File this one under “Adulthood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I don’t have a lot of experience making friends. Most of the time, if I have a friend, it is because they are an extrovert and they adopted me.

But if I thought making friends as a child was rough, it paled in comparison to making friends in the social wasteland that is adulthood.

There are a lot of good arguments to be made for not mixing work and pleasure, which means that we tend to hold at arms length the people we spend the most time with – our co-workers. Unfortunately, that time is so much “most” that spending time with other people or in other settings is limited.

Then you decide to take your small bit of victory in the social games and make a baby with them, and you learn that despair can, in fact, make you laugh.

“So what do you do in your free time?” Asks a new acquaintance.

You fall into hysterics.

My theory is that if you want to have real friends as an adult, you have to carry them into adulthood with you.

Maybe it’s a childhood friend. More likely it’s your best friend, or a handful of them, from late adolescence: high school or college.

You just don’t get to know people that well anymore when you don’t spend hours a day in close proximity to each other.

This pandemic has made me, a confirmed introvert, so desperate for friends that I think I’ll join three clubs when this whole thing blows over.

I might even attend!