Building friendships based on principles from arranged marriage

October 3, 2021 9:57 PM

A woman had a hard time making friends -- until she built a group based on arranged marriage. "What makes it work are key elements borrowed from arranged marriages: commit first, lean on structure, and allow for fun and intimacy to emerge and sustain the relationship." Most of the group has now been together almost 10 years.

I am thinking about trying this myself.

posted by NotLost (49 comments total)

I object to the "marriage" framing because it trivializes the actual happening-right-now suffering of uncountable people, including some I know personally. Being sold so that your father can make a slightly more advantageous business deal is not empowering.

...because that is literally what arranged marriages mean for millions of women. That's what "arranged" means -- we have decided this suits our interests, and your interests are irrelevant, so we're done.

This is not "heritage", it's not "ancestral wisdom" it's modern slavery and sexual abuse, and it's happening right now as we speak, and shit like this is just a fig leaf that's being put in place very intentionally.
posted by aramaic at 10:30 PM on October 3, 2021 [19 favorites]

aramaic, I think that arranged marriage encompasses a wide variety of practices, and I'd like to make a distinction between arranged marriage and forced marriages like the ones you describe.

Example: One of my high school teachers had an arranged marriage, and to her (like to any happily married person) it was incredibly special, supportive, and loving. She was very happy and felt respected in her marriage. She talked openly with me about it once because, as an atheist white teen, I found it very confusing and I was genuinely curious. She was also Muslim. (For context, this was a couple years after Sept. 11th, and other brown friends of mine had experienced harassment in our town, and the administration was trying to squash the Muslim Students Association but imposing no such barriers on the Christian youth group that met after school.)

I also recently provided housing for a year to an Afghani refugee woman, and spent time getting to know her while we lived together. She had fled her home after her parents died and her brother tried to sell her into a forced marriage as a second wife to a much older man.

Clearly, these two women could not have had more different experiences -- one had a consensual arranged marriage that may be foreign to my experience but was certainly happy. The other fled a horrific forced marriage that would have led to abuse and slavery. We acknowledge that there is a distinction between consensual, happy sex and sexual assault -- is the distinction between consensual arranged marriages and slavery/forced marriages so hard to see?
posted by cnidaria at 11:12 PM on October 3, 2021 [69 favorites]

Now I want to get back to the original article! I think this is very cool. In some ways, this reminds me of how I've made friends by living at age-diverse housing co-ops, or by attending church. Showing up at a specific place and time to be with people in a way that doesn't require complex entertainment or sophisticated scheduling seems to be really helpful in allowing friendships to grow. I also find that my individual friendships work between when they're part of a coherent group of folks who know each other and give a bigger structure and context. I think it's cool the gals in this story were hanging out one-on-one as well as in larger groups.
posted by cnidaria at 11:15 PM on October 3, 2021 [18 favorites]

Pulling from the article, and partly regarding aramaic's comment:

I grew up in Iran where such unions occurred and many turned into good and long-lasting relationships.

My fairly uninformed impression is not that arranged marriages are a good thing. Being married to somebody you don't know based on the interests of your parents seems unequivocally bad. But the question is then, given that sometimes it turns into a positive relationship: What elements of this apparently negative thing lead to these positive relationships, and can we repurpose them?
posted by solarion at 11:21 PM on October 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

Showing up at a specific place and time to be with people in a way that doesn't require complex entertainment or sophisticated scheduling seems to be really helpful in allowing friendships to grow.

That's the plot of the last two or three James Gunn movies.
posted by SPrintF at 11:21 PM on October 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Well, saying arranged marriages doesn't work for everyone is similar to how corporate career development or capitalism doesn't work for everyone - there's always points of failure, even bad actors who abuse the system. But it doesn't mean there aren't positive concepts worth looking at, or that we throw the whole thing out and go with, anarchy or something.

I would say that there's a significant population of people who might actually view marriage as more of a political and economic contract, rather than a romantic one, but for purposes of appearances pretend to go with the majority view nowadays. This... seems to be the equivalent, but for friendships.

-- "In our initial ceremony, we vowed to be as supportive and loving as ideal friends."

One thing not mentioned is how I think this concept of formalizing a friendship is kind of cool. Marriage, after all, formalizes the union between two people: for some people, it might favour them to be in a long term relationship, even have children, with someone they're not married to, because they don't want the commitment. There are proponents of both sides. Why not friendships? Why restrict friendships to the equivalent of one-night stands or summer flings, something ephemeral that might evaporate by the morning?
posted by xdvesper at 11:29 PM on October 3, 2021 [12 favorites]

Like the author, my heritage culture is one where arranged marriages are common. (My parents were actually the first love marriage on both sides of the family -- and it was a Really Big Deal.) For the most part, at least in middle-class families, this means your parents send essentially a "marriage resume" to a matchmaker and you get set up on what Westerners would call blind dates. Watch Meet the Patels for a funny, nuanced take on what this looks like. There are still situations, though, where women are sold as part of dad's business deals. And both of these get called "arranged marriage."

I also object strongly to the "arranged marriage" framing here, because even in relatively happy arranged marriages, divorce is almost never an option, whereas people could and did leave this formalized friend group, and at no point were they living together 24/7. Frankly, I think what she describes here sounds lovely, but the "arranged marriage" term feels like clickbait for a Western audience that the sexual-slavery version of "arranged marriage" in their mind.
posted by basalganglia at 4:30 AM on October 4, 2021 [26 favorites]

So it's one of those shared-interest clubs people always suggest you join, but it's a Friendship Club.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 5:08 AM on October 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Some in the West (like me) look upon Western "love match" marriage as largely a farce and wonder how things are in cultures where arranged marriage is common. Tbh there's a fair amount of literature and film that makes arranged marriage seem benign when it often is anything but.

If you replace "arranged marriage" as used in the article (and group) with "intentional community" you might wind up with a similar set of ground rules, but the phrase you'd use is far less redolent of toxic patriarchal practices. But, as someone else noted above, it wouldn't get as many clicks.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 5:14 AM on October 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

I was thinking also of military camaraderie, where a number of people who otherwise would have nothing to do with each other are forced to depend on each other for survival. Unsurprisingly, the bonds formed sometimes eclipse other friendships and last for life.
posted by acb at 5:18 AM on October 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

The west used to have much more structured socializing with understood rules, paying calls, returning calls, etc. old books are always having people go and sit for 15 minutes with one family or another. As with nearly all human activity, could be used for good (such as the human contact necessary for almost all people ) and bad (such as keeping the uninitiated out of snobbish social circles).

I’ve been thinking lately about how our current society has just as strict an understanding of how relationships should work as any other period - I think there was a post the other day that touched on how boys are discouraged from forming friendships within intense emotional bonds, but that certainly hasn’t always been true. Etc.
posted by acantha at 6:13 AM on October 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

To be honest, this sounds a lot like what being in a sorority was for me in college. We were asked to make a commitment to the sisterhood prior to forming close friendships with other sisters. It was a flawed system, to be sure, but it was also the most supported I've ever felt by a group of friends/peers, and unfortunately not something I ever expect to have to that extent again.
posted by mosst at 6:23 AM on October 4, 2021 [11 favorites]

We acknowledge that there is a distinction between consensual, happy sex and sexual assault -- is the distinction between consensual arranged marriages and slavery/forced marriages so hard to see?

Well, yes, because of that bolded word.

Do the people involved actually have the ability to consent to entering these arrangements (and, as basalganglia notes, to exit them)? Because if not, even if the arranged union ends up being a happy one, it still seems fundamentally problematic.

I suspect some of the friction here may come from terminology, and that it would help to have terms to distinguish between situations where (a) third parties just act as matchmakers and the people involved can then choose to do what they wish with the arranged pairings (including ignoring or leaving them), and (b) third parties make the marriage arrangements and the people involved just have to live with it.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:36 AM on October 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

Sort of a bummer the bulk of this discussion is on the framing. The author compares her idea for generating a social circle to arranged (not forced) marriages, because as she says, she is from Iran, and this is a cultural touchpoint for her. It's not a difficult to understand analogy. The actual friend group experiment she describes is pretty interesting and would probably be more fun to talk about.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:23 AM on October 4, 2021 [36 favorites]

The problem is that while an arranged marriage can be a happy, modern relationship, capable of forging an extremely powerful bond between families for political, social, and yes economic purposes, it is also often used as a means of control. I have two friends, who knew they were in an arranged marriage since childhood, who love each other and have, as far as I can tell, a wonderful marriage, set up so that two Boston Brahmin families could renew ties that had lapsed for a few generations. They were given a choice in the matter, but when the time came they enthusiastically got hitched after he graduated from law school (Princeton) and she graduated with a post-grad Pharma degree. But then I knew a Afghani woman, our receptionist at a startup, who one day didn't show up for work, and when the police were eventually called, it turned out she had been taken home by her parents and married off against her will, something she had said she was afraid would happen.
posted by Blackanvil at 8:32 AM on October 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

I don't think anyone is talking about or considering forced friendships.

Can we get back to the topic of friendships?
posted by NotLost at 8:36 AM on October 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

In a context of intentional community, I think the framework outlined in TFA is one really good option (out of a number of also perfectly great friendship styles - I think we could use more of all of them). I have a group of friends I think comes very close to this, but with the hangup that nobody quiiiite wants to say it out loud and be that vulnerable. I might stick my neck out and float some of these components as an experiment.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:42 AM on October 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

I would be so into doing something like this. I think a lot about situations that tend to lead to close relationships and I feel a lot of it is just...sustained proximity. As an adult, it's so easy to just opt out of things. We are all juggling so much, and it's so easy to just opt out of things. But intimacy really needs sustained and regular investments of time and energy...so sort of committing to that up front is super interesting.

This is something I've thought about a lot because I think people I know can be really quick to write off activities etc if they aren't perfect...I get it, b/c who wants to "waste their time" on something that isn't perfect? But nothing is perfect, and if you aren't willing to sort of hunker down and commit regularly to something, it's hard for real intimate friendship to emerge.
posted by wooh at 8:51 AM on October 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

Something like this seems great if you actually even know that many people (within your geographical area, too, unless everyone's fine with foreverzoom) you'd be willing to spend time with? Not bashing it but it definitely isn't a way to MAKE friends, it's a way to KEEP friends. I literally don't even have the contact info of 9 people in the city where I live, you know?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:02 AM on October 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Argh! I really want to read this. Anybody got a non-paywalled link?
posted by Jess the Mess at 9:10 AM on October 4, 2021

This link should work, Jess.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:19 AM on October 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Jess, try this Archive.is link

EDIT: Jinx.
posted by now i'm piste at 9:20 AM on October 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Before joining, Nurse had envisioned meaningless small talk, surface niceties and awkward silences. Like the rest of us, she wanted a supportive group and a container for unfettered and engaging communication.

This is exactly what I would expect given that's all I seem to get out of anyone I force myself to go meet. I think it's really interesting they chose not to meet on zoom (smart!) but still kept it going. I would love to try something like this. Early in the pandemic I had a chance to join a small new d&d group made of mbmbam fans near me but I chickened out at the first zoom meeting when I got the sense that it was just more of the same awkward silences as usual but now I regret it.
posted by bleep at 9:43 AM on October 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I like the idea of a group deciding to have friendship meetings and have a ritual for sharing. It does sound like a neat way to be friends. But I did try something similar once, joining a new parent group. What I actually found from that is that a large group like ten or twelve people is overwhelming. Four or five seems more likely to work for introverts.
posted by blueberry monster at 9:53 AM on October 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't entirely buy that this woman had a hard time making friends to start with, since it sounds rather like she found all these people interested in forming a semi-committed relationship with her on her own. Groups like this are fantastic and the regular contact is exactly what we need to develop deep relationships, and I've seen some "wild woman circles" form near me that do this (though for a limited period of time). But finding the initial group; that's the sticking point for most of us.
posted by metasarah at 10:22 AM on October 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Coming from a culture where this (arranged marriage) is the norm; this doesn't sound like the any arranged marriages I know of. The woman went ahead and created an intentional community without having any preconceptions of who she was doing it with; and let the relationship grow from there. That seems more like a Meetup group than arranged marriage to me.

For me; the big points of Arranged Marriage are these. First; it is done through a middleman mostly. Used to be our version of Shadchans; but it has become online now. Second; the group is self selecting; meaning you have to be the same caste, from the same community, etc. Thirdly, the most important thing is the fact that people who get married this way are usually from the same socio economic spectrum, and even more importantly have very similar cultural attitudes to the big questions (religion, money and life goals (children, importance given to education etc.)).

Reading that article gave me no sense of it being like an arranged marriage. The only intersection point was the lack of preconceived notions going in. That is not enough to call it an arranged marriage, if you ask me.
posted by indianbadger1 at 10:41 AM on October 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

Coming from a culture where this (arranged marriage) is the norm; this doesn't sound like the any arranged marriages I know of

I think honestly the problem, as alluded to above, is that there are a lot of cultures which involve arranged marriage, and they all have very different arranged marriage norms.

For me, coming from a culture where arranged marriage is not the norm but is still common enough that I have several family members with arranged marriages, there are some strong similarities in what she has done. I should note that these are not forced arranged marriages; my family members all had a choice and chose to enter those marriages for largely compatibility and economic purposes.

The big thing I see is primarily in the difference between love marriages and arranged marriages - with a love marriage, you're expected to fall blindingly in love, practice the realities of love, and then make the commitment, kind of as a seal on what already exists. With an arranged marriage as I have seen them, you make the commitment, then practice the realities of love, and then possibly actually fall into the experience that we know as romantic love, but either way you are getting the practicalities of love. There are some members of my family that wound up falling romantically and deeply in love through these methods; there are some that did not but became friends who have sex and do romantic things and raise a family together and are still quite happy.

With friendships, especially American friendships, you're often (in my view) asked to meet some mythical 'close friend' point before you experience the benefits of friendship, where it's all nebulous and impossible to quantify and you're always stepping on toes by asking for things because everyone has such different expectations. In this case, what she's done is to reverse the normal friendship order in a similar way as to arranged marriage - she's created the commitment first, then practicing the realities of friendship, then you may come to actually like and enjoy each other, which 7/9 of them did.

It does sound very similar to military service, honestly, which operates on a similar principle; you get your squad, you are told that people in the same squad do X things, you do them, and then you wind up bonding strongly.
posted by corb at 10:52 AM on October 4, 2021 [26 favorites]

Before the pandemic, I had started doing bi-monthly "Friday Night Meatballs" style gatherings, where I'd make a giant pot of something (usually it was stew, plus appetizers and bread), invite friends and acquaintances, both familiar and not so familiar, to my house for dinner, which really allowed me to get closer with some people I didn't know too well. I was too shy to ask them out one on one since I barely knew them, but since I was inviting so many people already, it was somehow easier?

I do love the idea that's laid out in the article though, I might try it.
posted by vespertinism at 10:55 AM on October 4, 2021 [16 favorites]

vespertinism: I openly wept reading your description of your dinners. I never had that experience as a child and I can't justify it now. But wow! "Mom makes a big pot of something and invites the neighbors" just fills me with joy.
posted by SPrintF at 12:59 PM on October 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

I feel like I have some aspects of this in some of my best friendships. They all had a moment early on where we both kind of just decided "okay, we're going to be friends." It's hard to describe but it was definitely more like a decision to be friends than falling into friendship over time or tumbling head over heels into friendship. One friend and I sometimes greet each other with "hello my lifelong friend"--referring to the future, not the past. And we have indeed been there for each other through joy and trauma. Maybe there's something about me that provokes this kind of decision making? Just yesterday I spoke for the first time in years and years with an old school friend. We were sharing our worries about growing old alone and she said "You're welcome to move in with me." And I was like, "Hmm. I bet we would get along just fine." Or maybe people open up to this approach as they grow older and realize that it's not just going to drop into your lap--if you want a committed relationship, you have to commit.

(Guys, I think there's a way to engage with the substance of what these women are doing rather than getting hung up on whether arranged marriage is the right analogy, is a good or terrible institution, etc.)
posted by HotToddy at 1:29 PM on October 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Wait, this writer believes in forming friendships restricted to their own religious group, only within their own caste and sub-caste and sub-sub-caste, completely excluding the possibility of having any disabled or queer or unemployed friends, and requiring all female friends to compulsorily obey the parents of their male friends.

Oh? They didn't mean it that way? They just wanted normal friends who agree to commit to each other without any restrictions on caste or disability or employment status or religion or whose parents must be obeyed by whom?

WELL THEN IT'S NOTHING LIKE ARRANGED MARRIAGE IS IT.

Christ. I am so fucking mad at people who try to peddle arranged-marriage apologia. It is one of THE most evil institutions on the planet. The institution of arranged marriage exists specifically to enact caste-based and gender-based violence on the bodies of women and lower caste people, and to exclude people of other religions, races, sexualities, employment status, disabilities, etc., like these are all the stated and acknowledged purpose of arranged marriage. You wouldn't romanticize slavery like this or the Holocaust or colonialism. Why the fuck would you romanticize arranged marriage which is even today committing literal gendercide.

(I'm sorry that I can't ignore this as irrelevant. You wouldn't be able to either, if you had been raised in an arranged-marriage culture. Words have power. The writer needs to take responsibility for theirs.)
posted by MiraK at 2:17 PM on October 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

the "arranged marriage" term feels like clickbait for a Western audience

Yep. This is orientalism, pure and simple. You know how in the ~spiritual~ and ~less materialistic~ and ~so very enlightened~ Exotic Eastern Countries they practice a mystical method of marriage which also very conveniently perpetuates murderous social oppressions such as caste-based and gender-based violence? Sure sounds like something we Americans ought to be learning from! Or at least pretending to learn from, for clicks!
posted by MiraK at 2:24 PM on October 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Are you suggesting the Iran-born author of this piece orientalized... herself? Is that more likely than her stated explanation that her lived experience around people with arranged marriages spurred her thoughts on commitment as a first step toward building a relationship rather than the final one? That's really the extent of the parallel she drew.

I mean, yes: if you layer a bunch of extra stuff on there she did not include, her limited analogy would fall apart. She did limit it, though, just to the one thing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:28 PM on October 4, 2021 [14 favorites]

It's both, DirtyOldTown. I have no idea what's going on inside her head and I'm fully willing to take her word for it that she was inspired by her native cultural practices. That doesn't erase the fact that she *is* advocating (indirectly) for the acceptance of a poisonous institution to a western audience because western audiences find eastern cultural practices - poisonous or otherwise - most appealing.

Limiting it to one incidental feature of arranged marriage does not excuse her as much as you think it does. It is an evil institution and explicitly drawing analogies to it was a choice which she can be called to account for.
posted by MiraK at 2:32 PM on October 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

I hear what you are saying about pandering. But extending the analogy in ways the author did not do to force it to break feels like somewhere between missing the point of analogies and a willfully bad faith reading of the material.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:34 PM on October 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think some people are stretching a little here. The author says:

What makes it work are key elements borrowed from arranged marriages: commit first, lean on structure, and allow for fun and intimacy to emerge and sustain the relationship. This experiment is reproducible because the stakes aren’t as high as a marriage, and the framework provides a container within which friendships can thrive. Plus, the arranged bit takes the guesswork out of finding friends.

She did not say it was an arranged marriage (!). She did not even say it was like an arranged marriage. Someone who was almost assuredly NOT the author of the piece wrote the headline. She said she took key elements, outlined what she meant, and then continued on to describe what she did and what happened.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:44 PM on October 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

If I notice something on the grill display in a Wal-Mart ad that gives me a good idea for how to arrange charcoal, am I necessarily an apologist for boorish corporate behemoths or is it possible I mean it when I say I just like the way they stacked the briquettes? Maybe a pointed harangue about corporate welfare and exploiting the working class is a weird tack to take there, do you think?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:52 PM on October 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

I value your input, MiraK, and I really don't mean to be unkind. I just feel like there are several leaps and bounds I can't quite follow y'all on. There's a woman from a culture with some arranged marriages musing on why some of those work and extrapolating one thing from those to try and form a friend group to chat and maybe drink wine with in her garden. It takes a lot of work to suppose what she means includes forced marriage, even more work to suppose a US resident in an apparent love marriage, with a diverse friend group, would be pushing arranged marriage even indirectly, let alone forced marriage, even more work to suppose she's trying to do it stealthily, and even more work on top to think she's luring us in with orientalism to get all of that done.

I just can't get there. I'm old, and prone to cultural relativism, so maybe I'm way off. It feels like a stretch.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:14 PM on October 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

To try to return to the original article and topic, the idea of formalized, committed friendship groups assembled from relative strangers has arisen recently within several spiritual traditions: Kalyana Mitta groups in Buddhism, and havurah groups in contemporary Judaism.
posted by PhineasGage at 3:31 PM on October 4, 2021 [9 favorites]

Weirdly, what it reminded me of was the assigned middle names in Vonnegut's Slapstick. In that novel, the president, under a plan he dubs "Lonesome No More!" assigns Americans new middle names. Under the plan, all citizens would be provided with new middle names, made of the name of a random natural object paired with a random number between 1 and 20. Everyone with the same name would be cousins, and everyone with the same name and number would be siblings.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:35 PM on October 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

I will change my middle name to "Old" if I get to hang out with you, DirtyOldTown.
- PhineasOldGage
posted by PhineasGage at 3:48 PM on October 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, twenty years ago, marshaled evidence for "aggregate loss in membership and number of volunteers in many existing civic organizations" -- specficially the ones with commitment and repeated interactions with the same people, which the OP recognizes as a seedbed for friendship, and Putnam was thinking of as a seedbed for civil society including representative politics.

Putnam cites data from the General Social Survey that showed an aggregate decline in membership of traditional civic organizations, supporting his thesis that U.S. social capital had declined. He noted that some organizations had grown, such as the American Association of Retired People, the Sierra Club, and a plethora of mass-member activist groups. But he said that these groups did not tend to foster face-to-face interaction, and were the type where "the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter."[1] He also drew a distinction between two different types of social capital: a "bonding" type (which occurs within a demographic group) and a "bridging" type (which unites people from different groups).

I would have assumed that modern WIERD-class expectations of moving every couple of years weakened society ties, but apparently the data goes the other way.
posted by clew at 4:10 PM on October 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

I've been mulling over this a bit and I think my main takeaway is that I should try and schedule regular interactions with a group of friends. A lunch every week, an activity day every month, that sort of thing. It's so easy to...not.

I also dislike the arranged marriage framing immensely, but it is what it is.
posted by wooh at 9:21 PM on October 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

When we had kid #1, we were introduced to a weekly parent's group: several families from the same neighbourhood with similar aged kids with some help from a professional nurse, working out of a council-owned hall in the neighbourhood. It was a time to ask questions, share experiences, swap poo stories, have a bit of a cry sometimes with other parents who were going through much the same things as we were.

We laughed about it, agreed that it was clearly Not Our Thing but went along anyway.
We're still friends with some of those parents & their kids 15 years later.
posted by nickzoic at 1:20 AM on October 5, 2021

I've been mulling over this a bit and I think my main takeaway is that I should try and schedule regular interactions with a group of friends. A lunch every week, an activity day every month, that sort of thing. It's so easy to...not.

Same. Life gets in the way, busy sorting out or cleaning, tired after work, don't feel like it's right to impose on people who are in the same boat, get hung up on something, and all of a sudden realise a year has gone by.
posted by MattWPBS at 2:08 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Scheduled regular interactions with people really help to build things. One of my huge pandemic issues is that once my regular in person activities (plays and karaoke) were no more, my friendships with that IRL crowd pretty much died because those people had little to no interest in transitioning to online/text/zoom. They wanted "in person," we could not, and....fizzle. The theater we did plays at is still on indefinite hiatus (lost their theater space) so that option is gone. Karaoke is back but most of the regulars are no longer in the habit of going, and only a few have returned occasionally and some are just gone forever. It really bums me out, but I feel like a naggy bitch trying to get the old gang back together when they have clearly just lost interest. Why bother trying.

Really, I feel that you need to have some kind of online/text relationship going in order for friendships to last. I really enjoy my in person hangouts and I have made new friends doing them now, but if they can't connect in other ways eventually, those will probably evaporate with another situation change.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:10 AM on October 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

> One of my huge pandemic issues is that once my regular in person activities (plays and karaoke) were no more, my friendships with that IRL crowd pretty much died

Same here. I started a new job recently and we all bonded quickly -- it's a small group working long hours in a weird setting, so it lended itself to that -- and it's strange how much time I spend with these new friends instead of the people I've been close friends with for a decade or longer. I think my book / craft / game groups will get back together eventually, but I just don't know when; we never managed the transition to Zoom. I have some other, more fragile friendships that I think are permanently gone.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:47 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

[Folks I'm sorry about going off on my pet rant earlier in this thread, for coming across in a hostile way to people, and for derailing attempts to get this thread back on the main topic. I've been hiding out all yesterday feeling embarrassed about my outburst, this was really not the time or place for it. Sorry.]
posted by MiraK at 7:16 AM on October 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

To be honest, this sounds a lot like what being in a sorority was for me in college.

Same. I hesitate to say this because I think all fraternities and sororities should be burnt to the ground immediately, but ritualizing friendships and providing a commitment to being friends was one of the only good things about being in a fraternity in college. I think there are things we could learn from that system without also bringing all the terrible things about it. I've heard (on MetaFilter!) some chapters of the Elks and similar aren't totally regressive these days — if I ever have free time again I might check them out.
posted by Tehhund at 4:43 PM on October 15, 2021 [2 favorites]