, usually during the winter holidays, to play gift-exchange games, dance, and gorge on food. The three friends essentially created their own culture and, with it, a profound bond. Others included three-day sleepovers and a secret code language. These ceremonies were just one part of the elaborate set of practices that RMS developed during middle and high school. They’d chant, “Leaders of Star Clan, we come to these rocks, to drink, share tongues, and faithfully talk.” They’d divulge their feelings, meditate in silence, and drink a palmful of the creek water. The shared area in the middle, featuring a creek with large moss-covered rocks, became their ceremonial site. Inspired by Warriors, an adventure-book series, the girls divided the forest into four territories, and each girl ruled over one. ![]() When she was in middle school, she and two other kids, Margo Darragh and Sam Lodge, formed “RMS”-a name combining each of their first initials-that elevated their friend group to a sacred entity.Īs they approached high school, the girls would sneak out of their rural Pennsylvania homes at night and one would drive the rest on a four-wheeler into a forest on Lodge’s neighbor’s property. R achel Simmons was raised Catholic and later joined a Presbyterian church, but she told me the closest thing she’s ever had to true religion came from a childhood friendship.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |